Call us now:
We’re doing something a little different today.
We’ve looked at a lot of history so far on this channel, and for a transgender history channel, that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
We’ve also done some transgender mythology analysis, which we turned around and used to explore some history, through the lens of euhemerism.
But what we haven’t really done yet is literary analysis.
It was bound to happen sooner or later, since the ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t just leave us historical writings – they wrote a fair amount of what we’d consider today to be fiction as well.
It’s also the first time we’ll be looking at a more trans masculine history topic, which I’ve gotten a lot of requests for. And I kinda feel bad about that.
Because look, this channel is called We Have Always Existed, because it’s about the histories of transgender people.
So far we’ve talked about trans feminine priestesses, an ambiguously trans feminine emperor, some intersex and generally gender nonconforming topics, and a whole lot of castration. Something’s missing there.
To a certain extent, that reveals my own bias – I’m a trans woman, so naturally trans feminine topics interest me more. But trans feminine topics also tend to be more well known. The catalyst that got me to start this channel in the first place was in seeing people talk about the Scythian Enaree priestesses but not being able to find any decent information about them. Nobody was talking about it in a way that made any sense outside of stuffy academic papers, so I figured somebody had to do it, and why not me?
RELATED: The Transgender Enaree Priestesses REMASTERED
RELATED: Exploring the Grave of a Transgender Enaree Priestess
But trans men are frequently left out of the conversation when it comes to trans topics, and that sucks. I’ve read various different reasons why that’s the case – on average, the further trans men get in their transitions the better they tend to pass as cis, they tend to be more lowkey than their chaotic trans sisters, they tend to attract less ire from TERFs who view them as confused wayward lesbians to be rescued and not sick perverted men in dresses, yadda yadda yadda.
And on one hand, I feel like that last part might be nice – it’s exhausting to be the centre of political attention for an entire movement of hateful maniacs. But I’ve heard enough trans men talk about how difficult things can be on their side of the coin to recognize it’s clearly not such a great time either.
Trans men and trans women envying the other’s position, name a more iconic duo.
Who’s got it harder? Who’s got it easier? Who cares? Pointless conversation. What are we both doing to lift each other up and improve our entire community? That’s much more important.
But this channel is for you too, my trans brothers. Trans people deserve to know and own our histories, and that includes you just as much as the rest of us.
But trans masculine history has layers of complexity to it that set it apart from trans feminine history. For example, there’s a significant overlap between trans masculine and lesbian culture that doesn’t really exist for trans women and cis men. As a result, it’s sometimes difficult to discuss one without the other.
Today, we’re going to look at the Greek poet Lucian, and his Dialogues Of The Courtesans. We’ll talk about the poet himself, the particular dialogue that relates to the subject matter of this channel, some context to help it make more sense, and finally, a literary analysis of what the whole thing means.
As usual, your support on Patreon is greatly appreciated. It really does make a big difference in helping me turn this channel into something more self sustaining. You’ll get all sorts of perks, including access to our private Discord channel, a shout out in the credits, early access to videos before they go public, my eternal gratitude, and more. It starts at just a buck a month. Link in the profile.
But if Patreon support isn’t in the cards for you, that’s okay. You can still help support the channel by leaving a like and comment, and by subscribing. When you do that, it tells the YouTube algorithm that people like you like this video, so it’s more likely to show this video to people like you.
If you believe, like I do, that it’s important and necessary for trans people to understand our own histories, those simple actions – a like, a comment, a subscribe – will go a long way toward spreading these stories in the community. Even if you comment “I like the video Sophie!” that’s all it takes.
Let’s do what we can to counter the lie told about us by the forces of hatred – the lie that we’re a modern invention. We’re not.
Human history without trans people has never existed, and so long as humanity endures, so too will we.
Without further ado…
Chapter I: Lucian’s Dialogues Of The Courtesans And New Comedy
We talked about Lucian, briefly, in the original video on the Gallae. He wrote a piece called On The Syrian Goddess, where he told us a possible origin story for why the Gallae worshiped Kybele in the particular way they did.
RELATED: The Gallae: The Transgender Priestesses of Kybele
RELATED: Introduction to the Gallae
RELATED: Rituals of the Gallae Transgender Priestesses
Most of what we know about Lucian comes from his writings, which is a bit of a problem when it comes to putting together a biography of him. After all, his writings were satire. But here’s the best we can tell.
He was born somewhere around 125 CE, in the city of Samosata, in the Roman province of Syria, which includes part of modern day Syria, as well as parts of Turkey and Lebanon. Today, Samosata is called Samsat, and it’s in the southeast corner of Turkey along the Euphrates river, about a hundred kilometres from the Syrian border.
Lucian’s family was lower middle class, and as a young man he worked under his uncle as an apprentice sculptor, but he didn’t seem to like it so he ran away to Ionia, on the west coast of Asia Minor south of Mt. Ida, to pursue an education. Eventually, he settled in Athens, which is where he wrote most of his work. Even though he lived during Roman rule of Greece, and came from an area where Aramaic was most commonly spoken, he wrote in Greek.
When it comes to ancient writers whose work survives, Lucian is one of the most fortunate. Nearly a hundred titles attributed to him survive today, though at least a few of them were probably not his. That’s a pretty big deal when you compare him with other ancient writers.
The Roman writer Livy, for example, wrote 142 books on Roman history, and we have 35 of them.
The Athenian tragic poet Aeschylus wrote 90 plays, and we have 6.
79 of the Athenian orator Hypereides’ speeches were written down and published in the ancient world, and today we’ve got 2.
The Athenian poet Philemon wrote 97 works, and of those, we have a few fragments and titles.
A lot of this stuff gets lost over the millennia, so it’s kind of a miracle that so much of Lucian’s work survives today, especially since he made some nasty comments about Christians, and when Christianity became the dominant religion in the empire they tended to love purging anti christian works. Even still, he became popular in the Byzantine empire, where a lot of it was used as part of their school curriculum. So yeah, we’re pretty lucky to have what we have.
RELATED: Transgender Christians in History
RELATED: Gender Transgression in Early Christianity
One of the most interesting ones to me, personally, is called A True Story, about a group of travelers who are blown off course and end up on the Moon, where they find themselves caught in the middle of a war between Endymion the Moon King and Phaethon the Sun King, over who gets to colonize Venus. There’s a lot more to it from there, but this is, ARGUABLY, the earliest example of a story that could be called science fiction, from nearly 2000 years ago. I’m planning to do a reading of it on this channel, even though it’s not specifically trans history, because the idea of it is just so much fun.
But today, we’re looking at the Dialogues Of The Courtesans. It’s a collection of short pieces, sort of like skits, usually between a group of prostitutes. They share gossip with one another, and complain quite a bit; about other girls stealing their clients, about rejecting annoying clients, about the anxiety of receiving their first client, about dealing with men desperate for their attention, and about clients who get too rough. At times it’s dark, but for the most part it’s a lot of fun.
Dialogues of the Courtesans is a great example of what the ancient Greeks called “new comedy.” Without getting too far into the weeds here, ancient Greek comedy is divided into three different eras.
Old comedy was popular in the 5th century BCE. It was full of political satire, to the point where the characters in the plays would sometimes be caricatures of real people. It was also pretty lewd, full of what we might today call toilet humour. If you’re familiar with the comic playwright Aristophanes, some of his works are the best surviving example of old comedy we have today.
Next, middle comedy. Rather than taking aim at political figures and situations, they’d be more focused on mythological scenes, or so we’re told. No full plays of middle comedy survive today, so it’s difficult to comment much further on it.
Finally, we have new comedy. It became popular during Macedonian hegemony in Greece, the late 4th century to the end of the 2nd century BCE. It was much more focused on situations of everyday life. That meant they were full of stereotypical stock characters. If you want to think of new comedy as sort of like ancient sitcoms or comedy sketches, you wouldn’t be too far off the mark.
