Roman provincial sexualities: Constructing the body,sexuality,and gender through erotic lamp art

Introduction

In the Roman Empire gender and sexuality were contingent upon specific economies of representation, such as desire, symbols, and language. Roman society constructed sexualities that were partly defined by contrast with identifiable deviations from the established socio-sexual norms (e.g. pathic male and old woman). Roman sexuality has been widely understood through a penetration model in which sexuality is grounded in a binary hierarchy and connected to ideas of power (Blondell and Ormand, 2015; Richlin, 1992). As such, active/passive sexual roles structured the production of selfhood, gender asymmetry, and larger socio-political dynamics. Foucault’s model has been contested on the grounds of being phallocentric, over-deterministic, and reductive because it focuses on frames of legibility (Davidson, 2007; Kotrosits, 2018). Recent scholarship also stresses that while the Romans were preoccupied with the issue of who penetrated whom, they also saw agency as an important aspect of the sexual act (Kamen and Levin-Richardson, 2015, 2014; Levin-Richardson, 2013). Using an emic model based on Latin grammar, this research calls for revision of the penetration model namely through disassociation of active/passive behaviour from the desire to penetrate or be penetrated. These debates about Roman sexuality are based on limited geographical and material scope as they arrive from the studies of textual and visual evidence from Rome and its vicinity. Given that sexuality, as a mechanism of imperialism, is crucial for our understanding of both the nuance of power relations in colonial situations and the self-formation of those subject to empire (Voss, 2015; Voss and Casella, 2012), archaeologists have recently begun to also address questions concerning sexualities in the Roman provinces (e.g. Ivleva and Collins, 2020; Morelli, 2009).

In this paper I want to build on this research and discuss sexualities in the Roman provincial territories by means of terracotta lamps with images of sexual acts and erotic pursuits. By the Augustan period, mould-making became the dominant method for terracotta lamp and fine tableware manufacture. This technological innovation opened the possibility for lamps to be decorated with a variety of figural, including sexual, disc-reliefs (Bailey, 1988). Lamps were easily replicated using premade clay moulds fashioned directly from other lamps, or wooden and clay master models. Because moulds were reusable, lamps with the same disc-reliefs were produced time and again. Following the Roman imperial expansion and the rapid increase in connectivity, by the 1st century CE the terracotta lamp industry had developed into a complex network in which lamps were produced in the provinces and were available throughout the empire (Bailey, 1987; Huld-Zetsche, 2014; Harris, 1980). The occurrence of lamps with different figural subjects across a range of contexts, including domestic (Frecer, 2015), funerary (Goethert-Polaschek, 1985), and religious (Slane, 1990), suggests that lamps were multifunctional and that lamps’ context of use was not always determined by disc-iconographies (cf. Stewart, 2003: 195–207). Though the chief characteristic of lamps’ sexual repertoire is visual sameness, the distribution of lamps with sexual disc-reliefs varies across and during the empire. In Pannonia, for instance, these objects are entirely absent. Elsewhere, during the 1st century CE, they typically make up 3.10%–5.95% of the total lamp assemblage (Eckardt, 2002: 127–129; Vucetic, 2014: 151). Looking at the empire as a whole, sexual disc-reliefs disappear from the Latin-speaking regions after the 2nd century CE and in the Greek sites they continue until the mid-5th century CE (Appendix, Supplemental Tables 2, 3).

Sexual disc-reliefs are remarkably understudied. Because of their replicability, lamps and their figural art have traditionally been seen as less valuable than unique objects of art. Scholarship has also been conditioned by traditional assumptions that lamps with erotica were used for titillation (Miles and Norwich, 1997: 125) or as illustrated sex manuals (Brendel, 1970: 63–69). Textual evidence, however, points to complex links between lamps, artificial light, and eroticism in the Greco-Roman cultural imagination. In Hellenistic and Roman love poems, lamps are witnesses to lustful encounters and erotic promises which they illuminate at night (Bielfeldt, 2014; Kanellou, 2013). Pliny (Nat. 34.11–13) also relates how the destabilising agency of candelabra seduced the elite woman Gegania to lust after her hunchback slave Clessipus, ultimately transforming the couple’s socio-sexual dynamic. Likewise, in Petronius’ Satyricon (75.10–11), the former slave Trimalchio discloses that he used lamp oil to anoint his lips in the hope that he would grow a beard sooner and thus de-eroticise his youthful face. In this anecdote of an intimate physical encounter between slave and object, as Bielfeldt (2018: 425–427) compellingly argues, the lamp is animated into a bodily entity that aids Trimalchio in attaining his freedom.

