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• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  e Acts are adventure stories, but unlike the pagan novels the Acts are historical romances, set against a backdrop recognizable as the Roman Empire of the fi rst century. As in the pagan romance, travel and serial endangerments hold together the structure, which is episodic, sensational. Th e apostles are miracle workers, endowed above all with the wondrous ability to resurrect the dead. Th ey are also preachers who come to be arrested by the Roman authorities. Th e apocryphal Acts, like the romances but to an even greater degree, are forensic dramas. Th e gathering tension between ap- ostolic missionizing and the Roman order inevitably resolves into a judicial confl ict. Th e apostle, in the end, is martyred, so that death substitutes for marriage as the common ending of the apostle’s story. Between the travel, miracle working, and martyrdom of the apostles, sex continually juts into the foreground of the stories. Sex functions as a primary symbolic code in the world of Christian legend, but in a radically reformulated sense. Christian romances not only preach a new model of proper sexual conduct, they also discovered a way of expressing a strikingly original romance of the eternal soul, in which this world of fl ux and regeneration is a façade and the reunion with God, through purity and death, is the ultimate consummation. “Nothing of yours endures, but all things, right down to human conventions, are transient.” As in the pagan romances, the Acts reveal deep generic similarities in the treatment of sex, so that there is a sense in which the genre speaks collectively, or at least uses a shared syntax of conventions and symbols. Even in the apostolic traditions that rely least on the manipulation of sexual protocols, certain formulas recur. Th e Acts of Peter focus principally on the rivalry between the apostle Peter and the mountebank ur- heretic, Simon Magus. Sexual tropes are not, in the Petrine legends as we have them, a dominant thread. But they do suddenly play a commanding role when the story turns abruptly from the rivalry with Simon Magus toward the death of Peter. Th e fatal sequence begins when four concubines of the prefect Agrippa hear the “teaching about purity, and all the teachings of the Lord” and withdraw their sexual favors from the powerful offi cial. Peter’s next triumph is a “a superlative beauty,” Xanthippe, the wife of a powerful man. Finally, “many other women” left their husbands, and husbands their wives, in the name of sexual purity. With so many marriage beds abandoned, Peter has put Rome in an epic stir of erotic frustration. Peter sneaks out of the city in disguise but, in a touching scene, encounters Christ and famously asks him, “Whither  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N goest thou?” Peter marches back through the gates to his certain death. Th e

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Leucippe’s freedom is a key to the way the novels work and the way they can guide us through the sexual landscape of the high Roman Empire. Her freedom referred at once to her social status and her subjective agency. Of course, the fact that she invokes her freedom at the exact moment when she seems most constrained underscores the extent to which the individual’s agency was limited. The novels are fatalistic romances, stories of the overpowering, divine force of erotic love. They are unusually aware of the external forces—nature and society—bearing on the individual and determining his or her fate. Here is the novels’ most authentic level of representation, and the greatest opportunity they afford to explore the relationship between erotic ideologies and social structure in the late classical period. They preserve for us something of the vitality, complexity, and chaos of sexual life in the second-century empire. Because Leucippe and Clitophon deliberately offers a panoramic vision of eros and its place in the world, we follow Achilles Tatius and consider the sexual experience of the high empire from various angles—same-sex eroticism, the expectations placed on women, the sexual life-course of men, the dynamics of marriage, the attitudes of the philosophers. Throughout, our goal is to find the interface between sexual energy and prevailing morality, the points of contact between the circulation of pleasures and the regulatory force of sexual norms. In the age of the romance, eros flourished unawares, serenely confident in its eternal powers, and if we did not know that Christianity was stirring in the hills, we might never have believed that the first icy gusts of denial could be felt sweeping across the ancient valleys.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But over animals he had singular powers. I have watched his grizzled head approaching cautiously, though in friendly wise, toward a nest of adders, and before a lizard have seen his gnarled fingers execute a kind of dance. On summer nights he took me with him to study the sky from the top of a barren hill. I used to fall asleep in a furrow, tired out from counting meteors. He would stay sitting, gazing upward and turning imperceptibly with the stars. He must have known the systems of Philolaus and of Hipparchus, and that of Aristarchus of Samos which was my choice in later years, but these speculations had ceased to interest him. For him the stars were fiery points in the heavens, objects akin to the stones and slow-moving insects from which he also drew portents, constituent parts of a magic universe in which were combined the will of the gods, the influence of demons, and the lot apportioned to men. He had cast my horoscope. One night (I was eleven years old at the time) he came and shook me from my sleep and announced, with