Now, Dialogues of the Courtesans is absolutely a new comedy. But that doesn’t mean Lucian was a new comedy playwright. These three eras of comedy happened centuries before Lucian was born, so he exists outside of these movements. He wrote in a variety of different styles – the one we’re looking at today just happens to be more of a new comedy style.
It’s like one of those retro rock bands that was big in the early 2010s that played Led Zeppelin worship 70s rock. Yeah they’re playing in a vintage style, but it’s not the same thing as the original. The style by that point had already been codified. That doesn’t mean it’s entirely derivative, innovation and exploration is still possible, but it’s done in response to the original established genre.
For our purposes, we’ll be looking at Dialogue V. It’s not very long, so I’m going to just read the whole thing here. I’m reading from the Loeb Classical Library version, which from what I can tell is public domain, but I guess we’ll find out if I get a copyright strike. I’ll put the text on the screen too, so you can follow along more easily.
But before we get to reading the text, I want to spend some time talking about how prostitution worked in ancient Athens. After all, it is called Dialogues of the Courtesans, and if we don’t take some time to understand what that world might have been like, we’ll end up filling in the gaps with all sorts of modern assumptions, and that’s not helpful.
So let’s take a short look at the world of Athenian prostitution. From there, we’ll read Dialogues of the Courtesans V, pick through the text, and address the whole reason why we’re covering it here on this channel.
Chapter II: Understanding The World Of Athenian Prostitution
When we think of prostitution, a pretty specific image probably comes up. Unless you happen to live in an area where it’s legal, which is more places than you might think – the US puritanical attitude around sex work is not the global norm – you might imagine ladies of the night selling their trade on dimly lit street corners, dealing with abusive pimps exploiting them from within their butterfly collars, and living just outside Johnny Law’s oppressive reach.
But that’s not what it was like in ancient Greece. At least, not exactly.
The Athenian lawmaker Solon, who laid the foundations for what would become Athenian democracy, supposedly founded a number of brothels in the city, paid for by public funds. These brothels were mandated to provide sex work for a “reasonable price” of one obol per session. So when incels today talk about using government to provide access to sex, that’s not even a new idea.
Six obols was worth a drachma, the standard of currency in ancient Greece. Based on what the Athenian general turned historian Xenophon tells us, half a drachma would have been enough to provide for a somewhat comfortable living for the lower classes.
There’s a lot of talk about living wages – the amount one needs to earn to fetch a decent lower class quality of life. In Toronto, a comparably sized city to ancient Athens, relatively speaking, that’s $25.05 an hour as of late 2023, assuming full time employment (Living Wage Network). Let’s round down to $25 an hour, just to make the math easier. So a living wage in Toronto is around $200 a day, which is the equivalent to a half drachma. So one drachma would be $400. Divide that by six and you get about $67 Canadian dollars for one obol.
In other words, if we had the same system today that they had in ancient Athens, you could hire a government hooker for about the price of a new video game.
Why did Solon do this?
Well, it’s arguable whether or not he did, but we’re not getting into that.
If he did it, why did he do it?
Money, first of all.
When we talk about the ancient polis, or city state, we’re referring to the city itself, as well as the surrounding area it controlled. The polis of classical Athens, for example, included the city of course, but also the farmland around it, and several other towns. Athens itself is not a coastal city, of course, but it controlled the busy port town Piraeus. Various ships would arrive at the port on a regular basis, where travelers, merchants, and the ship’s crew would disembark and look for ways to spend their time and money. Many of these were young single men, so, do the math.
By legalizing, regulating, and taxing prostitution, Solon brought a lot of revenue to the state.
But there was another goal.
By providing accessible prostitution, the Athenian government would be able to reduce the number of chaste young Athenian women being deflowered by lonely horndog sailors. They were also trained in how to provide sexual pleasure, which Athenian women by and large weren’t skilled in, if we believe the entirely male writers who reported on such things. A woman’s role was to be a housewife and a mother, and sex was viewed as an act done to somebody, not with. You either took an active or a passive role in sex, and the active role was reserved almost exclusively for Athenian citizen men. Athenian wives tended to be quite passive during sex, which doesn’t seem to have been satisfying for either partner involved. But being the wildly misogynistic culture they were, Athens cared only about the sexual satisfaction of its citizens – and only adult men could be citizens.
Were all prostitutes the same? No, in fact there were a few different categories of prostitute.
First, the slave prostitutes and streetwalkers. These were called pornai, from the Greek verb “pernemi” or “to sell” and it’s obviously where we get a certain modern word. These girls were owned by a pornoboskos, who acted essentially as a pimp. They worked in the public brothels Solon established, as well as some privately owned ones.
A pornoboskos was looked at sort of like how used car salesmen are today – a perfectly legitimate, though not particularly trustworthy or reputable, way to make a living (NO OFFENSE TO YOU IF YOU’RE A USED CAR SALESPERSON IN THE AUDIENCE I’M SURE YOU YOURSELF ARE A PERFECTLY TRUSTWORTHY AND REPUTABLE INDIVIDUAL). He would train the newly acquired pornai in how to please their clients, which they’d do in the brothels.
How he trained them, I don’t know, but I’m sure we can make some educated guesses.
What about the brothels themselves? They didn’t seem like great places to be.
One particular archaeological site at Athens is called the Kerameikos district, called that because there were a lot of ceramics workers in the area. A series of buildings – called Z1 Z2 and Z3 – have been identified as brothels. Z1 was destroyed in an earthquake around the late 5th century BCE. Z2 was built shortly after to replace it, and was destroyed when the Spartans conquered Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War in 404 BCE. Z3, from there, survived until the end of the 4th century BCE when another earthquake took it down. Z3 is the one whose remains we understand best.
It was about 500 square metres in size, and I know that sounds really big, it’s more than 5300 square feet, but I double checked a couple different sources to make sure that wasn’t a misprint or something, and yeah it really was that size. It was a single storey, and divided into a bunch of smaller rooms. In most of these rooms we’ve found loom weights, and some have interpreted this to mean it was a textile factory, conveniently ignoring the statues and amulets depicting Aphrodite and Eros, and several hundred eating and drinking vessels. They also ignore the fact that no ancient source mentions a textile factory in this area, despite the fact that the area itself is fairly well documented.
Using a loom was considered feminine work, and was often a housewife’s job. But it wasn’t necessarily just a housewife’s job. In fact, women who were slaves often did this sort of work as well. So the fact that this brothel was filled with both erotic art and weaving tools suggests this building was a place where slave women would serve as prostitutes, and weave in between clients.
It was also one of the nicer spots in town, as far as brothels go. There was a garden courtyard, baths, dining rooms, and beautifully designed mosaics on the floor. But the fact that these pornai would spend their days either having sex with random men for a legally imposed pittance (and on top of that, the pornoboskos would take part of their wages) or working hard to produce textiles in dark rooms, suggests they didn’t live a particularly joyous existence, even in what might have been considered one of the nicer brothels.
Pornai weren’t necessarily slaves, though it seems as though they often were.
Okay, so that’s the pornai. But they also had another category – hetairai.
These were significantly different. In fact, hetairai were often considered fairly cultured, intelligent, and worldly. Rather than just providing sexual services, they also served as entertainers.
A tradition for upper class Athenians was a type of social gathering called a symposium, where they would recline on couches, eat, drink wine out of a vessel called a kylix, and entertain each other. If you’re familiar with Plato, you might recognize the word symposium as the name of one of his works – that’s because it’s written to have taken place at such an event. It was for men only, like much of Athenian public life – the wives stayed at home, tending to the household, taking care of the kids, and often taking care of themselves with an olisbos, a dildo made from dogskin. Yeah, you heard that right.
But after a while, it tends to get tiring if you just keep throwing parties with a bunch of dudes. So if you were hosting a symposium, and you were a particularly cool guy and wanted your friends to know you were a particularly cool guy, you might hire some hetairai to come to your party as well.
These girls would dance, sing, play instruments, serve food, and engage the men in conversation. And when it came down to it, they’d sometimes have sex with them as well. But it wasn’t always a short term relationship. In fact, they could enter long term relationships with their clients, becoming their pallake, or concubine, sometimes receiving lavish gifts in exchange.
