56. Captivity in antiquity: why dwell on Horrible Things?
Reasons for delving into sexual violence in antiquity. Value in transparency?
If you’re just here for the talk about books, I’m sorry. I’m on a bit of an obsessive kick at the minute.
My last post on captivity in antiquity went into some detail on the themes of violence and sexual violence in the course of capture and captivity, particularly as applied to women. In the texts I quoted from, I pointed out that other translations, ones which made the implicit violence of the situation more visible in English, were possible. Even ones which emphasised violence and humiliation.
Why? Why spend so much time dwelling on such acutely horrible things? I think it’s worth being transparent about intent and purpose here, since sexual violence remains an everyday part of many people’s lives.
It's not the purpose of titillation. We're all aware that power games are some people's kink. Kink is fine. Consent is sexy. Go have wild BDSM parties, or whatever it is that people do.1 (I do personally find it rather disrespectful to treat real human suffering, however long past, as material for some wank fantasy.2 But opinions on art vary widely.)
Far more harmfully, some people (usually men) subscribe to misogynistic ideologies that take active and doctrinaire satisfaction from the subjugation and humiliation of women. For them, the details of ancient women's3 experience serves only to confirm their prejudices.4 You shouldn't investigate sexual violence in antiquity in order to support your own biases. (Though it's not as though it's easy to stop very literally white-washed images and impressions of antiquity from being used in support of various flavours of modern fascistic authoritarianism.)
I'm partly interested in antiquity because, quite frankly, it's horrifying. And partly because I find it fascinating how people in different social contexts and with very different frameworks for understanding the world lived their lives and navigated problems of power and survival, how they attempted to exercise control over their circumstances. Whether that's the enduring problems of health, illness, and bodily frailty that kept me interested throughout my thesis, or the human cruelty of soldiers and slave masters. What I'm saying is, people try to live. They form communities, look for joy and pleasure, try to avoid what they think of as the worst outcomes: and what that means to them can be very different to what it means to us, but it can also be strikingly relatable. To downplay or diminish the challenges they faced, though, diminishes their successes, too: the imaginative resources, the stubbornness, that kept people going and that kept survivors alive for so long as they lived.
The history of writing (and from the 20th century, film-making) about the ancient Mediterranean has in its largest part focused on men, and on "great" men, the military leaders, kings, and emperors that held incredible amounts of power in their societies. The experience of their less "great" victims has only recently drawn serious attention.
And from antiquity itself, the phenomenon of sexual violence has often been passed over with euphemism. Most students of the ancient world study it because they find in it, or found it in once, something appealing: something to admire or some sense of kinship. This, combined with a legacy of in-print prudery (at least in the English-language world) and the years during which many standard translations were printed5 means that the sometimes already euphemistic endemic sexual violence and rape of the ancient world has been sanitised still further in its English renditions.
It may not always be right to emphasise violence in a translation. To see, for example, where Rolfe in 1946 for Loeb translates
Inter quas unam rex ipse conspexit maestiorem quam ceteras et producentibus eam verecunde reluctantem . Excellens erat forma, et formam pudor honestabat;
into:
"Among these women the king himself [Alexander] noticed one more sad than the others, who modestly resisted those who would lead her forward. She was of surpassing beauty and her modesty enhanced her beauty,"
and instead offer as a translation:
"Among them the king himself observed one more downcast than the others, and who ashamedly struggled against those who led her forward. She was of surpassing beauty, and her shame6 honoured her beauty."
But the first version implies the blushing, becoming reticence of a Regency débutante. The second, on the other hand, at least acknowledges the pervasive presence of violence and humiliation that was almost certainly part of this woman's experience as captive, rather than sanitising it and rendering the context of violation invisible.
