This brings us near the conclusion of my mini-series on classical Roman sexuality and the bits and scraps it tells us about relationships between women. (Although I think I'll add another of my occasional primary source entries, with Iamblichos' Babylonaika and it's story of Berenike and Mesopotamia.) If you like the challenge of trying to reconstruct possible social systems from fragments, then there's both enough material to work from and enough empty canvas to paint on. But if you want a clear and unambiguous picture of the types of stories there might be to tell about women loving women in ancient Rome, then you'll be disappointed. This month's podcast tackled the question of trying to make sense of what we do know. But the largest challenge to our imagination is the very different conceptual framework the Romans were operating with. And even more so, the fact that so much of what we "know" has been strongly filtered through the attitudes and opinions of the elite male citizen class, who carefully constructed the sexual hierarchy with themselves at the top. Given those historic constraints, some may feel that there are no positive f/f stories to be told in this setting. I think that's not true, but I also think that we have to adjust our idea of "positive". Others may feel that with so little concrete knowledge about relations between women, we can invent what we like and it will be just as likely to be true as actual history. I think that, too, is not true. A modern person could not easily have invented the sexual system that applied to Roman men based purely on imagination. And we have a great deal of evidence for that system.
One of the historic novels kicking around in my files is one set in the 1st century CE, taking place in Rome and Brittania. Back 30 years ago, I actually sent it out of submission a few times. These days, I'm glad it didn't sell back then, because I have some far more interesting ideas of how to tell that story, who my characters are, and how they move through the world. (For example, I've decided that my Roman protagonist will be from an elite Egyptian family, to draw on the evidence and traditions we can find for that context.) I want to take up the challenge to find a way to tell a story that is both true to its times and emotionally satisfying to me personally. Like many of the historic stories I want to tell, it won't be a story about women who understood themselves to be part of a "lesbian identity". But it will be a story about women who exist within a cultural context of other women like themselves...whatever that means to them. And I think it will be a lot more fun to tell the story that's true to history, even with all the limitations.
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