the same grumbling laconism that he would have employed to predict a good harvest to his tenants, that I should rule the world. Then, seized with mistrust, he went to fetch a brand from the small fire of root ends kept going to warm us through the colder hours, held it over my hand, and read in my solid, childish palm I know not what confirmation of lines written in the sky. The world for him was all of a piece; a hand served to confirm the stars. His news affected me less than one might think; a child is ready for anything. Later, I imagine, he forgot his own prophecy in that indifference to both present and future which is characteristic of advanced age. They found him one morning in the chestnut woods on the far edge of his domain, dead and already cold, and torn by birds of prey. Before his death he had tried to teach me his art, but with no success; my natural curiosity tended to jump at once to conclusions without burdening itself under the complicated and somewhat repellent details of his science. But the taste for certain dangerous experiments has remained with me, indeed only too much so. My father, Aelius Hadrianus Afer, was a man weighed down by his very virtues. His life was passed in the thankless duties of civil administration; his voice hardly counted in the Senate. Contrary to usual practice, his governorship of the province of Africa had not made him richer. At home, in our Spanish township of Italica, he exhausted himself in the settlement of local disputes.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I have already mentioned that my titles added virtually nothing to this astonishing certitude; on the contrary, the feeling was confirmed in performing the simplest routines of my function as emperor. If Jupiter is brain to the world, then the man who organizes and presides over human affairs can logically consider himself as a part of that all-governing mind. Humanity, rightly or not, has almost always conceived of its god in terms of Providence; my duties forced me to serve as the incarnation of this Providence for one part of mankind. The more the State increases in size and power, extending its strict, cold links from man to man, the more does human faith aspire to exalt the image of a human protector at the end of this mighty chain. Whether I wished it or not, the Eastern populations of the empire already considered me a god. Even in the West, and even in Rome, where we are not officially declared divine till after death, the instinctive piety of the common people tends more and more to deify us while we are still alive. The Parthians, in gratitude to the Roman who had established and maintained peace, were soon to erect temples in my honor; even at Vologasia, in the very heart of that vast world beyond our frontiers, I had my sanctuary. Far from reading in this adoration a risk of arrogant presumption, or madness, for the man who accepts it, I found therein a restraint, and indeed an obligation to model myself upon something eternal, trying to add to my human capacity some part of supreme wisdom. To be god demands more virtues, all things considered, than to be emperor. I was initiated at Eleusis eighteen months later. In one sense this visit to Osro�s had been a turning point in my life. Instead of going back to Rome I had decided to devote some years to the Greek and Oriental provinces of the empire; Athens was coming more and more to be the center of my thought, and my home. I wished to please the Greeks, and also to Hellenize myself as much as possible, but though my motives for this initiation were in part political, it proved nevertheless to be a religious experience without equal. These ancient rites serve only to symbolize what happens in human life, but the symbol has a deeper purport than the act, explaining each of our motions in terms of celestial mechanism. What is taught at Eleusis must remain secret; it has, besides, the less danger of being divulged in that its nature is ineffable. If formulated, it would result only in commonplaces; therein lies its real profundity.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The romantic elements, even in the eviscerated version of the Acts that has come down to us through Gregory, are unmistakable. The Acts of Andrew were hardly alone. In a freestanding episode in the fifth-century Lausiac History, the Christian adaptation of the romantic repertoire is even more evident. In a “very old book ascribed to Hippolytus,” Palladius found a story about a “certain maiden, most noble and extremely beautiful, in the city of the Corinthians, who was practicing the life of virginity.” In an age of persecution, she was denounced to the governor as a Christian. The “woman-mad” governor had his own designs on her, and he “tried every device [mēchanē ]” but “could not persuade the girl.” He ordered her sentenced to a brothel, where she was subjected to the usual threats. She deflected her suitors with a ruse of her own. “I have this festering sore in a hidden place, which emits the most foul stench, and I fear it will make you hate me. Hold off from me for a few days, then make your use of me, for free.” She prayed. God, seeing her chastity, sent a young man in the employ of the Roman secret service to be the instrument of her salvation. He paid the guard for a night with the girl, went in, and gave her his clothes. She escaped in disguise, “inviolate and unpolluted.” The next day “the drama was known, the agent was seized and thrown to the beasts.” He was a martyr twice over, both for his own sake and for “the blessed girl.”29