These women were given the chance to develop their intellectual side far more than most Athenian women, which is part of why they were allowed to join in at a symposium. They often lived on their own or with other hetairai, and even though they weren’t usually freeborn Athenian woman – they were sometimes slaves, former slaves, or foreigners – some of them seemed to have greater freedom and more enjoyable lives than freeborn Athenian women. It’s suspected that some hetairai were upper class women from cities that were conquered by Athens.
Smart, sexy, witty, talented, great in bed, and with more freedom than Athenian women – no wonder these women were so highly sought after.
But I love the patriarchal logic here. Athenian men went out of their way to make sure their women were nothing like the hetairai, whom they clearly found to be more desirable. So in the process of putting women in their place, so to speak, it also created a situation where Athenian men were actually less attracted to them.
Patriarchy really does make things worse for everyone.
Were there male prostitutes as well? Yes. But, in keeping with the patriarchal ideas of ancient Athens, male prostitutes were described with verbs. Meanwhile, porne and hetaira are nouns. Men did prostitution, and could stop doing it – women were prostitutes, it was an identity they were branded with.
So what about the girls in the Dialogue of the Courtesans? Were they pornai or hetairai?
Several of the dialogues reference the girls having attended parties, and that doesn’t seem like something pornai were allowed to do.
As well, in dialogue 6, between Corinna and her mother Crobyle, the two women talk about how difficult it’s been since Crobyle’s husband and Corinna’s father, Philinus, died. They sold all his blacksmithing tools, but since then they’ve had very little to eat. But Crobyle talks about Corinna supporting both herself and her mother. This exchange says, quote:
Crobyle: I worked out that when you were as old as you are now, it would be easy for you both to keep me and provide yourself with clothes, that you would be rich, and have purple dresses and maids.
Corinna: How so? What do you mean by that, mother?
Crobyle: By associating with young men, drinking, and sleeping with them for money.
Corinna: Like Daphnis’ daughter, Lyra?
Crobyle: Yes
Corinna: But she’s a [hetaira]
It’s worth noting that she specifically uses the word hetaira here.
The boundary between pornai and hetairai wasn’t always a clear one, and some scholars wonder whether these were even distinct categories at all. But that’s beyond the scope of this video.
That said, I think these girls were hetairai. But this dialogue is set during the golden age of Athens, which was a few hundred years before Lucian’s time. So he’s bound to have gotten some of the details wrong. In fact, these girls are fictional representations of courtesans, not actual courtesans.
So, now that we know a bit more about what Athenian prostitution might have looked like, let’s get to the text.
Apologies in advance, there’s a bunch of misgendering in the passage to come, which I chose to preserve as written because it’s relevant to the analysis we’ll be doing after. Outside of the original text itself, however, I’ll be referring to characters the way they identify themselves.
Chapter III: Dialogue V
Klonarion: We’ve been hearing strange things about you, Leaena. They say that Megilla, the rich Lesbian woman, is in love with you just like a man, that you live with each other, and do goodness knows what together. Hullo! Blushing? Tell me if it’s true.
Leaena: Quite true, Klonarion. But I’m ashamed, for it’s unnatural.
Klonarion: In the name of Mother Aphrodite, what’s it all about? What does the woman want? What do you do when you are together? You see, you don’t love me, or you wouldn’t hide such things from me.
Leaena: I love you as much as I love any woman, but she’s terribly like a man.
Klonarion: I don’t understand what you mean, unless she’s a sort of woman for the ladies. They say there are women like that in Lesbos, with faces like men, and unwilling to consort with men, but only with women, as though they themselves were men.
Leaena: It’s something like that.
Klonarion: Well, tell me all about it; tell me how she made her first advances to you, how you were persuaded, and what followed.
Leaena: She herself and another rich woman, with the same accomplishments, Demonassa from Corinth, were organising a drinking party, and had taken me along to provide them with music. But, when I had finished playing, and it was late and time to turn in and they were drunk, Megilla said, “Come along, Leaena, it’s high time we were in bed; you sleep here between us.”
Klonarion: And did you? What happened after that?
Leaena: At first they kissed me, like men, not simply bringing their lips to mine, but opening their mouths a little, embracing me, and squeezing my breasts. Demonassa even bit me as she kissed, and I didn’t know what to make of it. Eventually Megilla, being now rather heated, pulled off her wig, which was very realistic and fitted very closely, and revealed the skin of her head which was shaved close just as on the most energetic of athletes. This sight gave me a shock, but she said, “Leaena, have you ever seen such a good looking young fellow?” “I don’t se one here, Megilla,” said I. “Don’t make a woman out of me,” said she. “My name is Megillus, and I’ve been married to Demonassa here for ever so long; she’s my wife.” I laughed at that, Klonarion, and said, “Then, unknown to us, Megillus, you were a man all the time, just as they say Achilles once hid among the girls, and you have everything that a man has, and can play the part of a man to Demonassa?” “I haven’t got what you mean,” said she “I don’t need it at all. You’ll find I’ve a much pleasanter method of my own.” “You’re surely not like Hermaphroditus,” said I, “equipped both as a man and a woman, as many people are said to be?” for I still didn’t know, Klonarion, what it was all about. But she said, “No, Leaena, I’m all man.” “Well,” I said, “I’ve heard the Boeotian flute-girl, Ismenodora, repeating tales she’d heard at home, and telling us how someone at Thebes had turned from woman to man, someone who was also an excellent soothsayer, and was, I think, called Tiresias. That didn’t happen to you, did it?” “No Leaena,” she said, “I was born a woman like the rest of you, but I have the mind and the desires and everything else of a man.” “And don’t you find these desires enough,” said I? “If you don’t believe me Leaena,” said she, “just give me a chance, and you’ll find I’m as good as any man; I have a substitute of my own. Only give me a chance, and you’ll see.”
Well I did, my dear, because she begged so hard and presented me with a costly necklace, and a very fine linen dress. Then I threw my arms around her as though she were a man, and she went to work kissing me, and panting, and apparently enjoying herself immensely.
Klonarion: What did she do? How? That’s what I’m most interested to hear.
Leaena: Don’t enquire too closely into the details; they’re not very nice; so, by Aphrodite in heaven, I won’t tell you.
Chapter IV: Geez Where Do We Even Start With This One?
Hoo boy is there a lot to pick through there. I mean geez, where do I even start? Is your brain bristling with the possibilities here?
Yeah, mine too. We’re gonna dig deeper.
To start, it’s important to keep in mind this isn’t a historical text. I mean, it is, in that it’s old, but it’s not a work of history. It’s fiction. So what we’re doing today is just as much literary analysis as it is history.
Let’s take a moment to consider Lucian’s intent with these characters, and how the audience he wrote for would have interpreted them.
The fact that both Leaena and Klonarion refer to Megillus and Demonassa as “Lesbians” doesn’t quite mean what you think it means. Lesbos is an island in the Aegean sea, just south of Mt. Ida if you remember that from the Hermaphroditus video. People who live on the island are called Lesbians, regardless of their sexuality, and so are their exports. The island has a long history of winemaking in particular, and Lesbian wine was highly sought after in the ancient world. It still is today, though they seem to call it Lesbos wine now, for reasons I can’t possibly imagine, if I found Lesbian wine on the shelves at the liquor store, I’d probably bring a case of it home with me. Even the island is often just called Mytilene today, after its largest city, in one of the biggest collective “no homos” I’ve ever seen.
But okay. Lesbian in this context means somebody from Lesbos. But the fact that Lucian made Megillus a Lesbian was more than just a coincidence.
That’s because Lesbos is where the poet Sappho was from, and if you’re gay yourself you probably know where this is going. But if not, that’s okay, I might have a few heteros in the audience here, that’s cool. You’re still welcome here, you need only bring a curious mind.
Sappho was a poet who lived during the 7th and 6th centuries BCE – so, after Homer, but before the Athenian golden age writers like Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, and the other guys we mentioned earlier. She wrote a lot of poetry about how much she loved women, and I mean, mood. That’s why we call erotic feelings between women sapphic, and women who are into women, you guessed it, lesbians.