In the Roman world, lamps were thus not mere material things but social mediators with anthropomorphic qualities and multiple cultural lives. They had a capacity to manipulate senses, affect emotions and realities, and transform experiences (Hamilakis, 2014: 75–80). Lamps were crucial for the illumination of night-time events and required constant attention: they were carried, emptied, filled, cleaned, and examined. Bronze lamps and anthropomorphic lampstands also functioned as display objects appreciated for their aesthetics. The interplay of flickering light produced by lamps and their figural disc-reliefs would have had emotive effects and stimulated the beholders’ eye and imagination. Through these tactile and optical experiences, lamps produced phenomenological effects on the beholder. The power of lamps rests in their materiality and viewers’ engagement with their disc-reliefs within social contexts (Gell, 1998). Replication helped sexual disc-reliefs to communicate a unified set of symbols in the range of settings in which lamps were used. The affordability and portability of lamps helped these messages reach large audiences across vast geographical areas. Because people bought these objects by selecting from a range of available lamps, this ‘off-the-shelf’ sexual art can be used to address questions of identity and agency in the communities within which this imagery was circulating.

Using the human body as a chief focus, I explore how replicated sexual art mediated sexual ideology in the Roman provinces. I look at 684 lamps with sexual disc-reliefs from 11 sites, taken as representatives of Latin- and Greek-speaking parts of the empire (Appendix, Supplemental Table 1). The lamps were systematically gathered through fieldwork and lamp catalogues: Trier (Goethert-Polaschek, 1985), Vindonissa (Leibundgut, 1977), Carthage (Deneauve, 1969), the Athenian Agora (Perlzweig, 1961), Kerameikos (Böttger, 2002), Corinth (Broneer, 1930), Pergamum (Heimerl, 2001), Salamis (Oziol, 1977), and Berenice (Benghazi) (Bailey, 1985). The Lyon data was obtained from Arnaud Galliegue. The Ephesus lamps were gathered via excavation reports and fieldwork.

The body, materiality, and agency

The body, as a historically contingent and culturally negotiated form, is a locus of subjective experiences and knowledge (Bordo, 2004; Moon, 2008). It is constructed through the process of embodiment in which a subject both has and becomes their body. In this context, there is a dialectic relationship between how the body is materially produced and the way the body is understood and experienced within a culture. The body is central to the constitution of personhood and an individual’s place within society.

Queer and post-humanist feminist ideas about the body, gender, and sexuality have been particularly profitable for Classical scholarship (Barrow, 2018; Surtees and Dyer, 2020). Butler (1990: 192) famously asserts that ‘[g]ender is […] a “doing” rather than a “being”’ and that the body materialises through repetitive bodily acts (performance). Performative citations are informed by established gender and sexuality norms (Butler, 1993: 27–55) and are marked by the dimension of abjection: ‘I’m this, not that’. In Kristeva’s (1982) terms, the abject is a threat to the self that has the potential to mislead, corrupt, and disrupt established order. Visual culture, along with other social and institutional discourses, participates in the materialisation of the body. Because the body is a central means for establishing gender, the differences between representations of bodies can be linked to different social categorisations of gender in the societies in which images were created and looked at. Bodies shown in visual records are, however, not direct representations of their living counterparts. Images of bodies which display physical attributes, gestures, and interactions reveal the cultural climate in which they are produced. They affect societal understandings of certain ways of being within a given culture. The bodily performances shown in art are also enacted within a society that provides a cultural framework for making both images and actions meaningful. Representations of different kinds of bodies transmit social information, materialise ideologies, and have a capacity to both reinforce and contest power relations and social order (Joyce, 2008; Meskell and Joyce, 2003; Schmidt and Voss, 2000).

Posthumanist feminists recognise gender as performative and add that anatomy, physiology, and other human and non-human materialising forces regulate desire and produce bodies, gender, and subjectivities (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013). The body is always-becoming-matter which undergoes change through new entanglements. The body is also shaped differently depending on how it is captured semiotically. For the study of sexuality and gender through the archaeological record, these queer and new materialist ideas are useful because they allow us to ask how discourses materialise the body, how bodies relate, how they affect, and how they are affected.

