Good Sex at Home in Ancient Rome

January 18, 1987
Good Sex at Home in Ancient Rome
By JOHN BOSWELL

THE CARE OF THE SELF
Volume Three of The History of Sexuality.
By Michel Foucault. Translated by Robert Hurley.

FOUCAULT
A Critical Reader Edited by David Couzens Hoy.

he Care of the Self'' is presumably the last whole work from Michel Foucault's hand to appear in English, although the remaining volume of his ''History of Sexuality,'' unfinished at his death, may yet be brought out in both French and English. This is why ''Foucault: A Critical Reader'' can bill itself as ''the first major assessment'': edited by David Couzens Hoy, who teaches philosophy at the University of California at Santa Cruz, it is the first collection of essays based on the entire extant corpus of Foucault's work - including interviews in the press, a laudable innovation in scholarly research techniques, especially in this context.
Although Mr. Hoy's ''Critical Reader'' does not break much new ground, his introduction and 13 essays by scholars in fields ranging from philosophy to sociology do offer a good survey of the many epistemological controversies and approaches Foucault inspired or exacerbated. Some of the contributors were friends who agreed with Foucault; some were critics, who here continue long-standing opposition. The collection will enable long-time Foucault readers to condense and organize some of their thoughts and will help the uninitiated to appreciate the evolution of and context for difficult works like ''The Care of the Self.'' Ultimately, however, the latter, adequately translated by Robert Hurley, may be a better introduction (and memorial) to the perplexities of Foucault's extraordinary genius than any critical assessment.
Initially, the reader of the third volume of ''The History of Sexuality'' will feel more at home in its social landscape than he did in those of the earlier volumes of the series. The culture of imperial Rome in the first centuries of the Christian era appears, through Foucault's eyes, almost uncannily familiar. Its population, like that of the industrial West in the 1980's, is obsessed with personal health and the care of the body. Pop medical authorities cater to this preoccupation by providing guides to diet, exercise, sex and regimen that seem surprisingly modern - down to such fine points as the recommendation to eat a lot of bran.
Unlike the disconcerting Greeks, whose philosophy is so provocative and whose domestic arrangements -with their cloistered wives and inexplicable penchant for homosexuality - seem so bizarre and alien, the Romans pose few ethical problems, and they idealize conjugal union and nuclear families as the norm of erotic fulfillment. (The problem presented by ''boys'' does not even appear in the book until the end, by which point its difficulties are easily contained and compartmentalized in Foucault's schema.) This world and its concept of sexuality are even introduced through the discussion of imperial manuals of dream analysis - a stunning parallel to Freudian erotic-dream analysis, which one might have thought uniquely modern.
The book's central argument is that Rome represented and effected a transition between the sexuality of the ancient world (Greece, discussed in the previous volume) and that of Christian Europe. In the former, sexual ethics and politics were organized around axes of social power and domination, and understandable largely in terms of hierarchical systems of interpersonal relation. Romans, by contrast, evince a more solipsistic focus. The issue for them is the self rather than the household or city or the demands of philosophy: how to employ sexuality so as to maximize the self's health, well-being, happiness. There are enough hints here about the unpublished fourth volume on early Christianity that one can reasonably infer its thesis: this preoccupation with the well-being of the self becomes the basis for a Christian ethics in which the salvation of the individual soul is the fulcrum of moral activity and thought; Roman advice about how to optimize health and happiness is transformed into absolute rules about how to behave to attain salvation.
This is an ingenious, if not original, formulation, and there is much to it. ''The Care of the Self'' is quite accurate in depicting a greater emphasis on conjugal eros and affection in imperial Rome than there had been in Europe before or would be long after (under Christian influence eros would hardly be allowed in marriage at all); and Foucault rightly affirms recent arguments by the French historian Paul Veyne and others that the apparent disjunction between Roman hedonism and Christian asceticism is an illusion.
''The Care of the Self'' shares with the writings on which it draws the characteristic of being carefully constructed, exquisitely reasoned and internally cogent, but oblivious of and irrelevant to the ordinary human beings whose sexuality it purportedly treats. Apart from a reference to Pliny and a few others, its analysis is based entirely on learned writings by specialists in two fields, medicine and philosophy: the dream book of Artemidorus; medical texts of Galen, Aurelianus and Oribasius (who? even classicists might ask); philosophical writings of Epictetus, Musonius Rufus, and Plutarch; and the dialogue on love dubiously attributed to Lucian. It is ironic that this arcane and bloodless approach to sexuality should be adopted by the writer who so brilliantly persuaded his readers in the past that ''what we take to be rational, the bearer of truth, is rooted in domination, subjugation, the relationship of forces - in a word, power,'' as Arnold I. Davidson, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, puts it in his essay in ''A Critical Reader.''