This was well known in Lucian’s time as well. So it’s not a coincidence that he made Megillus from Lesbos – we’re supposed to view him as a lesbian, in both senses of the word. That’s why even after he repeatedly insists he’s a man, Leaena and Klonarion continue to refer to him as a woman named Megilla. In fact, even when Leaena refers to Megillus as “mannish” – άνδρικός or andrikos – she uses a feminine ending to the word.
Now I understand he/him lesbians are a thing, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that, but just know that that’s not what’s going on here, at least from an ancient perspective.
But as the dialogue goes on, we start to realize how confused both Leaena and Klonarion are by the whole thing.
First, Leaena says Megillus was “terribly like a man,” and Klonarion’s only frame of reference for this is to ask if he’s a hetairistra, which as we mentioned in the video on gender transgression in early Christianity was a term used to refer to gay women.
But Megillus makes it clear that he’s a man. He tells them in several different ways too, he’s not subtle about it. But even after he says “don’t make a woman out of me, my name is Megillus,” still, Leaena and Klonarion don’t seem to clue into it. Leaena then asks three different mythological questions to try to understand what Megillus’ deal is.
These questions can help us understand how the ancient Greeks looked at gender transgression in general, so let’s take a closer look.
Question I: Is He Like Achilles?
Then, unknown to us, Megillus, you were a man all the time, just as they say Achilles once hid among the girls, and you have everything that a man has, and can play the part of a man to Demonassa?
That’s Leaena’s first question. What’s she referring to here?
Most of us know Achilles as that guy with the weak heel who dies at the end of the Trojan War (spoiler alert), and we tend to think of the Iliad as being the story of the Trojan War. But the Trojan War was ten years long, and the Iliad actually starts 9 years into the war, and at the end of it, the war is still going and Achilles is still alive. It’s hard to figure out exactly how long the Iliad is supposed to be, but most scholars agree it was somewhere around a couple of months. So it’s really just a brief snapshot of the war. We’re told about Achilles’ death in other sources, and there are plenty of myths that start before the Iliad as well.
Leaena is referring in particular to Achilles’ time on Skyros, a Greek island northeast of Athens. The most detailed account of this myth we have is in the Achilleid, an unfinished epic poem by the Roman writer Statius, who wrote during the second half of the 1st century CE, during the reign of the emperor Domitian, though the story is absolutely older than that. It seems like Statius didn’t get far in writing this one – what we have today is the first book, and the beginning of the second book. That’s a real shame, since this could have been a great resource for the myths of Achilles. Alas.
Anyway, as the myth goes, Achilles was prophesied to die in the Trojan War, and his mother, the nymph Thetis, didn’t want that to happen. So she disguised him as a girl and took him to Skyros, where she told the king that Achilles was her daughter, who’d been raised among the Amazons and needed to learn how to act like a woman by being around more civilized women. So Achilles lived as a girl on Skyros for a time, but it was also prophesied that the Greeks couldn’t win the Trojan War without Achilles, so Odysseus was sent to find him. He tracked Achilles down to Skyros, made it seem like the island was under attack, and Achilles sprung to action to defend his friends. That made it obvious who he was, so Odysseus left with him to sail to Troy.
If you’re thinking that story sounds pretty gender, yeah there’s a lot to read into here. If you wanted, you could have a lot of fun playing with this story, which is exactly what author Maya Deane did with her novel Wrath Goddess Sing. It’s a re-imagining of the story of Achilles not as a boy in disguise hiding among girls, but as a transgender woman, gone to live in a place where girls like her were safe, where they had various herbs and medicines to stave off testosterone driven puberty. How does this change the tale of Achilles? How will the gods, ever present and interfering in Achilles’ life throughout mythology, affect her in this tale? Will she fight at Troy anyway? And how do Odysseus, Agamemnon, Hector, Helen, and the other Greek and Trojan heroes play into this re-imagining? It’s worth finding out. This isn’t a sponsored ad or anything, though Maya did send me my copy of the book. I just think if you like this channel, you’ll like this book as well. Link in the description if you want to get your hands on a copy.
Anyway, back to Megillus. Is that the case with him? Was he like Achilles?
I haven’t got what you mean. I don’t need it at all. You’ll find I’ve a much pleasanter method of my own.
The allusion to Achilles represents gender in response to material circumstances. Achilles was a man (unless you ask Maya Deane, of course) who was faced with a choice. Either he could play the role of a woman, or he could go off to war and die. He didn’t want to die, so the choice was obvious.
So no, Megillus was not a man forced to hide among women in disguise.
Question II: Is He Like Hermaphroditus?
You’re surely not like Hermaphroditus, equipped both as a man and a woman, as many people are said to be?
Leaena’s second question is talking, of course, about Hermaphroditus.
And like most myths, the details around the story of Hermaphroditus vary.
In some stories, Hermaphroditus is a boy fused with the nymph Salmacis by the gods, becoming, as Ovid says, “not a man or a woman, but neither, and yet both.”
In others, Hermaphroditus is born as essentially an intersex deity.
Lucian knew about the Hermaphroditus myth, since he talks about them in another of his dialogues. But he seems to have written Leaena as someone who didn’t know the specifics of the myth, just that those like Hermaphroditus are “equipped both as a man and a woman.”
There’s obviously a lot more to say about Hermaphroditus. In fact, there’s an entire video on Hermaphroditus already, on this channel. For more details, check it out.
RELATED: Transgender Mythology
RELATED: The Myths of Hermaphroditus
So, is Megillus like Hermaphroditus?
No, Leaena, I’m all man.
Hermaphroditus, in this regard, represents nature. Not nature as in like, a fertility symbol, but more anatomically.
But that’s not Megillus either. He doesn’t have intersex anatomy.
Question III: Is He Like Teiresias?
“Well, I’ve heard the Boeotian flute girl, Ismenodora, repeating tales she’d heard at home, and telling us how someone at Thebes had turned from woman to man, someone who was also an excellent soothsayer, and was, I think, called Teiresias. That didn’t happen to you, did it?”
I love how much she’s reaching at this point. It’s like, okay well I heard once that somebody told me they heard from this guy that a girl got turned into a guy, or something like that, maybe? Real Herodotus moment here.
Now, I knew at some point we were going to talk about Teiresias on this channel, because their story is full of gender.
Teiresias is one of those mythological characters who shows up all over the place. They’re in Sophocles’ plays Oedipus Rex and Antigone, in Euripides’ Bacchae, in the Odyssey, in Hesiod’s works, and of course, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Like most mythological stories, there are plenty of accounts, and most of them are contradictory, but we’re going to focus on one particular part of Teiresias’ story, for reasons that are about to become pretty obvious.
Teiresias was the son of a shepherd and the nymph Chariclo. At some point, he was out for a walk, where he came upon a pair of snakes doing it. I guess he was a bit of a prude, so he smacked them with his stick. This turned him into a woman. She then went off to live her life, even marrying a man and having children with him.
Seven years later, she was out for a walk in the same area, and found the same two snakes doing it. Depending on who you read, she smacked them again, left them alone, or stomped on them, and whatever it was she did, this turned her back into a man, which is how he lived the rest of his life.
There’s a lot more to dig into with Teiresias – maybe we’ll take a look later.
EDIT: we already did!
RELATED: Transgender Wisdom: The Myths of Teiresias
But the moral of the story is that if you’re having trouble building up the gumption to start your transition, bring a stick with you the next time you go for a walk.
So Leaena’s last idea, if he’s not a man disguised as a woman like Achilles and he’s not intersex like Hermaphroditus, is to wonder if it’s divine intervention.
Did the gods transform Megillus?
And finally, Megillus is clear on the matter.
“I was born a woman like the rest of you, but I have the mind and the desires and everything else of a man.”
Chapter V: And That’s Pretty Clear, Isn’t It?