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  THE TWILIGHT OF APOLOGETICSAs Methodius, author of the Christian Symposium, was being tried and martyred at Patara in June of 312, the armies of an ambitious western emperor were marching south through Italy. That emperor, Constantine, had recently experienced a celestial vision that he soon came to understand as a message from the Christian God. By the end of October his troops, with crosses painted on their shields, had destroyed his western rival and left Constantine as the sole ruler of the western provinces. Tolerance for Christianity, and then official favoritism, soon followed. In the aftermath of Constantine’s conversion, a small, increasingly articulate, and highly organized spiritual movement became a powerful institution, and, more gradually, a dominant social ideology in the territories ringing the Mediterranean. Among the most unusual traits of this movement was its core commitment to sexual austerity. The choice to mark out the body and its sexual potential as a domain of moral authenticity was savvy. In the cacophonous, polyglot world of the Roman Empire, the Christian message was unmistakable. Of all the competing religions and philosophies of the late classical world, this one, with its distinctive attitude toward erotic pleasure, prevailed. The anarchic pluralism of the ancient Mediterranean would gradually recede behind the universalizing orthodoxies of that extraordinary institution, the Christian church. The world would be very different if any of the alternatives had become the preferred religion of the emperors. But as it happened, Aphrodite was to be slain by the Christians—toppled “like some debauched slave-girl.”1 The Christians were little prepared for this eventuality. There was, to be sure, a stable and standardized packet of sexual norms carried by the religion wherever it insinuated itself: virginity was ideal, marriage acceptable, sex beyond marriage sinful, same-sex eros categorically forbidden. Beyond this zone of consensus there were peripheral aspects of sexual life where Christian regulation lacked definition and sharpness—the validity of remarriages, the measure of virginity’s superiority, the exact peccability of surplus marital congress. But the main drama of late antiquity was not the gradual resolution of questions outstanding. The main drama, rather, was the absorption of society by the church, the mainstreaming of the religion. The most astonishing development of late antiquity is the transformation of a radical sexual ideology, for centuries the possession of a small, strident band of vociferous dissenters, into a culture, a broadly shared public framework of values and meanings. The Christian vision of sexual humanity, incubated in the radical air of persecution, was forced, unexpectedly, into the mold of a regulatory system. Certainly Paul, who believed that the rulers of this age were “doomed to pass away,” would not have dreamed that his terse missives would become the touchstone of an entire culture.2

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Some people, their every movement full of mysterious resonance, are destined to become symbols. This star of the stage who repented and retired among the virgins was to launch a thousand legends. Her story was ready-made for literary adaptation, and not only because of the sheer arc of her conversion. Her legend was born at an opportune moment. She lived in the age of mass conversion, during a generation that saw the ranks of the baptized grow at a startling pace. The waters of baptism flowed over men and women who brought into the church different depths of spiritual commitment. As society trudged listlessly into the Christian church, the entry of the penitent prostitute offered crystalline sharpness. Her story of repentance struck a chord. The female body was a symbol beyond time and circumstance. Across ancient literature, the woman’s body stood as a cipher, capable of expressing the most intensely felt beliefs about the order of the world. The stark opposition between purity and pollution, between honor and shame, was endlessly reworked in the literary imagination. But the transition from one pole to the other, from purity to corruption or vice versa, was almost never compassed, precisely because the woman’s body was an objective correlative for an entire state of being. The passage of a prostitute’s body from prurience to penitence handed Christian authors a figure that not only resonated in an ancient arcade of symbols. Quite inadvertently, the penitent prostitute transcended the very logic of an immemorial symbolic architecture.2

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  The conflict between the Hedgehogs and the Foxes in evolutionary biology continues unabated to this day. In recent decades, adherents of the thoroughly foxy, Darwinian subdisciplines of phylogeny and developmental evolution (a.k.a. evo-devo) have worked to restore their places in an evolutionary biology that has been dominated, indeed hijacked, by adaptationist Hedgehogs. In this book, I have argued that the Darwinian theory of aesthetic evolution should also be restored to evolutionary biology. Each of these Darwinian subdisciplines focuses on diversity itself—the “vast variety” of specific instances—rather than on law-like generalizations of adaptive process. — Darwin concluded The Origin of Species with an inspired and poetic evocation of the “grandeur in this view of life.” Later, in The Descent of Man, he articulated an equally moving grandeur in an aesthetic view of life. It has been my goal to revive Darwin’s theory of aesthetic evolution and to present the full, distinctive richness, complexity, and diversity of this aesthetic view of life. Here, I want to conclude by discussing how an aesthetic view of life can have a positive impact on science, on human culture, and on the development of a newly respectful and productive relationship between them. In many ways, Darwin’s idea that the aesthetic evaluations involved in mate choice among animals constitute an