One could perhaps make sense of this if Foucault argued that these authors represent the ruling classes, and that the socially powerful through their discourse and articulations shaped the sexual attitudes and experiences of the rest of the population; or that the particular texts chosen themselves reflected or determined some reality. But in fact no such argument is made, and at several points Foucault notes in passing that his texts are not even representative. This is true: despite its ostensible parallel to Freud, for example, Artemidorus' dream book had no influence either on the sexuality of the age or on subsequent discourse about it. The interpretation of dreams was a recondite specialty, about as influential as urology journals today.
To argue that this is the result of Foucault's intention to write intellectual history misses the point, as does the historian Mark Poster's observation, in his essay ''Foucault and the Tyranny of Greece,'' that it results from the ''brilliant manoeuvre'' of focusing not on general codes of conduct but on the ways in which sex was ''a problem for the individual in his or her effort to lead a moral life.'' In earlier works (for example, ''Discipline and Punish'') Foucault showed quite convincingly how the social manipulation of ideas and language affected individual lives. Here he offers no indication -not even his own conviction, much less evidence - that the trends he discusses affected either the society at large or any individuals other than the writers.
Is this then a ''genealogy'' of modern texts on sexuality? An ''archeology'' not of human sexuality but of writing about human sexuality? It would be hard to pin down, over the span of his writings, what Foucault meant by these characteristic and seminal terms. Most of the essays in the ''Critical Reader'' attempt to do so at some point; Ian Hacking (of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Victoria College, University of Toronto) and Barry Smart (of the Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield) make it the focus of their articles, and Mr. Poster addresses it specifically in the context of history, all without a clear resolution - doubtless in part because Foucault's own meanings for them evolved over time. But ''The Care of the Self'' could hardly represent either, in any intelligible sense. The almost total absence of a female perspective in a study of human sexuality creates such a profound distortion that the subject becomes effectively incomprehensible, even if masculine myopia makes it difficult to recognize this. THE relationship between the reality of conjugal unions and both the Greek and the Roman power elite's discourse about them - cause? effect? parallel? tangent? - would have constituted a splendid subject for the kind of analysis of power and language at which Foucault was better than almost any other modern writer. But the opportunity is forsaken, as is the chance to analyze the relationship of taboo, cultural fear and biological necessity to learned philosophical and medical thought. I kept hoping that after credulously repeating the elaborate justifications and rationalizations of Hellenistic philosophers and doctors about medical and philosophical reasons for not having intercourse naked or during menstruation or in daylight, Foucault would note that these same taboos occur in many other cultures without such intellectual rationales, and that this raises interesting questions about cause and effect. But no: the rationales are simply reported, discussed and enshrined as if they sprang Minerva-like from the minds of philosophers, and the docile population, moved by their evident veracity, adopted them.
This is the more disappointing because, in the few places where Foucault chooses to address the broader context, he does so brilliantly (that is, in the very general and brief remarks on politics in Part Three, Chapter Two, or on the public aspects of marriage in Part Five, Chapter One). It would not be fair, indeed, to suggest that Foucault's own understanding of the sexuality of the period was based exclusively on the texts he discusses: he read widely and rarely makes an error of fact. But this hardly helps the reader to understand what sort of ''archeology'' is offered in a work treating ''human sexuality'' on the basis of a half-dozen specialized texts written by men about how men should organize their conjugal lives to maximize their happiness.
Two explanations occur to me. By canonizing these texts as a kind of ''patristics'' (both a sacred literature and a statement of the authority conferred by age and gender) of human sexuality, Foucault may have been making a wry comment on truth as a scholarly artifact; or the vastness and complexity of sexuality in Rome may have seemed to him not reducible to comprehensive treatment, so he simply excerpted and selected texts to make the points he considered important without even trying to explain their context. The two are not incompatible, and either or both would constitute a worthy epistemological riddle from the author of so many previous challenges to the way we understand thought, language, history and their interaction.
John Boswell, who teaches European history at Yale University, is the author of ''Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality.''
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