Even if we recognize it isn’t terribly affirming from a more modern understanding of gender, how could we read Megillus at this point as anything other than a transgender man?
But there are other complications.
When Megillus first meets Leaena at a party, he’s wearing a wig and presenting as a woman. And it’s not just any wig, either – it’s a particularly convincing one. He takes the wig off when the three of them are in bed together, and at that point he reveals his shaved head and starts calling himself a man.
In other words, he’s a lady in the streets, and a man in the sheets.
So, what’s going on here?
As we talked about before, Lucian was a satirist. And the type of characters we see in new comedy are based on stereotypical stock characters, or caricatures of the type of people you’d meet in Athenian society. Leaena and Klonarion both serve as caricatures of gossipy women, for example.
But what about Megillus? Is he a caricature?
For that to be the case, we’d have to look at what he might be a caricature of.
So, let’s do that.
Is He A Caricature Of Lesbians?
That is, the sexuality lesbian, not the island Lesbian.
It’s tempting to look at it that way. After all, in the modern world we do have a stereotype of lesbians as being more masculine – even though that’s obviously far from universal. You might think that’s a cishet stereotype, but it’s true even among queers. The more masculine a woman looks, the more likely one is to assume she’s gay, to the point where even cis femme lesbians are often assumed to be straight girl tourists in Sapphic spaces.
But alright, was that stereotype the case in the ancient world?
To answer this question, we’d have to understand what the general Greco-Roman attitude was toward lesbians. After all, to understand satire, we need to understand the source material satire is satirizing.
You’re not really going to understand what makes Galaxy Quest great if you don’t understand Star Trek, y’know?
So let’s look at the representations we have of lesbians in the ancient world, with a specific eye to trying to piece together some sort of stereotype.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much. Scholar K.J. Dover’s book Greek Homosexuality is around 200 pages long, and the section on gay women fills barely a dozen pages. That tells us just how few sources there are on the subject – and to be fair, K.J. Dover does acknowledge this.
But okay, what do we have to work with?
Plato does mention women who love women in the Symposium, when exploring his absolutely wild theory of how the genders arose, which I’m not going to fully get into here even though it’s a lot of fun to pick through.
But the short version is that originally, humans were sphere shaped. We had four arms, four legs, and two faces on a single head, with four ears. There were also two sets of sex organs, and everything else. The spheres walked upright, and when they ran they did cartwheels.
There were three different types of these spheres – male, female, and androgynous. The male ones were male on both sides, same with the female. But the androgynous ones were male on one side, female on the other.
The spheres angered the gods by trying to conquer them, so the gods punished them by cutting them all in half, which is how we got anatomically modern humans.
That’s why we love each other – we’re seeking to be whole once again. But we still have memory of our original forms.
So, if there were a stereotype of lesbians being masculine, it would make sense for Plato to describe lesbians as having been the ones that came from the androgynous spheres. But the opposite is actually true. He says, quote:
[T]he women who are a section of the women do not care for men, but have female attachments: the female companions are of this sort.
So, women who are half of a female sphere are the ones into other women. They’ve got no masculinity in them at all. So, that one’s out.
We also have descriptions of lady love in Sappho, and I mean I could sit here all day and recite the gayest poetry the ancient Mediterranean has to offer, but then we’d really get off the rails. The point is, nothing seems masculine about Sappho’s love for women. It just seems like sapphic longing, and I guess that’s why we call it sapphic longing, huh?
What else?
We’ve got the poet Alcman as well.
Alcman lived during the 7th century BCE, so roughly contemporary with Sappho, though they almost certainly never encountered each other. That’s because Alcman lived in Sparta.
Now, when we think of Sparta, we think of the highly militaristic, martial, fascist state where if you’re a boy, you’ll grow up to be a soldier, and if you’re a girl, you’ll grow up to marry a soldier who spends most of his time in the barracks fucking other men while you stay home, raise his kids, and work out with the other women in town. After all, two strong parents will have strong children, right? So Sparta didn’t exactly prioritize intellectual pursuits the way the Athenians did. It does seem that Spartan boys were taught to read and write, but they weren’t exactly cranking out the literary hits.
As a result, most of what we know about classical Sparta comes from writings from their contemporaries – mostly Athenians. Alcman is one of the rare exceptions – he’s actually a Spartan writer, though he probably wasn’t born there.
But for the purposes of finding an ancient stereotype of masculine gay women, his descriptions don’t give us much to go on here either.
What else?
Well, we’ve got the poet Martial, who was actually a Roman. He lived in the Roman province Hispania, modern day Spain, and wrote during the first and second centuries CE. He was known for his satirical epigrams, and in particular he had a couple of epigrams that mention a masculine gay woman, or so I’m told, but every copy of his works I find just didn’t translate those sections.
A million years ago I made the very first video on this channel, the introduction to my historical approach here, and one of the reasons for why there’s not that much evidence for queer history is because of deliberate erasure from the historical record, and this is what I’m talking about.
The whole thing is translated into English, except for the dirty bits. Imagine you’re reading through your copy of Martial’s works in translation, and all of a sudden you come upon IPSARVM TRIBADVM TRIBAS, PHILAENI, RECTE, QVAM FVTVIS, VOCAS AMICAM.
What am I supposed to do with that?
I mean, I can do something with that, because I do know a bit of Latin, although I’m pretty rusty. But it turns out I’m going to have to do something about it, because I’ve looked all over the internet, and haven’t found a copy of Martial’s works with those particular sections translated. And I’m not gonna buy a copy, wait a week for it to arrive, and then find out it’s bowdlerized too.
So I guess I’ve gotta do this myself.
There are two of them, both in Book 7. There’s epigram 67, and epigram 70.
It’s been a LONG while since I’ve done any direct Latin translation, and I’m almost certainly going to screw this up, but I’m going to do my best.
*ONE HOUR LATER*
Okay, so here’s what I’ve got. A localization of epigram 70 might read something like this:
Dykiest of the very dykes, Philaenis, it is correct for you to call the girl you f*ck your girlfriend.
Okay, neato.
The word tribas comes from the Greek verb “to rub”, and today it gives us the word tribadism, a more polite word to describe scissoring, in the same way that fellatio is a more polite way to describe sucking c*ck. And uhh okay, awesome.
So I translated epigram 70 before I even looked at epigram 67, and I mean translating one sentence is one thing, but look at this whopper:
PEDICAS PVEROS TRIBAS PHILAENIS ET TENTIGINE SAEVIOR MARITI VNDENAS DOLAT IN DIE PVELLAS. HARPASTO QVOQVE SVBLIGATA LVDIT ET FLAVESCIT HAPHE, GRAVESQVE DRAVCIS HALTERAS FACILI ROTAT LACERTO, ET PVTRI LVTVLENTA DE PALAESTRA VNCTI VERBERE VAPVLAT MAGISTRI: NEC VENAT PRIVS AVT RECVMBIT ANTE QVAN SEPTEM VOMVIT MEROS DEVNCES; AD QVOS FAS SIBI TVNC PVTAT REDIRE, CVM COLOEPHIA SEDECIMCOMEDIT. POST HAEC OMNIA CVM LIVIDINATVR, NON FELLAT (PVTAT HOC PARVM VIRILE), SED PLANE MEDIAS VORAT PVELLAS. DI MENTEM TIBI DENT TVAM, PHILAENI, CVNNVM LINGERE QVAE PVTAS VIRILE
sigh
Anyway, it took me about an hour to translate the first sentence.
Philaenis the dyke f*cks boys in the *ss, and, more ferociously than any husband, rails eleven girls a day.
I’d love to translate the whole thing, because that sounds awesome, but I’m BAD at this, so I started searching again and actually did track down a translation of epigram 67. Here it is, but with my first line preserved because gosh damn it I put too much work into it:
Today on, Great Works Of Ancient Literature
Philaenis the dyke f*cks boys in the *ss, and, more ferociously than any husband, rails eleven girls a day.
With her clothes hoisted up, she also plays ball and, rubbing her body down with sand, from a confident arm swings weights that studs would find heavy. Now, filthy from the dusty palaestra, she takes the beatings of a well oiled gymnastics master.