These perspectives also bring into focus the agentiality of the gaze in the production of embodied knowledge. The gaze has a capacity to materialise what it embraces: which bodies have which meanings, which bodies are deprived of meaning, and how bodies (and meanings) materialise (Haraway, 1988: 581–585). As a Roman social practice, the gaze was central to both the emotional experience of viewing and the interpretation of meaning in art (Elsner, 1995; Hölscher, 2018). The intimate relationship between sight and desire in the Graeco-Roman world also points to the eroticised relationship between the desiring subject and desired visual object (Squire, 2016). In Roman culture the gaze was thus, in Elsner’s (2007) terms, both a unifier and a divider of self and the world. The act of viewing brings together the agency of the disc-reliefs and the narrative-making on the beholder’s part (Elsner, 2020). The varied iconographic configurations of replicated sexual disc-reliefs emphasise the similarly varied visual components of desire and sexuality, simultaneously revealing and eroticising the gaze. It is through these optical regimes that lamp-images of copulating bodies invited subjectivity, confronted desires, and shaped experience.

By focusing on the body, materiality, and agency, we can move beyond the aesthetic qualities of the lamps’ sexual art to ask what this imagery communicated and how it shaped ideas about sexuality. In the following pages, I initially discuss representational trends and look at how these images use semantic combinations of bodies and actions to construct sexual discourse. Visual sameness allowed lamps to construct relatively coherent ideas about sexuality throughout the globalising empire. Provincial communities, through their selection of lamps, redefined this sexual discourse locally. It is through this tension between the visual sameness and provincial selection of lamps that I explore how sexuality was mediated in Roman provinces. I look at how sexual disc-reliefs generate meanings through idealised and dwarf symplegmata in the Latin locales and through portrayals of idealised symplegmata, mythological rapes, and bestiality in the Greek East. Rather than providing a comprehensive account, my goal is to use key examples to sketch how sexuality was culturally produced through one type of visual record in Roman colonial situations.

Visual sameness in sexual disc-reliefs

Sexual disc-reliefs can be grouped into human acts and mythological pursuits (Figure 1). Human symplegmata portray idealised and dwarf bodies in a range of coital positions and acts. Disc-reliefs mainly depict human male-female and human-animal sexual couplings. Mythological themes show Jupiter’s lustful abductions (Leda, Europa, and Ganymede) and, less frequently, hybrids’ sexual aggression: Centaur & Maenad and Satyr & Nymph. Images abide by a set of representational conventions. All disc-reliefs have distinct variations in motif configuration which occur in representational series (themes) associated with specific periods and locales. Some themes, such as rear entry symplegma, circulated widely. Others had more localised distribution: dwarf symplegma is strongly associated with Latin-speaking sites, woman-equine symplegma is prominent in the Greek sites except Berenice, and man-donkey symplegma occurs only in Athens during the 3rd century (Appendix, Supplemental Tables 4–6).OPEN IN VIEWER

Variability within a sexual theme, achieved through the manipulation of elements, produces different portrayals of bodies, actions, and gaze. Importantly, each variation incorporates motifs that are repeated elsewhere in the lamps’ sexual repertoire. Images are thus bound by a number of shared and consistent elements which form the basis of each thematic structure. The established schemata allow for bodies to be de-individualised and sexual performances typified. Besides a bed, the absence of any reference to surroundings places semantic importance on bodies, bodily arrangements, and actions. Specific but limited variations in postures and gestures assist in the visual articulation of boundaries of ideal and non-ideal behaviours. The power of lamp disc-reliefs, it can be suggested, lies in their capacity to render complex ideas about sexuality into recognisable, formulaic images in which specific bodies and actions emerge as types of gendered expression in the context of sexual performances. The simplicity and constancy of the schemata allows these images to retain validity in the variety of settings in which lamps were used. Visual replication also allowed their meanings to be communicated across large geographical areas. Following Hölscher (1987), we can suggest that sexual disc-reliefs rely on a unified system of representation in which semantic combination of elements generates meaning. Disc-reliefs are thus best understood relationally, within the logic of their own figurative systems and the larger Roman visual koine to which they belonged. In the subsequent pages, I discuss how repeated combinations of key elements generated sexual ideology across the lamp repertoire.

