Chris Weimer

I'm not at home at the moment, but when I get there I'll check my Latin-Greek dictionary for a translation of cinaedus.

Chris Weimer

Could that be a threesome?

If you could find that, I would greatly appreciate it.

As for Carlson's remark, paiderasths and cinaedus seem to work well for male-male relationships, although not exactly. Indeed, male-male sex was not only typical but approved of in Graeco-Roman societies, as long as you weren't the bitch (cinaedus).

S.C.Carlson

By the time you get as late as John the Faster, it probably just meant that they buggered their wives.

That final qualification is crucial and brings up another problem with the translation "homosexual"--it fails to capture the distinction, important in antiquity, between the man who was the dominant one and the male (usu. a boy, slave, or prostitute) who was the submissive one.

Stephen

Diogenes the Cynic

Doubtful. The exact phrasing is that "some men engage in the male-bedders' sin with their wives." I think most people just take it for granted that J the F was talking about anal sex, although, theoretically, I suppose it could have referred to women "pegging" their husbands or (even more remotely) husbands prostituting their wives.
I can't seem to find anything linkable (my google-fu is weak when it comes to this kind of thing) but I'm pretty sure I read it in one of John Boswell's books.

Chris Weimer

Blasted, I forgot again to look up cinaedus in my lexicon. Tomorrow though, I promise.

seebs

Diogenes, do you have links for this stuff? I have been trying for ages to find historical usages of arsenokoites outside the Bible, and I've come up with a couple of unsourced web pages asserting various things which would be convenient to the authors if true.

Diogenes the Cynic

I don't know of a free linkable site which would have a comprehesive listing for all attestations of the word, but the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae Database is a subscription service which I think contains most, if not all of the extant attestations (42 of which are from vice lists).

Chris Weimer

Hrm, forgot about this. But as most should know by now, cinaedus comes from kinaidos, so Greek actually has a word perfectly suitable for homosexuality but is unused in the GNT...

S.C.Carlson

Well, the Greeks and Romans weren't content with just one word for homoeroticism in their system of sexual identity. Some of them are even being discovered just recently. (See, e.g., David Bain, "Two Submerged Items Of Greek Sexual Vocabulary from Aphrodisias," Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 117 (1997) 81–84 PDF).

In fact, one of the terms referring to the homoerotic role of the cinaedus even occurs in the NT. Specifically, this Princeton paper traces the history of the word malakos which pops up in 1 Cor 6:9.

Stephen

S.C.Carlson

More discussion about this topic is found on About.com's Non-Standard Roman Male Sexuality.