independent evolutionary force in nature is as radical today as it was when he proposed it nearly 150 years ago. Darwin discovered that evolution is not merely about the survival of the fittest but also about charm and sensory delight in individual subjective experience. The implications of this idea for scientists and observers of nature are profound, requiring us to acknowledge that the dawn bird song chorus, the cooperative group displays of the blue Chiroxiphia manakins, the spectacular plumage of the male Great Argus Pheasant, and many other wondrous sights and sounds of the natural world are not merely delightful to us; they are products of a long history of subjective evaluations made by the animals themselves. As Darwin hypothesized, with the evolution of sensory evaluation and choice comes the emergence of a new evolutionary agency—the capacity of individual judgments to drive the evolutionary process itself. Aesthetic evolution means that animals are aesthetic agents who play a role in their own evolution. Of course, this fact would be unsettling to a Wallacean Hedgehog who believes that the power of the idea of natural selection lies in its all sufficiency—its ability to explain everything. However, I am afraid that, to quote another passage from Hamlet, “there are more things in heaven and earth…[t]han are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The ascent was made by night; just as for Aetna, I took with me only a small number of friends used to climbing. My purpose was not simply to accomplish a propitiatory rite in that very sacred sanctuary; I wished to see from its height the phenomenon of dawn, that daily miracle which I never have contemplated without some secret cry of joy. At the topmost point the sun brightens the copper ornaments of the temple and the faces smile in full light while Asia's plains and the sea are still plunged in darkness; for the briefest moment the man who prays on that peak is sole beneficiary of the morning. Everything was prepared for a sacrifice; we climbed with horses at first, then on foot, along perilous paths bordered with broom and shrubs which we knew at night by their pungent perfumes. The air was heavy; that spring was as burning as summer elsewhere. For the first time while ascending a mountain I had trouble breathing; I was obliged to lean for a moment on the shoulder of my young favorite. We were a hundred steps from the summit when a storm broke which Hermogenes had expected for some time, for he was expert in meteorology. The priests came out to receive us under flashes of lightning; the small band, drenched to the skin, crowded around the altar laid for the sacrifice. Just as it was to take place a thunderbolt burst above us and killed both the victim and the attendant with knife in hand. When the first moment of horror had passed, Hermogenes bent with a physician's curiosity over the stricken pair; Chabrias and the high priest cried out in admiration that the man and fawn thus sacrificed by this divine sword were uniting with the eternity of my Genius; that these lives, by substitution, were prolonging mine. Antinous gripping fast to my arm was trembling, not from terror, as I then supposed, but under the impact of a thought which I was to understand only later on. In his dread of degradation, that is to say, of growing old, he must have promised himself long ago to die at the first sign of decline, or even before. I have come to think now that that promise, which so many of us have made to ourselves but without holding to it, went far back for him, to the period of Nicomedia and the encounter at the edge of the spring. It explained his indolence, his ardor in pleasure, his sadness, and his total indifference to all future. But it was still essential that this departure should have no air of revolt, and should contain no complaint. The lightning of Mount Casius had revealed to him a way out: death could become a last form of service, a final gift, and the only one which seemed left for him to give.

• From The Songs of Bilitis (1894)

  Bilitis regarded the Nymphs with ardent piety. The sacrifices which she offered, nearly every day, were for their fountain. She often speaks of them but it seems that she never saw them, for she reports with so much veneration the accounts of an old man who, one day, had surprised them. The close of her pastoral existence was saddened by a love of which we know little, although she speaks of it at length. She ceased to sing of it when it became unhappy. Having become the mother of a child which she abandoned, Bilitis quitted Pamphylia for unknown reasons and never returned to the place of her birth. We find her again at Mytilene where she went by way of the sea along the fair coasts of Asia. She was then scarcely sixteen years old, according to the conjectures of M. Heim, who established with probability some dates in the life of Bilitis from a verse which alludes to the death of Pittakos. Lesbos was then the centre of the world. On the main road between beautiful Attica and magnificent Lydia, it had for its capital a city more elegant than Athens and more corrupt than Sardis: Mytilene, built upon a peninsula overlooking the shores of Asia. The blue sea encompassed the city. From the height of the temples one could distinguish on the horizon the white line of Atarnea which was the port of Pergamos. The narrow streets were always encumbered by a throng resplendent in many-colored stuffs, tunics of purple and of hyacinth, cyclas of transparent silks, mantles trailing in the dust of the yellow shoes. The women carried in their ears great rings of gold set with raw pearls, and on their arms massive bracelets of silver roughly chiseled in relief. The men themselves wore their hair brilliantly perfumed with rare oils. The Greeks wore sandals with the ends fastened to their bare ankles by large serpents of bright metal, while the Asiatics wore soft, tinted boots. The passers-by stood in groups before the façades of the shops where the goods for sale were on display: rugs of sombre colors, cloths worked with threads of gold, jewels of amber and of ivory, according to the quarter. The animation of Mytilene did not end with the day; there was no hour so late that one could not hear, through the open doors, the joyous sounds of instruments, the cries of women, the noise of dances. Pittakos himself, who wished to give a little order to this perpetual debauch, made a law in defense of players of the flute too young to be employed in the nocturnal festivals; but this law, like all laws that pretend to change the course of natural morals, determined the secrecy but not the observance.