Constructing sexuality through formulaic representations

Sexual disc-reliefs were developed during the Early Imperial period when a new style of Roman erotic art also emerged. Lamp-makers borrow style and motif arrangements from sexual art that appear on other media such as fine tableware, silverware, and wall paintings. Through this process, sexual imagery became a part of the larger unified visual programme which, as Zanker (1990) demonstrates, played a role in communication of the Augustan culture of new morality (27 BCE–14 CE). The developed lamps’ sexual repertoire is relatively limited and homogenous. Disc-reliefs almost uniformly promote male-to-female genital sex, and occasionally possible anal sex (bestiality excluded). Across the gathered corpus, two lamps show fellatio, two depict threesomes, and one shows male-to-male sex (Appendix, Supplemental Table 7). The consistent privileging of male-to-female sex potentially suggests proscription of same-sex desires, or at least their physical expression. This representational trend is prevalent across other media. There are exceptions, but in general they constitute a small proportion of all Roman sexual art (Clarke, 2007: 138–139, figs. 93-93.1, 146, fig. 99; Oswald, 1936–7: pl. XX; Versluys, 2002: 283).

On lamps, visual materialisation of both idealised and dwarf bodies relies on well-established stylistic conventions. The 5th century BCE artistic convention for conveying the Classical Greek body provides the framework for the erotic representation of normative body forms. Sexual disc-reliefs visually connect social markers of age and gender to display proportional, youthful adult males and females. Female figures are characterised by the full figure of a grown woman, with large but firmly modelled breasts, wide hips, curved contours, and, occasionally, clearly delineated genitalia. Female bodies are mostly presented with a downward gaze, in the profile view, and nearly always partially concealed from the viewer. Men are beardless with defined pectoral muscles and an athletic appearance. Male bodies, mostly presented in the profile view, also have torsos twisted and occasionally their penis partially revealed to the viewer. Artistic depictions of these bodies across different Roman media, in both public and private spaces, suggests that the uniform characteristics of ideal bodies visually communicated social values of the inner intellectual and moral qualities associated with exemplary masculinity and femininity (Squire, 2011; Zanker, 1990).

By contrast, dwarfs’ bodies have large heads and short legs, and female dwarfs have protruding buttocks and sagging breasts. The stylistic convention for portrayal of dwarfs emerges in Roman Nilotic scenes in the third quarter of the 1st century BCE (Versluys, 2002: 274–277). Considered to have strong sexual potency, dwarfs were used to convey ideas about fertility (Versluys, 2002: 282–283, 436–438). Dwarf symplegma has been read as a visual metaphor for the union between Isis and Osiris, or between Egypt and the Nile (Meyboom and Versluys, 2007: 199–200). Roman visual caricaturing of dwarfs and other malformed bodies also incited amusement and emphasised dwarfs’ otherness (Clarke, 1998: 45–49, 2007: 155–169). Iconographically, dwarf bodies changed from the Republican period, in which they have an ethnographical character, to a more burlesque portrayal in the early Imperial period, when Egyptians start to be visually depicted as dwarfs (Versluys, 2002; Meyboom and Versluys, 2007: 172, 207). At this time lamp-makers repurpose the figural arrangements and style of Nilotic scenes to generate dwarf symplegma disc-reliefs.

Different aesthetic preferences and stylistic conventions for depiction of idealised and dwarf bodies, that were both like and unlike the viewer’s own lived experience, point to cultural knowledge of what different body types communicated. They also suggest that different body forms participated in the larger contemporary discourses about masculinity, femininity, ethnicity/race, and disability.

Sexual disc-art includes recuring bodily actions that belonged to the Hellenistic visual koine. In idealised symplegma, men’s arms are selectively placed on the female body, curved above their head, or raised in a gesticulating manner. Idealised female bodies are shown with arms resting on their hips or used to support their bodies. Less often, the woman embraces her lover or guides his penis towards her vagina. Actions such as a raised arm appear in a variety of renditions and are performed by both idealised and dwarf men. Other gestures seem to be exclusively associated with idealised bodies. A key reoccurring motif both on lamps and Roman erotic art is the arm crooked over the man’s head. This gesticulation goes back to the Greek Apollo Lykeios where it suggests tiredness or sleep (Clarke, 1998: 68; Connor, 1984). By Roman times, the motif takes on the meaning of ‘opening up’ oneself, exploring ideas of one’s unconscious sexual readiness (Sichtermann, 1992: 33). In mythological representations, the gesture appears in conjunction with figures baring their body for the divine gaze, embodying ideas of innocence, in the context of sexual willingness (Zanker, 2012: 168, 170, figs. 2, 4). On lamps, the action occurs alongside sexual acts, such as the woman straddling the man (woman riding position), where the woman takes on a more active role. The man’s relaxed body and the hand gesticulation may be taken to signal physical inactivity framed by sexual willingness and erotic pleasure, but without the innocence associated with mythological iconography (Clarke, 1998: 68, 181, 2007: 243).