She doesn’t recline or eat until she’s vomited three litres of wine, and thinks she can carry on this way after wolfing down sixteen meatballs. Then, when she’s horny, she doesn’t s*ck c*cks – not manly enough, she thinks – but greedily devours young girls’ groins. May the gods bring you to your senses, Philaenis, you who believe it manly to lick s**tch!
Both of these are about a woman named Philaenis, who clearly GETS IT.
Unfortunately this opens up YET ANOTHER side path to go down to understand this. I really do try to streamline these videos as much as possible, not only to keep it from getting too off the rails, but also because it’s a lot easier for me. Right now this script is 34 pages long and I’ve still got a lot to do. But there’s so much background knowledge to cover that I really can’t avoid it. I’m writing this stuff not for my fellow classicists, but for my fellow trans people, and most of y’all are probably not both.
Damn it.
Anyway, Philaenis!
We don’t know much about Philaenis. We don’t even know if she was a real person. If she was, her father was named Ocymenes, and she was from Samos, an island south of Lesbos, which was known for its prostitution. And she wrote a famous manual on sex that described a bunch of different positions, which unfortunately doesn’t survive today outside of a couple of fragments. She’s mentioned in several ancient sources, including some early Christian writers who hated her work. Remember Justin Martyr? Yeah he wasn’t a fan. Shocking.
Whatever Justin, go cut off your junk and stop judging me.
Most scholars agree today that she probably wasn’t a real person, but rather a persona. If you were an erotic writer in the ancient world, you might publish your work under the name Philaenis. But whether or not that’s true, she’s definitely not a real person in Martial’s epigrams, she’s a caricature. That’s because Martial was a satirical writer too.
This isn’t a single character, it’s important to mention. Each of these epigrams is self contained, and she shows up in other epigrams too. In one of them, she’s actually dead. But clearly she’s very very manly.
But first of all, Martial was a Roman, and Lucian was a Greek. Yes, he lived during Roman rule of Greece, but they still had their own distinct culture that set them apart from the Romans.
Also, the portrayal of Philaenis is very different from Megillus.
Philaenis bangs nonstop, and Megillus might hire prostitutes, but he’s also married.
Philaenis likes guys and girls, and Megillus is only shown with women.
Philaenis is ravenous and insatiable, and Megillus seems more measured in his sexuality.
Philaenis is always masculine, but Megillus is only so in bed.
So it might be the closest parallel, but it’s still worlds apart.
And it doesn’t negate Plato, or Sappho, or Alcman. It means there’s essentially no consistent stereotype of gay women from what we can tell, let alone one where they’re particularly masculine.
That might have been deliberate, though.
In the book Greek Homosexuality mentioned earlier, author K.J. Dover wonders if we have so few sources on gay women because most of our surviving writers are men, and men felt anxiety around women being into each other. There were, after all, some taboo subjects that satirists didn’t touch. The plague of 430 BCE is one of them, for example, and I think after living through this decade so far we can all understand why that might be the case. Maybe female homosexuality was a taboo as well?
It’s hard to say. But the reality is, other than these few literary examples, and some pottery showing gay women doing their thing, there isn’t much in the way of female homosexuality represented in classical art one way or another. And what is there doesn’t paint a picture of any particular stereotype of gay women at the time.
So I think it’s safe to say we can toss this one out. Megillus was probably not a caricature of a lesbian.
Is He A Caricature Of A Lesbian?
That is, the island Lesbian, not the sexuality lesbian.
This one is actually more likely. The Greeks did have certain stereotypes associated with different cities.
The Spartans, for example, were assumed to be… well, not the sharpest spears in the armoury. Various translators of plays with Spartan characters have tried to reproduce this attitude over the years by playing on modern prejudices, which is uhhhhhhhhh.
Pick up a translation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, and try to guess what sort of accent the Spartan woman Lampito will have to convey that she’s provincial, and less refined. In this one, she’s Scottish, but I’ve seen a Southern US accent used as well. Yikes…
Anyway, the Spartans weren’t stupid. But they also didn’t value things like poetry or rhetoric very highly – they were a society of soldiers. But if Plutarch is to be believed, some of the things they’re reported to have said over the years are pretty clever.
Plutarch, like Lucian, was a Greek who lived during Roman rule of the area. He was born in the year 45 CE – during the reign of the emperor Claudius – was made consul by Trajan, the highest rank in Roman society other than emperor – and died in 120 CE, during the reign of Hadrian. One of his works is a collection of essays, Moralia, and in them he records some of the particularly clever things Spartans have said over the years.
For example, we’ve all seen the movie 300, I’m sure. It’s very dumb in very many ways, but a few of the cleverer lines actually come from Plutarch.
When someone said “because of the arrows of the barbarians it is impossible to see the sun”, the Spartan king Leonidas responds with “Won’t it be nice, then, if we have shade in which to fight them?”
Everybody loves this one, the Persian king Xerxes wrote a message asking the Spartans to lay down their arms – the Persians were known for being fairly merciful to people who submitted to their rule – and Leonidas’ response was the simple “molon labe” – come and take them.
When King Agis III of Sparta was being pestered by somebody who kept asking him who the greatest Spartan was, he replied with “the one most unlike you.”
And this one is my personal favourite – when Philip of Macedon, Alexander’s father, was conquering Greece, he sent an envoy to the Spartans asking them to submit to his rule. After all, he was planning to unite Greece, and then from there invade Persia. But the Spartans would have none of it, which frustrated Philip. After some back and forth, he wrote a letter to them saying “If I invade Laconia (Sparta), I shall turn you out”
And the Spartans’ response?
“If”
Gods, I love it.
What do these have in common? They’re short, punchy, and to the point. That’s where we get the phrase laconic wit from, in fact, from Laconia, or Lakedamonia, the area around Sparta. I love it.
It’s different from the more elaborate Athenian wit we get from Lucian, but it’s also not what you’d expect from a bunch of boneheads banging rocks together.
Anyway, the point is, how the Greeks stereotyped each other wasn’t much different from how some stereotypes work today – perhaps a kernel of truth, but filtered through cultural lenses and generalizations to the point of absurdity.
So, we don’t know where Leaena and Klonarion were from – they lived in Athens, but if they’re hetairai, they might have been from somewhere else. There’s not much to work with there.
But we know Megillus is from Lesbos, and Demonassa is from Corinth – and that’s interesting. Let’s start with Corinth.
Athens and Sparta get most of the historical attention, but Corinth was a very important player in the ancient world as well. It’s right on the Isthmus of Corinth, the only land bridge connecting the Peloponnese with the rest of Greece.
This made it an easily defensible point. We talked a moment ago about the Persian invasion of Greece under Xerxes – after the battle at Thermopylae, where the THIS IS SPARTA guy died, the Persians pushed further. Euboea, Phocis, Boeotia, and even Athens itself fell to the Persians. But the allied Greeks fortified Corinth, which stopped the Persians from advancing any further. From there, they pushed the Persians out of Greece, back to Asia Minor.
The isthmus also made Corinth a very wealthy city. They controlled all land traffic between Athens – itself a very wealthy city – and the Peloponnese. So if you were a trader traveling by land, at some point you’d find yourself passing through Corinth. But they also would have ships drop goods off at their port on the northwestern coast, and transport it by land to the southeastern coast. This meant traders could avoid the treacherous journey all the way around the Peloponnese, so it was well worth the price of admission. There’s a canal there now today, but in the ancient world that was the best they could do.
They even had their own distinct type of columns. You know the columns they had on temples? There are actually three different types. Doric, Ionian, and Corinthian. First, Doric columns – these were used in Sparta, and they’re so Spartan, aren’t they? Functional, simple, nothing unnecessary. Laconic architecture, to fit their laconic wit.
Next, Ionian columns – these were common in Athens, the Greek cities along the coast of Asia Minor, and a lot of the Greek islands. Elegant, balanced, not too elaborate – suitable for a city of navel gazing philosopher NERDS.