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The apocryphal legends are a powerful expression of early Christian sexual morality, the sexual gospel of a minority movement, when the religion and its followers stood apart from mainstream society. The Christian romances reflect a configuration of sexual morality and society in which Christian austerity represented a radical freedom from the demands of the world. The stories of wandering apostles and the eager female adherents who hear the gospel of chastity were produced by the same imagination that reconceived the problem of free will around the capacity to act without encumbrance from fate or from social expectation. This body of early Christian literature adopts, wholesale, the romantic trope of feminine inviolability. But the heroine’s chastity is reoriented toward otherworldly ends rather than the reproduction of life here beneath the moon. There is something flat, compressed, about the presentation of sex in the apocryphal literature. There is a juvenile absolutism about its place in human life. No character wrestles with desire, confronts temptation, or experiences confliction. Sex is a symbol of the world, and all the more simplified by that fact. Only a religious movement that had so completely resolved to live apart from the order of society could package sex as a compact and tractable symptom of ordinary life, with its dull cycles of survival and reproduction, in contrast to the shimmering promises of an invisible order. It was a vision of sex and its pervasive role in life that the Christian authors found, with a wholly opposite purpose, in the contemporary genre of romance.39

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Th e mélange is deliberate, for it helps us resist the temptation to ascribe supremacy to any one witness or class of witnesses. Th ere will be no doubting, however, which type of in for mant is accorded a mea sure of favoritism: the novelist. Th e history of the ancient novel is eff ectively coterminous with the four centuries of Roman Empire. Rarely in history are great genres of literature born, and when they are, it surely signals a signifi cant cultural juncture. Th e novels are tales of eros; they are dedicated to the power of eros and celebrate its divine power. A heady synthesis of comedy, love poetry, travel literature, and philosophy, the novels are the quintessential cultural expression of a civilization with a mature tradition of speculation on human sexual experience. At the same time, the novels are breathtakingly unique creations whose narrative intri- cacy allowed their authors to explore, slowly and with a new sympathy, the contours of the soul experiencing eros. On the whole, the romances strike a tone of wry conservatism. Th ese stories are the product of a confi dent and assertive aristocracy, capable of believing that the world could be redeemed through social reproduction. But it is too much to declare the novels simple propaganda. Th eir authors are too alert to the unruly power of eros, too eager to portray the sinuous routes to conjugal love to be trying to put over something as bland as a point. In par tic u lar, Chapter 1 lets Leucippe and Clitophon, a romance written in the second century by an author named  FROM SHAME TO SIN Achilles Tatius, act as a guide as we trek across the landscape of imperial sexual culture. Among the surviving romances, Leucippe and Clitophon is probably the most sensational and certainly the most canny. Th e whole work is marked by a sly, if not subversive, sympathy for the inevitable disjuncture between the inarticulate mysteries of human sexuality and the artifi cial constraints of any erotic code. Achilles Tatius makes an ideal tour guide, one who knows all the traditional details but gleefully spills unauthorized truths.  Many scholars have treated the romances as a privileged source for the history of sexuality, so that we could simply invoke tradition in foreground- ing the novels. But a more substantive justifi cation is in order, particularly because it might seem outwardly contradictory that an interpretation that professes to respect the hard facts of social life also takes some of the most fantastic products of the imagination so seriously.