Sexual disc-reliefs follow iconographic conventions for representing both sexual encounters of non-ideal bodies and idealised symplegma of desirable bodies. These images constructed and sustained cultural norms associated with gender and sexuality by favouring idealised symplegma involving young adult male and female bodies framed by intimacy and domesticity. They point to the commonalities and shared experiences of different communities in the Roman Empire. By repeating the same kinds of bodies, actions, and coital positions, lamp-images produce visually cohesive and powerful organisation of desires and pleasure in which both male and female bodies emerge as points of eroticised gaze. The distinct but limited variations in bodies, postures, and gestures assisted in articulating limitations of ideal behavior and thus strengthened visual representation of sexuality both across mythological and non-mythological sexual narratives. Selective inscriptions of specific and repeated gestures as typical of a woman and a man across disc-reliefs materially stabilise gendered expressions of sexual desire. As such, these images cannot be viewed as subversive of the Roman sexual and gender discourses. Rather, the potential of these images lies in the semantic combination of their elements: delicate distinctions in the bodily postures as well as the ambiguities of how different bodies relate and their actions affect each other produce different sexual agencies and expressions of desire. In this way, disc-reliefs created space for the viewers’ own desires, erotic imaginations, and subjectivities to unfold. Lamp-images thus emerge as sites where subjectivities of different resolutions of feminine and masculine embodiments were negotiated and also as a place for potentially non-conforming viewers’ desires to emerge. Two widely circulated images of rear entry coitus may serve as an example here.

In Figure 2 (left) the woman is crouched, her buttocks lowered, and her face almost entirely obscured from both her lover and the viewer. The man with his upright torso exposed is laid bare to the viewer’s gaze. The meeting of the bodies through the penetrative act is juxtaposed by the absence of visual exchange between the lovers. This figural dynamic captures a sense of emotional ambivalence which leaves the penetrative contact to emerge as a focal point of the spectator’s gaze. The careful placement of the bodies leaves the beholder to speculate about possible anal intercourse. These iconographic choices become important when we consider that in Roman texts anal penetration, notwithstanding the recipient’s gender, is referred to as ‘that boyish thing’ (illud puerile, Mart. 2.60.2, 9.67.3; Apul. Met. 3.20), suggesting that the youthful bodies of different sex were sites of men’s erotic desires (Williams 2010: 83, 20–29, 204). The tantalising effects of these images may not simply lie in the portrayal of the woman as a passive subject. The very concealment of the erotically receptive partner and the penetrative act also invite narrative makings which have potential to speak to desires of different genders and sexualities.OPEN IN VIEWER

In Figure 2 (right), the revealing of the woman’s body presents a more explicit display of the penetrative act and offers the woman to both her lover’s gaze and those who are looking at the image. In that sense, the woman remains the object of desire. The image, however, does not fit comfortably within the penetrative framework of interpretation. The meeting of the bodies, reinforced by the gestures of touching, is now replicated in the meeting of the lovers’ gaze. The mutual male-female gaze here, as Toscano (2013) warns, does not necessarily imply equality. Rather, it recognises women’s interest in being both the object of desire and the desiring subject. This mutuality also points to men’s interest in both looking and being looked at, even if this might have created sexual ambiguity and anxiety (Kampen, 1997). By communicating confident eroticism, these bodily performances diffuse desire and destabilise the hegemonic male gaze: both figures materialise as agents of their own erotic pleasure and also as objects of eroticised gaze. Thus, even when the woman is displayed as an erotic spectacle, disc-reliefs suggest the possibility for female sexual agency to visually emerge within the Roman socio-sexual system. It is also possible that women looking at these images found a positive signifier of female sexual agency. Figure 2 (right) highlights the ways women could have negotiated their agency through lamp-imagery, and the ways in which a pleasurable female gaze on the female and male bodies could emerge. Thus, while the visual portrayals of women in lamp-art, it may be argued, are an effect of male expectations (most lamp-makers were men), sexual disc-reliefs were nonetheless also contested sites of agency.