We can see this process also at work with Frank Cole Babbitt in his 1931 Loeb translation of Plutarch tells us the Roman officer "obtained possession" of his captive where "seized violently" is another possible translation, and offers us a Roman captor decapitated "as he was affectionately taking leave" of the captive he had raped, instead of "taking a farewell kiss," (or in my loose and seriously unfriendly translation, "having a last grope goodbye").7
Am I harping on this? Perhaps. But consider the popularity of "leadership lessons from the ancient world": military leaders and autocrats from antiquity whose conquests are reframed for capitalist corporate boardroom leadership seminars. Amazon advertises me several, including The Wisdom of Alexander the Great: Enduring Leadership Lessons from the Man Who Created an Empire; The Leadership Genius of Julius Caesar; Julius Caesar: Lessons in Leadership; Leadership Lessons from the Ancient World: How Learning from the Past Can WIll You the Future. And several on Marcus Aurelius, some of which may be more about his philosophy than his leadership, and at least one on Attila the Hun, who is a little behind the scope of my expertise.
These men, even if the books attempt to contextualise them, are held up as admirable. Emblematic of successful leadership, a valuable trait. Part of the sanitised, popularised, made-palatable vision of antiquity, the vision that contributes to feel-good nostalgia about a more ideal past, a more civilised age, where the youth respected their elders and the trains (or ox-carts) ran on time. That nostalgia provides cover to our modern autocrats, who use it to hark back to an age of strong leaders.
Justice, as the historian Thucydides had his Athenian ambassadors tell their audience, is only in question between equals in power. The strong make demands and the weak concede. [Thuc. 5.89.1]
But modern democratic societies at least try to build a world that holds the powerful to account, collectively, even when individual people cannot. That's the whole point of not having bloody stupid kings. An autocrat is a king without even the glamour of divinity: what sensible person wants to end up with one of those?
How many of those inspired-by-ancient leadership books, do you think, reckon with the fact that these ancient leaders built their careers and success on widespread, at times grotesque, socially sanctioned, organised cruelty? Does the mythologising of the ancient autocrat stand up when you take away the figleaf and look directly at the thousands of people massacred in the wake of defeat and the thousands more whose enslavement -- in all the attendant brutalities, rape, and exploitation -- paid for those autocrats' continuing campaigns?
There's always a political dimension to violence, as well as to silence. Who gets spoken of, who gets to speak. The sources from antiquity are already filled with silences: preservation and time has taken its toll so that we have so much less surviving from antiquity than was written, but gender and status controlled who had most opportunity to write in the first place.
I think we owe it to ourselves and to history to look at the sources with as much critical appraisal about the violence and sexual exploitation present in the world of antiquity as we can bring to bear. Not to overstate its presence, but not to understate its potential either. The people who died of that violence -- or who made their lives with its scars, in its wake or in its shadows -- are every bit as human, and every bit as interesting, as the Alexanders and the Scipios and the Caesars of antiquity.
I mean, to pick one conqueror out of a hat, is it any good to pretend that Alexander didn't order massacres of thousands at Thebes, Tyre, Gaza, and Persepolis, and sell thousands of the survivors into slavery? (Is a high death toll really grounds for calling a man "the Great"?)
I was raised prudish and never really got over the part where talking about sex at all in public feels wildly embarrassing and inappropriate. And yet I have spent much time on the internet, learning in the process that this is not at all a universal and also that some people's idea of a consensual good time is really icky to other people (me). The widespread acceptance of a) tagging and b) content warnings is a good thing, friends.
Do NOT get me started on certain novels set in antiquity that purport to be romance and involve slavery. Even leaving aside their historical inaccuracies.
Assume, please, that when I say "women" I mean "people socially gendered as women by their society" or "people living as women," rather than any kind of biological determinism. The same goes for men. I'm not going to digress on the whole concept of gender in Greek or Roman antiquity: that is complex enough for entire academic careers to be spent on.
Whether those prejudices are "it wasn't so bad," or "they deserved it," or "it's only natural that life should work this way," or "things are always like this and always should be." I don't know, I fail to understand the internal logic of most forms of misogyny.
The Loeb Classical Library was established in 1911: many popular texts were translated into this series between that date and the late 1938s, and remained standard texts for the length of the 20th century.
Pudor means shame, modesty, and honour in Latin, there are whole theses written about this word and I'm not a Latinist.
I value the Loeb Classical Library as a project immensely: one of its goals in 1911 was the democratisation of classics, the serious study of which then even more than now was the preserve of a monied elite. And anyone who can do readable and broadly accurate translation is very skilled. But everyone comes to a project of translation in their own social context.