"Just like us": cultural constructions of sexuality and race in Roman art

One of the greatest difficulties plaguing the study of Roman art is the persistent notion that the Romans were "just like us." This problematic idea forms the premise and subtext of five centuries of classical studies. If the Renaissance had a deep stock in establishing the legitimacy of early capitalist/bourgeois conceptions of the humanist individual through the study of classical texts, it was because the legitimation of princely politics and ethics required a powerful precedent - no less authoritative and powerful than the fabled Roman empire. Renaissance humanists looked to Cicero, Vergil, and Livy for ways to define the early modern state. Subsequent attempts to legitimate the prince, the absolute monarch, colonialism, nineteenth-century nationalism, and - finally and most terrifyingly - German and Italian fascism, always went back to the ancient Romans, to those same texts with their histories of emperors and empire, their great lawyers, statesmen, rhetoricians, moralists, and poets.

Late twentieth-century Euro-American culture is in many ways the end product of centuries of adaptation of ancient Roman texts and cultural artifacts to fit the requirements of an increasingly capitalist, bourgeois, and colonial system. If the Romans seem to be in all things so much like "us," it is because "we" have colonized their time in history. (In this essay I use the words "we" and "us" to denote the white, male elite of Euro-American culture - the person I perceive to be the dominant voice in traditional scholarship.) We have appropriated their world to fit the needs of our ideology.

A revolution has occurred in the study of classical texts, one that has challenged those five centuries of scholarship. On one front, feminist scholars have challenged and problematized the sources in their search for that elusive person, the Roman woman.(1) All the texts that have survived, written either by elite white males or by men working for them, construct - that is, make up - women. Both the poet and the jurist put words in their mouths and devise their actions, whether vile or virtuous. One will search in vain for a woman's commentary on the condition of women of any class, although by deconstructing texts scholars have succeeded in extrapolating information about the elite woman: her legal and marital status, social mores, and political power. Harder to track are the nonelite women - the greatest number of them invisible because they are ciphers, both juridically and socially: these include free nonelite women, former slaves, slaves, foreigners, and outcasts (infames) like prostitutes.

A second route of inquiry has tried to recover the diversity of people in the Roman empire by applying the models developed in sociology, economics, cultural anthropology, and geography (including urban studies and population analysis). The picture that has emerged is that of an empire loosely organized indeed. Once the Romans had conquered various peoples of the Mediterranean, they tried to rule with the lightest possible touch, preferring the laissez-faire accommodations of religious syncretism, local rule, and vassal (puppet) kings to the heavy-handed direct policing that was so expensive to maintain. As long as a town or province paid its taxes to Rome and maintained a modicum of civil order, Rome was happy to let indigenous cultures continue. Again, it seems that modern ideologies have required Roman rule to be more all-encompassing than it was in reality.(2)

If application of the methodologies of feminist scholarship and the social sciences has begun to expand the tunnel-vision optic of traditional classical studies of Rome, what can the study of visual representation accomplish? Central to any project using Roman visual arts to understand ancient Roman people is the realization that whereas texts addressed the elite, art addressed everybody. From official imperial art to the wall paintings in a Pompeian house, Roman art consciously embraced a far broader audience than the texts. My recent work has focused on two specialized genres of Roman art, images of human lovemaking and representations of the black African, in an effort to understand the nonelite viewer, the female viewer, and even the non-Roman viewer.(3) It is from this work that I would like to draw two illustrations of how contextual readings of visual representations reveal the great differences between Roman culture and our own.

The typical literature on sexual representation in Roman art presents a variety of imagery in many media - from wall paintings to ceramics and metalwork - under the rubric of "erotic" art.(4) Authors then try to tack texts onto photographs of these representations: the reader sees a photograph of a satyr and maenad copulating on one page, and on the facing page an excerpt from Ovid's Art of Love. Never mind that the painting came from the wall of a house in Pompeii; that it dates from one hundred years later than Ovid's poem; that the couple is mythical, not human; and that Ovid was writing poetry for the elite whereas the viewer of this painting may have been illiterate. Yet with few exceptions studies of Roman so-called erotic art have assumed that Roman visual representations illustrated texts and that texts "document" Roman sexuality. Erudite studies of Latin words for sexual positions claim to find corroboration in wall paintings, lamps, even the coinlike spintriae - all considered without regard to their architectural contexts or dates.(5)