Roman provincial sexualities

The replicability of disc-reliefs and the wide circulation of lamps facilitated communication of consistent ideas about sexuality, aiding cultural cohesion of provincial communities throughout the empire. Sexual disc-reliefs were however received differently by different provincial communities. This tension between the visual sameness of disc-reliefs and the provincial selection of lamps allows us to explore how sexuality was culturally produced through sexual lamp-art in the provinces. In selecting from the range of lamps available to them, provincial communities continually redefined a unified, albeit localised, sexual ideology. The greatest contrast between locales is that between the Latin and Greek. During the first two centuries CE, sexual disc-reliefs occur in all sites. After the 2nd century CE, they only circulate in the Greek locales, where they remain until the mid-5th century CE. In the Latin sites idealised and dwarf symplegmata are most frequent, whereas in the Greek settings idealised couples, mythological rapes, and bestiality are prevalent (Appendix, Supplemental Tables 4, 6, 8, 9). These trends point to different provincial predilections for certain types of sexual iconography and variations in social practices which involved lamps. They also hint at the complexity of agency and the construction of meaning in colonial situations.

The Latin-Greek differentiation is not altogether surprising. In northwestern Europe, moulded terracotta lamps with sexual disc-reliefs were novel and foreign objects initially associated with Roman representatives and the lighting practices of the colonisers (Eckardt, 2002; Leibundgut, 1977). Over time they were incorporated into local markings of (Roman) provincial identity. In contrast, the cities of the Greek East were connected by a Hellenic identity expressed through shared language and practices, and strengthened by the establishment of the Panhellenion by Hadrian in 131–132 CE (Worthington, 2021: 313–316). Lamps were involved in Greek identity expressions long before the Romans (Bookidis and Pemberton, 2015), and Greek communities were also familiar with the Hellenistic style of the disc-reliefs. Therefore, in the Greek East, neither lamps nor their sexual art were seen as foreign or necessarily strongly associated with the colonisers. In the following pages I discuss how in the Latin- and Greek-speaking territories, replicated sexual imagery produced meaning through the associative correspondence (the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations) of lamp-reliefs that were circulating in these locales.

Latin sites

Dwarf symplegma materialises on lamps during the first two centuries CE (Figure 3) (Appendix, Supplemental Tables 10, 11). In wall-paintings, dwarfs’ non-Roman sexual activities are emphasised by their non-Roman (Nilotic) setting. By the time dwarf symplegma is repurposed for lamps, however, scenes of copulating male-female dwarfs are located in some types of social setting, such as a banquet. This setting is suggested by the bed or actions that allude to dancing. References to the Nile and Egypt, signalled by a boat, palm branch, and crocodile, are reserved for disc-reliefs with dwarf woman-crocodile symplegma. This representational change may be linked to the observation that in Roman society dwarfs performed as entertainment in the imperial court, wealthy households, and public spectacles (Trentin, 2011; Westermann, 1924). In addition, by the time dwarfs gain popularity on lamps, the connection between the Nilotic scenes and the annexation of Egypt was weakened (Versluys, 2014: 150; Mol, 2015: 206–207). In the Latin provinces, male-female dwarf symplegma disc-reliefs appear to have had little to do with the Nile. Rather, the meaning of dwarfs is suggested by the juxtaposition of the stylistic conventions used for depiction of idealised and dwarf symplegmata scenes. Kampen (1997: 267–269) observation that bodies exist in ‘fluid states of desirability as they are perceived by different viewers’, and should therefore be understood relationally, is useful here. Idealised and dwarf bodies share some stylistic features: they are shown in the same kinds of coital positions, women have hair pulled back to form a bun, and men’s hair is in short curls. The intentional exaggeration of dwarfs' bodily characteristics and actions, however, undoubtedly stands in opposition to the idealism of the standard bodies. The concept of desirability materialises dwarfs as problematic, stressing both a need and a refusal to acknowledge the presence of these non-conforming bodies in society. Visual juxtaposition of stylistic conventions used for idealised and dwarf bodies produces semiotic effects by which dwarfs and their sexual performances emerge as both grotesque and erotically charged. Thus, inasmuch the dwarf symplegma scenes would have provoked laughter and served an apotropaic function, they also had a potential to generate additional meanings.OPEN IN VIEWER