But some people really do go out of their way to show off their wealth – rolling up to the club in a matte painted Ferrari, neon purple lights glowing beneath it, a gorgeous model on each arm, several gold rings on each finger each with its own precious jewel in it, logos everywhere you can see them, getting bottle service with a thousand dollar bottle of vodka… if DJ Khaled were a Greek column, he’d be a Corinthian one.
So, Corinthians had a reputation for being wealthy. But they also had a reputation for their sexual proclivities.
Corinth was also the home of a Temple of Aphrodite, where a different type of prostitution than what we looked at earlier went on. This was sacred prostitution.
The Roman geographer Strabo gives us some interesting insight into how this might have worked in Corinth. He tells us, quote:
And the temple of Aphrodite was so rich that it owned more than a thousand temple slaves, courtesans, whom both men and women had dedicated to the goddess. And therefore it was also on account of these women that the city was crowded with people and grew rich; for instance, the ship captains freely squandered their money, and hence the proverb ‘not for every man is the voyage to Corinth’.
– Strabo, Geographia, Book VIII.XX
So not only was Corinth wealthy, but the Corinthian temple prostitutes helped keep wealth in the city by getting visitors – sea captains, in particular – to spend their money there.
Now, you may find arguments that this sort of thing never actually existed. Scholar Stephanie Budin, for example, argues that what we know about it was based around misunderstandings – perhaps deliberate – of either non-sexual religious practices, or ritualistic sex that wasn’t paid for. She believes it might even be a result of cultural slander. That’s worth exploring, but not here, because we’re talking about how the Greeks stereotyped each other.
And from a stereotypical perspective, it’s clear Corinth was a place known for wealth and sex.
That’s Demonassa’s entire role in this piece, isn’t it? She’s wealthy, and she has sex with Leaena along with Megillus. So this explanation might work for her.
What about Megillus? We’ve talked about how Lesbians had a stereotype for being lesbians, but is there anything else about Megillus’ depiction that’s stereotypical of being from Lesbos?
People from Lesbos did also have a reputation for being sexually adventurous. Clearly that’s the case with Megillus and Demonassa as well – they have threesomes with prostitutes, after all. But K.J. Dover suggests that, based on Sappho’s and Alcman’s poems, they were known in the archaic period for being able to make each other orgasm just through touching each other. Seems like a useful skill, huh? But I mean, that kind of doesn’t mesh at all with Megillus, does it? Leaena doesn’t seem terribly satisfied by her experience. So that flies in the face of that theory.
Of course, sometimes writers can start with a stereotype, and then subvert it. This is a common thing in sketch comedy, which is the closest modern analog we have to what Lucian was doing here.
But of course a sketch is pretty compressed, so you have to rely on using stock characters to establish a stereotype for a character, before you flip it on its head. Key And Peele are masters of this.
Take this sketch, for example.
The camera angles, the lighting, the acting, the dramatic music, it’s all evocative of a scene you’ve seen before in a heist movie, even if you can’t think of exactly where. And because it’s familiar, your mind automatically fills in a bunch of the details. We don’t need to know the backstory of these characters for it to be effective. We don’t even need to know their names. We’re still told enough for our minds to fill in the blanks. So when Key’s character describes his big heist plan, you start to realize, along with Peele’s character, that he’s just describing getting a job at a bank, your expectations are subverted. This doesn’t look like the type of guy who would suggest getting a job at a bank, but the fact that we eventually figure out that that’s what he’s doing, our reaction mirrors Peele’s. They subvert what we expect from that scene, and that’s one of the reasons why it’s funny.
But it only works because we’re given a lot of information for it to flip around.
Are we given the same with Megillus? Not really. But it’s also difficult to suss out what a stereotype of someone from Lesbos might be in the first place. They were known for poetry – two of the Nine Lyric Poets – Sappho and Alcaeus – were from Lesbos. This was a group of nine poets that the scholars in Alexandria thought were great. Alcman was also in that group.
But Megillus isn’t a poet.
They were – and still are – also known for wine. But although they were at a drinking party, nobody ever mentions the word “wine” at any point. The Greeks’ drink of choice was wine, so you might say it’s implied that’s what they were drinking, but that still doesn’t give us anything from the perspective of painting Megillus as a Lesbos stereotype.
We could say that the fact that he’s said to be from Lesbos, but really doesn’t display any traits of somebody from Lesbos, is part of the joke. But Lucian could have done that without making him a man.
So even if he is a subversion of a caricature of someone from Lesbos, I don’t think that’s the whole story.
Is He A Caricature Of A Man?
“Okay, you’re lesbians, but like, which one of you is the man?”
Megillus, clearly. He says so himself. But men were expected to be the dominant sexual partner, both in Greek and Roman society.
But is he a caricature? This is difficult to say.
He does display aspects of masculinity – he’s got a shaved head, calls himself a man, and he likes girls. Not that the last part is necessarily masculine, mind you. But those aspects don’t paint any sort of caricature, not really. There’s nothing in particular there to satirize.
In fact, Philaenis seems much more of a caricature of masculinity than Megillus does.
There’s just not a whole lot to say about this one, otherwise.
Chapter VI: So, What Is He?
Unlike a lot of other ancient literature that deals with hetairai, Lucian gets into their personal lives more. Dialogues Of The Courtesans shows the nastier side of the lives of hetairai in some ways. In Dialogue VI, the courtesan is an unwilling participant, forced into the trade after the death of her father. In Dialogue II and XII, the courtesans argue over perceived infidelity. In Dialogue VII, the courtesan catches feelings for one of her clients and keeps him around despite him not paying her anything. And in Dialogue V, Leaena is clearly a reluctant participant in a threesome with Megillus and Demonassa.
But AGAIN, Lucian could have accomplished all of that without making Megillus a man.
It’s also possible that Lucian, being a man in a heavily patriarchal society, would have known nothing about how women had sex with each other, so he had to make it up. And he might have assumed that a man had to be involved somehow, because how could there be sex if there’s no man? Remember, in Greek, sex was a thing you did, or a thing that was done to you. So how does that work if you’re both the receiving partner? So he made Megillus a man in bed, but a woman in public life. So perhaps the whole thing was made up just to make Leaena feel uncomfortable.
But even that doesn’t work, because Megillus doesn’t act like a top the entire time. Some of the word choices in the original Greek imply that Megillus sometimes takes a passive role in relation to Demonassa.
Another argument is that it’s a reference to philosophical dialogues – notably, Plato’s Symposium.
Usually, literary dialogues in the ancient world centre the lives of people in power. Plato’s Symposium is a dialogue between upper class Athenian citizens at a dinner party. Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae has a similar setting.
Xenophon’s Hiero is a conversation between the tyrant of Syracuse and a lyric poet, where he says the life of a ruler is no better than that of a commoner. And so on.
But Dialogues Of The Courtesans – well, it’s in the name isn’t it?
At one point, Klonarion refers to Megillus as a hetairistria – έτάίρίστρίά – and that word appears nowhere else before this, except in Plato’s Symposium where Aristophanes is describing the sphere-people we talked about earlier.
And in another of Plato’s works – Laws – there’s a character named Megillus, a Spartan. In that text, homosexuality is portrayed as unnatural, as something Spartans did – not good Athenians (which, lol). And his shaved head and physical fitness might have conjured images of Spartans as well. This ties Megillus into a broader literary tradition, even if there are no direct analogues before him.
As you can see, it’s difficult to come to a satisfying conclusion on this whole thing. There’s a reason why more ink has been spilled on Dialogue V than any of the other dialogues. It’s difficult to suss out what exactly Lucian was getting at here.
Chapter VII: So, What Can Megillus Tell Us About Transgender History
It’s tempting to imagine Lucian wrote this dialogue based on an actual encounter a courtesan described to him, and that Megillus was a description of an actual person, a person we might describe today as a historical transgender man, or at least a gender fluid person.
It’s tempting. But while we don’t have any evidence to disprove this, we also don’t really have any evidence to support it either.