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Achilles Tatius exposes the internal logic of the genre and tests whether the reader will believe in it simply because it is good theater. He is willing to lay bare the purely artificial, literary substance animating his characters. Leucippe’s sudden and inexplicable transformation from a willing young girl curious about eros into a romantic heroine capable of the most soaring defenses of chastity is an example. More darkly, the creation of a doppelgänger for Leucippe, an “ill-starred” prostitute who is beheaded in Leucippe’s place, is an accomplishment without equal in the ancient romances. In the riddle of the severed head, which hangs, unexplained, over much of the narrative, Achilles confronts the reader with the mysterious dispensations of fate. The brilliance of this creation ensures us that the arch tone Achilles maintains across his romance is not postmodern camp before its time, but instead a serious engagement with the deepest social and cosmological assumptions of romance. The manipulation of romantic protocols is a sincere way of questioning the Fortune that presides over the order of romance—in fact, over the world. This story, with its intricate knowingness, promises the ability to confront the theodicy that underlies literature, through literature.21 The Ethiopian Tale of Heliodorus makes equally canny use of the generic conventions underlying the inviolability of the heroine’s body. The Ethiopian Tale is as self-aware as Leucippe and Clitophon, but the effect achieved by the author’s consciousness is an air of baroque grandeur rather than keen lightness. The Ethiopian Tale is the latest of the erotic romances that survive, and there are compelling reasons to place it sometime in the second half of the fourth century. The Ethiopian Tale deliberately builds an aura of latest and greatest. All of the conventional themes are allowed to unravel, in stately fashion. By far the longest of the erotic romances, it is unique in weaving two story patterns into a single narrative. At one level it is the story of Theagenes and Charicleia, their separation and endurance, their eventual union. The Ethiopian Tale is also a homeward journey for Charicleia, who gradually discovers her true identity as the princess of Ethiopia. In the sophistication of its narrative architecture, The Ethiopian Tale is without peer among the ancient novels. But it is also distinctive in its fixation on male bodily purity, and in general its chilly tone toward the pleasures of the flesh. The Ethiopian Tale very consciously redeploys the traditional armory of the erotic romance, but in the service of a hieratic vision of human life.22

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I addressed him through my interpreter but he deigned no reply, for this was indeed a sage. His disciples, however, were more loquacious; these pious beggars came from India, and their master belonged to the powerful caste of Brahmans. I gathered that his meditations led him to believe that the whole universe is only a tissue of illusion and error; for him self-denial, renunciation, death were the sole means of escape from this changing flood of forms whereon, on the contrary, our Heraclitus had willingly been borne along. Beyond the world of the senses he hoped to rejoin the sphere of the purely divine, that unmoving firmament of which Plato, too, had dreamed. I got some inkling, therefore, in spite of the bungling of my interpreters, of conceptions not unlike those of certain of our philosophers, but expressed by this Indian with more absolute finality. He had reached the state where nothing was left, except his body, to separate him from intangible deity, without substance or form, and with which he would unite; he had resolved to burn himself alive that next morning. Osro�s invited me to the solemnity. A pyre of fragrant woods was prepared; the man leaped into it and disappeared without one cry. His disciples gave no sign of sorrow; for them it was not a funeral ceremony. I pondered these things far into the night which followed. There I lay on a carpet of finest wool on the floor of a tent hung with gleaming brocades. A page massaged my feet. From without came the few sounds of that Asiatic night: the whispering of slaves at my door; the soft rustle of a palm, and Opramoas' snores behind a curtain; the stamp of a horse's hoof; from farther away, in the women's quarters, the melancholy murmur of a song. All of that had left the Brahman unmoved. In his veritable passion of refusal he had given himself to the flames as a lover to a bed. He had cast off everything and everyone, and finally himself, like so many garments which served to conceal from him that unique presence, the invisible void which was his all. I felt myself to be different, and ready for wider choice. Austerity, renunciation, negation were not wholly new to me; I had been drawn to them young (as is almost always the case), at the age of twenty. I was even younger when a friend in Rome took me to see the aged Epictetus in his hovel in the Suburra, shortly before Domitian ordered his exile. As in his slave days, when a brutal master failed to extract from him even one cry, though the beating broke his leg, so now grown old and frail he was patiently bearing the slow torments of gravel; yet he seemed to me to enjoy a liberty which was almost divine.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  This book tries to tell the story of the passage across one of the great thresholds in the history of private morality. Like any such passage, it knew its limits, and no one should be surprised to find pieces of the old in the new, or the new in the old. There are patent risks in overestimating the extent to which immemorial patterns of erotic experience, shaped by the primitive dictates of power, desire, and reproduction, actually changed. But there are risks, too, in underestimating Christianization as a watershed, or reducing it to something so abstract as a cultural substitution. At the beginning of our story, the Mediterranean was home to a society where an emperor’s male beloved, victim of an untimely death, would be worshipped around the empire as a god; in this same society, the routine exploitation of slaves and poor women was a foundation of the sexual order. By the end, we are in a world where the emperor will command the gory mutilation of men caught in same-sex affairs, even as he affirmed the moral dignity of women without any civic claim to honor. Paradoxically, these realignments were effected by the same, deep earthquake in human morality. Society and its needs had lost some measure of command over the sexual honor of men and women, and instead the individual, in his or her moral ends, was imagined as an isolate—free, frail, and awesomely responsible for all corporal stirrings. The triumph of Christianity within the public order was not the displacement of one self-deluding superego by another. It was a revolution in the rules of behavior and in the very image of the human as a sexual being. More profoundly, it was a revolution in the nature of society’s claims on the moral agent, and in the place imagined for the sexual self within the cosmos. CHAPTER ONE The Moralities of Sex in the Roman Empire