As Trentin (2016) observes, because dwarf bodies are loaded with both symbolic and ideological values, they demand that the viewer re-evaluate the function of the other in the construction of the self. Dwarfs appear in the same sexual acts as the ideal figures but their bodies make these acts become transgressive, thereby pointing to the volatility of the identity performance. The semantic configuration of elements enhances the sphere of the absurd, shameless, and ludicrous socio-sexual behaviour. As such, dwarf symplegma moves beyond the boundaries of normative desire and emerges as a form of the abject in the context of sexual performances. Lamp-images of copulating dwarfs stress the instability of desire and reinforce the relationship between the subject and the abject. These images of sexual humour incite viewers to actively engage with the otherness of sexual performances involving non-ideal bodies and consider themselves in relation to dwarfs, in both body and actions. Dwarfs, as the antithesis of the beholders’ privileged status, health, and wealth, emerge as something stereotypical both in imagery and real life; and dwarf symplegma materialises as a deliberate statement about socially acceptable sexual behaviours. The tension between ideal and dwarf bodies in lamp-art stresses cultural values assigned to physical form and social status and highlights that in the Latin-speaking locales sexuality was also constituted in relation to class and disability.

For the Romans physical malformity was intimately linked to racial prejudice. Because of this, copulating dwarf bodies, in the context of Roman imperialism, materialise the sexualisation and racialisation of the non-ideal (Isaac, 2013; Tanner, 2010). Dwarf symplegma scenes emphasise the eroticised and exoticised racial and socio-economic dimension of non-conforming bodies and their sexualities. The repeated occurrences of lamps with dwarf symplegma (and Nilotic art in general) in large Latin-speaking commercial centres during the Early Imperial period suggests that the dwarf symplegma motif was a global phenomenon, and that provincial urbanised communities had cultural knowledge about the anti-ideal embodied by dwarfs. Thus, the global meaning and cultural values assigned to physical form and social status had an impact in the colonised territories where this imagery was present. Locally, lamps with dwarf symplegma participated in expressions of social status and provincial identity marking. Because humour can be a powerful tool of a dominant ideology, the visual and social mocking of dwarfs would have also created an element of social cohesion (Mitchell, 2009: 300–315). Therefore, in the context of Roman imperialism, the use of lamps with dwarf symplegma situated Latin-speaking provincial communities within wider Roman society. In a way, in the provinces, lamps with dwarf symplegma tacitly endorsed the colonial order or were at least implicated in the instrumentalisation of it. In the Latin sites, lamp-scenes of idealised symplegma and copulating dwarfs participated in the production of both sexual ideologies and colonial discourse. Sexual disc-reliefs reveal the complex interplay of power in Latin-speaking colonial situations, and the way that this undermined a strict and linear socio-sexual hierarchy.

Greek sites

Across the Greek-speaking locales, disc-reliefs construct sexual discourse through lamp-images of mythological erotic pursuits, idealised human symplegma, and human-animal sexual union (Appendix, Supplemental Table 12). Lamps showing Jupiter’s rapes visually capture sexually charged abductions. They do so, however, with considerable harmonious restraint. This allows the experience of terror and the unwillingness of Jupiter’s victims to remain visually ambiguous: standing Leda is embraced by the Swan or is seated with the bird on her lap; Europa is carried away by the Bull or is walking beside the animal. These iconographic schemata can be traced back to Classical Greek and Hellenistic prototypes, suggesting the presence of a well-established convention for visual portrayals of these familiar stories. The ubiquitous presence of divine rapes in the Graeco-Roman written, oral, and visual traditions also meant that these narratives were quickly recognisable and appealing to a large audience from all social classes. Such myths have been interpreted as allegories of irrational sexual passion and divine potency (Clarke, 1998: 47) and as prototypes for love and erotic seduction in unlikely sexual couplings (Vout, 2013: 151). More routinely they have been seen as expressive of asymmetrical gender dynamics in the Graeco-Roman world (Robson, 1997). In Arachne’s tapestry (Ov. Met. 6.103–126), however, gods who submit to their base erotic desires are portrayed as farcical and their actions bestial. In Roman literary discourse, rape, even when divine, was perceived as a bestial act. Stories of divine pursuits thus also bring to light the complex relation between desire, deception, and consent in the Graeco-Roman cultural imagination. With this in mind and considering that rape makes the body a site of intimate violence and hopeless resistance, lamp-images of Jupiter’s pursuits in the Greek-speaking locales may also be viewed as a visual exploration of the effects of power and the human experience of violated autonomy.