But what we can use, kind of, is euhemerism.
We talked about euhemerism in the video on Hermaphroditus, but as a quick refresher, it’s a lens through which to view mythology that assumes it’s inspired by a true story that’s been told, retold, embellished, and exaggerated across the ages.
In the case of Hermaphroditus, we took the approach that their myths suggested the existence of intersex people in the ancient world as well, and used that as a jumping off point to explore that possibility.
Can we use the same approach with Megillus?
Sort of.
Euhemerism is a lens to use to analyze mythology, and Dialogues Of The Courtesans references mythology, sure, but it’s not mythology itself. Euhemerism relies on that centuries-long game of broken telephone to give us the stories we get now. The Trojan War, for example, was a real war – the city of Troy was destroyed, and we know there were Greeks in the battle because we found some Greek weapons there. They may even have been somebody named Akhilles present. But that doesn’t mean everything we read about in The Iliad is true. It was exaggerated over and over across the centuries.
With Dialogues Of The Courtesans, we don’t have that. Mythology arises in eras where literacy is at a minimum, and stories are passed down through oral traditions. But Lucian was a writer, not an oral poet.
That said, it’s easy to imagine Lucian speaking with hetairai to get an idea of some of their stories as inspiration for Dialogues Of The Courtesans.
When I wrote my first novel, The Bottom Line, the plot revolves around construction workers on a high rise building. And believe it or not, in a past life, I did do home renovations professionally, but that’s not exactly building high rises. So when fleshing out the characters, I made sure to have several conversations with high rise construction workers along the way. That makes for a better book, right?
By the way, The Bottom Line is being published in 2024 through Vraeyda Literary. Link in the description if you’d like to preorder a copy, I’m really excited about it coming out.
Anyway, I can imagine Lucian did the same.
Is that based on evidence? Not necessarily. But as we’ve already covered, exhaustively, extensively, it’s difficult to come to a satisfying conclusion about what Lucian was getting at.
What you get from these videos is essentially my own research process. I don’t always know what I’m getting into, but I start from the perspective of being open to whatever I find. I have a long list of topics I’d like to research, but I don’t start with a conclusion.
I started this video because Dialogue V looks pretty transy. It’s easy to just take what we read at face value, but unless we dig deeper, we aren’t really doing critical analysis. That’s the right wing approach to research – to come to a conclusion, and then look for evidence to support it. Instead, we want to look at the evidence, and come to whatever conclusion it leads us to.
That’s what we did with the Elagabalus video. I remember hearing about the transy bits of Elagabalus’ story back in my undergrad, but not the details. And although I’d love to have been able to dig into the material and come back to say hey! Rome had a transgender emperor! The reality just isn’t that – not definitively. And that’s probably for the best, since Elagabalus was, if we believe the primary sources, a terrible person.
So what conclusion can we take from here? Is this transgender history?
Strictly speaking, no. Lucian may, conceivably, have based the character of Megillus on a real person, but if he did, there’s no evidence that the Megillus in Dialogue V is Lucian reporting on any true event.
No, this is literature.
But literature doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s reflective of the society in which it was created. Whether it’s direct satire of current events like old comedy, or a lampooning of daily life more in line with new comedy, it still represents reality, even if that reality is distorted through the lens of fiction.
The Greeks, too, lived in a society.
So what can we, as modern trans people, take away from Lucian’s Dialogue V?
To start, it’s self evident that the Greeks had a broader understanding of gender than the simple “biology is destiny” binary. Lucian provides four different examples of that – Megillus, plus the three mythological references. Whether it’s through circumstance, genetics, divine intervention, or pulling a wig off your head, that idea was clearly there.
It’s also clear that existing outside the binary wasn’t necessarily viewed as a bad thing. Akhilles and Teiresias are highly regarded figures. They’re not ridiculed for having taken a woman’s role at one point. And Hermaphroditus had temples built to honour them – they were quite literally worshipped.
Dionysus, as well, is considered a gender fluid figure – sort of the ancient equivalent of a femboy. And Leaena ends Dialogue V by invoking Aphrodite Ourania in saying she won’t tell about their sex life. Aphrodite Ourania is an aspect of Aphrodite specifically associated with her birth from Ouranos’ castrated nads on the island of Cyprus – and there’s a centuries-long tradition of worship of a transgender Aphrodite on that island. More on that in a future video, which I’ve been working on for a long long time. The script is already twice as long as this one and it’s nowhere near done.
*Sigh*
So while Megillus may or may not have been a real guy, gender fluidity was clearly still a thing in ancient Greece. In some cases, perhaps, it was shunned, but not as a rule – not necessarily.
That’s not to imply ancient Greece was a paradise for gender nonconforming people, but nor was it necessarily the hellscape ‘phobes today want to make it out to be.
Because history without trans people has never existed, and so long as humanity endures, it never will.
Ancient Sources Used:
►“Greek Lyric, Volume II: Anacreon, Anacreontea, Choral Lyric from Olympus to Alcman”. Edited and translated by David A. Campbell. Loeb Classical Library 143. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
►Aristophanes. “The Acharnians. The Clouds. Lysistrata”. Translated with an introduction by Alan H. Sommerstein. Markham, Penguin Books Canada, 1973.
►Lucian of Samosata. “Dialogues of the Dead. Dialogues of the Sea-Gods. Dialogues of the Gods. Dialogues of the Courtesans”. Translated by M. D. MacLeod. Loeb Classical Library 431. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961.
►Ovid. “Metamorphoses”. Translated by Rolfe Humphries. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1955.
►Plato. “Symposium”. Translated by Benjamin Jowett, revised by Hayden Pelliccia. New York, Random House, 1996.
►Plutarch. “Moralia, Volume III: Sayings of Kings and Commanders. Sayings of Romans. Sayings of Spartans. The Ancient Customs of the Spartans. Sayings of Spartan Women. Bravery of Women”. Translated by Frank Cole Babbitt. Loeb Classical Library 245. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931.
►Sappho. “Stung with Love: Poems And Fragments”. Translated by Aaron Poochigan. Toronto, Penguin Classics, 2009.
►Statius. “Thebaid, Volume II: Thebaid: Books 8-12. Achilleid”. Edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey. Loeb Classical Library 498. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
►Strabo. “Geography, Volume VIII: Book 17. General Index”. Translated by Horace Leonard Jones. Loeb Classical Library 267. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932.
►Xenophon. “On Revenues”. Translated by Henry Graham Dakyns. 2008.
Modern Sources Used:
►AULT, BRADLEY A. “Building Z in the Athenian Kerameikos: House, Tavern, Inn, Brothel?” Houses of Ill Repute: The Archaeology of Brothels, Houses, and Taverns in the Greek World, edited by ALLISON GLAZEBROOK and BARBARA TSAKIRGIS, University of Pennsylvania Press (2016): 75–102. JSTOR.
►Bissa, Errietta M. A. “Man, Woman or Myth? Gender-bending In Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans”. Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici 70 (2013): 79-100.
►Boehringer, Sandra. “Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome”. Translated by Anna Prager. New York, Routledge, 2021.
►Blondell, Ruby, and Sandra Boehringer. “Revenge of the Hetairistria: The Reception of Plato’s Symposium in Lucian’s Fifth Dialogue of the Courtesans”. Arethusa vol. 47, no. 2 (2014): 231-264. JSTOR.
►Budin, Stephanie Lynn. “The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity”. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
►Cuchet, Violaine Sebillote. “Women as Wool-Workers and Sex-Workers in Athens”. Translated by John Dillon. Clio 38 (2013).
►Dover, Kenneth James. “Greek Homosexuality”. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1989.
►Johns, Catherine. “Sex Or Symbol? Erotic Images of Greece And Rome”. London, British Museum Publications Ltd, 1982.
►Pickthorne, Craig. “Living Wage Week 2022”. Ontario Living Wage Network, 2023.
►Shreve-Price, Sharada Sue. “Complicated Courtesans: Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans”. PhD dissertation, University of Iowa, 2014.