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The romances of the Roman Empire are such extraordinary witnesses to the experience of eros because they transform the exigencies of social reproduction into the workings of a cosmic destiny, they toy with the tensions between flux and order in the individual’s coming-to-be in the world, and in the end, they spiritualize the mysterious erotic energies that connect man to nature. In the romances, these stirrings are a constitutive source of the self. When a romancer like Achilles Tatius looked out upon the gloomy counsels of the philosophers, it was not as a partisan of one ideology upon another, competing for supremacy in the public mind; it was, rather, as a spokesman for life, and the timeless patterns of sexual experience, upon a small reformation movement. But somewhere in the city where Achilles lived, there lurked the germ of a new ideology, one that could envision stilling the timeless patterns of life itself, and whose rules would reorder the experience of sexuality. Achilles at times seems aware of this radical movement, but he never deigns to mention it explicitly. It is in that context, as a dark horse in the chaotic, competitive atmosphere of the high empire, that the early Christians, with their highly distinctive sexual gospel, need to be imagined.108 CHAPTER TWO The Will and the World in Early Christian Sexuality TO SOAR CLOSE TO ANGELSIn the romance of Achilles Tatius, the heroine Leucippe personifies the white horse of Plato’s chariot, capable of lifting the soul to the loftiest heights; it was an ambitious vision of conjugal eros, in which the most profound stirrings of the body not only connected man with the divine forces that replenished the earth but also offered personal transcendence. A little more than a century after Achilles Tatius wrote his novel, Plato’s chariot of the soul reappears, now in a dialogue written by a Christian. Methodius, bishop of Olympus in Lycia, wrote the Christian answer to Plato’s Symposium, in which the indulgent symposiasts of classical Athens have been replaced by ten female virgins. The Christian symposium of Methodius is a discussion circle on the surpassing merits on virginity, “something that is great, marvelous, wondrous, and exceedingly honorable.” For Methodius, the chariot of the soul, far from being pulled by the power of erotic attraction, could soar above the horizon only by lifting over the swamp of physical pleasures. The pure body might carry the virgin’s soul to the vault of heaven, where she could glimpse from afar “the vales of immortality.” After such a revelation, she would come to regard as trifles the things of this life, “wealth, honor, birth, marriages.” Marriage, on this view, is not sinful, but its merits shrink to invisibility in the blinding glory of sexual abstinence.1

• From Untrue (2018)

  “Sleep” is here a euphemism. The ceremony is called the endakwandet, which translates as “to be enveloped in sex for me.” The healing aspects of the ceremony were thought to derive from female desire, which in this cosmology was not only not to be controlled; its expression was literally lifesaving. In fact, Wyandot sex practices were basically driven by Wyandot women, who had a remarkable-seeming-to-us degree of sexual self-determination: The Huron considered premarital sexual relations to be perfectly normal and engaged in them soon after puberty…Girls were as active as men in initiating these liasons [sic]…Young men were required to recognize the right of a girl to decide which of her lovers she preferred at any one time. Sometimes, a young man and woman developed a longstanding, but informal, sexual relationship. This did not prevent either partner from having sexual relations with other friends. Trial marriages were another aspect of indigenous life in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans (and are also typical in many present-day hunter-gatherer societies). A young woman was free to test-run a potential husband for several nights—a young Wyandot man “proposed” by presenting her with a beaver robe or a necklace of wampum—and then she would decide whether she wanted to commit or not. Either way, she got to keep the stuff. Such exchanges, like sex itself, created social adhesion and give us a clue to a worldview in which a woman had the power to choose, change her mind, and choose again. And again. Men served at their pleasure. Jesuit missionaries wrote with astonishment and sometimes horror of the agency of Wyandot women and could not wrap their minds around the fact that Wyandot parents were particularly overjoyed upon the birth of a girl. Later, missionaries sought to suppress the customs of premarital sex, trial marriages, and the endakwandet, but this was not easy to do; as the Wyandot were matrilineal and matrilocal, their egalitarian notions about women and the power of female sexuality and female choice were deeply rooted. Only the Indian Act of 1876, with its comprehensive imposition of European beliefs and social organization, could extinguish it, by changing underlying patterns of residence and of clan inheritance.