A portrayal of Leda’s rape by the Swan on an oversized Athenian lamp diverges from the conventional figural arrangement (Figure 4 left). The lamp-image is worth noting as it corresponds to the canopy symplegma disc-reliefs which were also developed by the Athenian workshops (Figure 4 center). Across the two image-types, the woman is reclining on the luxurious bed with cushions and draperies on the floor. She parts her legs to embrace her lover and twists her torso as if to offer her bare breasts to the viewer’s gaze. With the lovers’ gaze directed towards the point of penetration, this figural composition evokes emotional stillness and the meditative mood captured by the symplegmata characteristic of Arretine ware (Zanker, 1990: 253). The shared style and structure between human symplegma and mythological rape invite iconographic readings through their paradigmatic relation. The interchangeability between the divine bird and the mortal man across disc-reliefs transfers the idea of divine masculine desire into the world of the human. The metonymical relation between the bodies of Leda and the woman also links the feminine response to divine rape to mortal masculine sexual advances.OPEN IN VIEWER

The canopy symplegma images also visually correspond to woman-horse symplegma disc-reliefs (Figure 4 right). Lamps showing cross-species erotics play on a fascination with the abject, offering a parody of the intimate human intercourse captured in the canopy symplegma disc-reliefs. The interplay of curiosity and repulsion produces a powerful emotional effect, and undoubtedly made these lamp-images amusing. Images and texts (Bruneau, 1965: 351–352; Plin. Nat. 8.65) of humans copulating with animals suggests that interspecies sex was a part of erotic fantasy.

Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, a tale set in 2nd century Roman Greece about a citizen of Corinth and a member of the Roman provincial upper class called Lucius, is the literary work most relevant to this iconography. One of Lucius’ tales (Apul. Met. 10.19–22) comically portrays a woman’s use of the animal for her sexual pleasure. Clarke (2007: 120–127, 226–228) proposes that this iconographic theme of taboo sex constructs female desire as volatile and speaks of the disruptive potential of woman’s sexual agency for the traditional socio-sexual order. Outside of this phallocentric model of interpretation, the woman-equine disc-reliefs appear as ideologically ambiguous. Bradley (2000) suggests that this sexual exploitation of Lucius as a powerless animal parallels the experiences of slaves in everyday life during the Roman Empire. In the lamp-imagery, the female body retains its physical form, while the horse has an animal body and a male mind. This configuration maintains the division between female (human) and male (animal) and also hints at the porosity of the limits between man and animal. The delicate adjustments to the woman’s actions and the portrayal of the lovers kissing materialise the woman as an agent of her own desire which transforms the horse into the instrumental abject because his animal corporality denies him agency. The discrepancy in the lovers’ physiques also signals the potentially disruptive effects this sexual meeting might have on the woman’s body. Based on these observations, these visual and literary stories of woman-equine symplegma may be read as tales of sexual exploitation which expose both the male subject and the human body as potentially vulnerable. The subversive potential of this imagery might be in its power to both satirise and contest the societal rules and regulations organised around gender and sexual pleasure.

In the cities of the Greek east, lamp-scenes of mythological rapes and woman-equine symplegma question human ontology itself by bringing into focus the ambivalent relation between human and animal and the danger desire poses for the integrity of the self. By engaging with the question of consent and the effects of power, these replicated images of sex participated in the production of provincial sexual ideologies while hinting at the complexity of what it meant to be Greek under the empire.

Conclusion

This paper demonstrates that analysis of the replicated iconography which decorates mass-produced objects is one tool for exploring the cultural production of sexuality in the context of Roman imperialism. The ways in which sexual disc-reliefs were linked together suggest that this imagery certainly formed a part of a broader Roman visual sexual discourse. That said, sexuality was and is polymorphous, and the experience of gender both in the past and now can take many forms. Thus, while the technological innovation of mould-made replication aided lamp-images in communicating consistent ideas about sexuality, both styles of consumption and the semantic combination of iconographic elements suggest that this sexual ideology was continuously shaped by provincial communities who asserted their own sexual selves. In the provinces, socio-sexual boundaries were both produced and redefined through the selection of lamps and the production of new meanings. Lamps with sexual art may thus be seen as one type of visual-material culture through which shared Roman sexual ideologies were constructed, and through which locally diversified sexualities were communicated. These observations point to the plurality of Roman sexualities, the regional basis for their formation, and their implication in the Roman colonial discourse.

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