• From Untrue (2018)

  “There’s an implicit bias against matriarchy. A lot of people, including scientists, seem to resist the idea that what bonobos do—that females are sexually assertive and strategic, that they build female-female coalitions through sex, and that they are a female-dominant species, period—is part of our evolutionary lineage. Bonobos are part of the narrative arc of humanness,” Parish said, making her point as if it were precisely what it is: a fact. I was momentarily stunned by the simplicity and profundity of what Parish was asserting. Our closest non-human primate relatives are non-monogamous. Females have baroque anogenital swellings, the better to attract the interest of multiple males, not one “best” alpha guy. In fact, there are no alpha guys, because they are a society of alpha gals. And this is so mostly thanks to gals preferring sex with one another. Which they do because of how wonderful it feels to rub their front-facing, exposed, and richly innervated clitorides together.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Then he slowly waved his arms to prompt these extraordinary children to sing. Their voices bounced off the walls and ceiling of this ancient hall and fell into a glorious harmony the likes of which I’d never heard. After starting his classmates in song, the young man stepped off his chair and joined them in performing a heartbreaking melody with tremendous care and precision. I could not understand a word of the Swedish lyrics, but it sounded angelic. Dissonance and harmonic tension slowly resolved into warm chords—the sound was transcendent. The singing built gloriously with each line. Standing on a stage above the singers with the headmaster beside me, I looked up at the ceiling—at the majestic artwork. My mother had died a few months before this trip. She’d been a church musician most of her life and had worked with dozens of children’s choirs. When I looked up and saw the drawings of angels on the domed ceiling I thought of her. I quickly realized I would never recover my composure looking up there, so I looked back at the students and forced a smile. When the students finished their song, the rest of the students cheered and applauded wildly. I joined the applause and tried to hold myself together. When I left the stage, students came up to thank me for the talk, ask questions, and take pictures. I was completely charmed. It was a long and exhausting but beautiful day. When I got back to the hotel I was grateful for the two-hour break before my next speaking commitment. I don’t know what prompted me to turn on the television, but I’d been away from home for four days and hadn’t seen any headlines. The local news blasted into my room. The unfamiliar Swedish TV anchors were chatting away when I heard my name. It was the piece the crew had filmed with me; familiar images filled the screen. I watched myself walking with the reporter into Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s church on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, then up the street to the Civil Rights Memorial. The scene then switched to Walter, standing in overalls amid his pile of discarded cars down in Monroeville. Walter gently put down a little kitten he’d been holding as he started to answer the reporters’ questions. He’d mentioned to me previously that all kinds of cats had sought shelter in his field of abandoned metal. He said things I’d heard him say dozens of times before. Then I watched his expression change, and he began talking with more animation and excitement than I’d ever heard from him. He became uncharacteristically emotional. “They put me on death row for six years! They threatened me for six years. They tortured me with the promise of execution for six years. I lost my job.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  threats will only bestow greater glory on her, which would be a strange thing for a slave to say, after all, unless she knew she was a romantic heroine. She warns Th ersander that her eleutheria, her freedom, will protect her. Achilles has contrived a brilliant scene in which eleutheria refers precisely to the heroine’s objective status rather than to her autonomy. For no coherent reason whatsoever, this claim deters Th ersander from his malicious designs. Or rather, for no reason other than the bare logic of the romantic genre itself, in which the honorable protagonist will remain inviolate, does she retain her purity. Whereas Th ersander refuses to believe in the rules of romance, Achilles Tatius asks the reader to believe solely out of convention rather than narrative plausibility. Leucippe’s mēchanē, her device of escape, is simultaneously the least convincing, and the most self- aware, of any in the genre. Achilles Tatius exposes the internal logic of the genre and tests whether the reader will believe in it simply because it is good theater. He is willing to lay bare the purely artifi cial, literary substance animating his characters. Leucippe’s sudden and inexplicable transformation from a willing young girl curious about eros into a romantic heroine capable of the most soaring defenses of chastity is an example. More darkly, the creation of a doppelgänger for Leucippe, an “ill- starred” prostitute who is beheaded in Leucippe’s place, is an accomplishment without equal in the ancient romances. In the riddle of the severed head, which hangs, unexplained, over much of the narrative, Achilles confronts the reader with the mysterious dispensations of fate. Th e brilliance of this creation ensures us that the arch tone Achilles maintains across his romance is not postmodern camp before its time, but instead a serious engagement with the deepest social and cosmological assumptions of romance. Th e manipulation of romantic protocols is  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N a sincere way of questioning the Fortune that presides over the order of romance— in fact, over the world. Th is story, with its intricate knowingness, promises the ability to confront the theodicy that underlies literature, through literature. Th e Ethiopian Tale of Heliodorus makes equally canny use of the generic conventions underlying the inviolability of the heroine’s body. Th e Ethiopian Tale is as self- aware as Leucippe and Clitophon, but the eff ect achieved by the author’s consciousness is an air of baroque grandeur rather than keen lightness. Th e Ethiopian Tale is the latest of the erotic romances that survive, and there are compelling reasons to place it sometime in the second half of the fourth century. Th