Reading and contextualizing aselgeia in tenth-century Byzantine law

In the Prokheiros Nomos, aByzantine legal compilation from 907 CE written to aid judges in their work, we read a law that addresses male/male sexual behavior: “The aselgeis ones, both the one doing it and the one getting it, let them pay the penalty by the sword, unless the one having gotten it perhaps might be less than 12 years old. For in that instance his lack of age sets him free from that sort of punishment.” The first things that may attract our attention now are that the law is concerned with anal intercourse and that the penalty is death. This penalty should be regarded as rhetorical, as are many penalties in this code, especially as there is no record of this law ever being used. Indeed, the law, a veritable copy, is the latest version of a law that appeared nearly 200 years earlier. Rather than center the penalty in this talk, I propose we consider anal pleasure, here designated by aselgeia, between males in the Byzantine imaginary. We proceed both by considering the content of the law and by contextualizing the law with sacred and secular writing that likely would have been familiar to someone reading this law in, say, the year 950.

Mark Masterson is Associate Professor of Classics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His major research interest is same-sex desire between men in classical antiquity and medieval Byzantium. He published Man to Man: Desire, Homosociality and Authority in Late-Roman Manhood (Ohio, 2014) and was one of three editors of Sex in Antiquity: Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World (Routledge, 2014). Another book, Between Byzantine Men: Desire, Brotherhood, and Male Culture in the Medieval Empire, will appear from Routledge. Mark has also published a number of articles and book chapters on sex and desire between men in the ancient and medieval worlds. He was a Summer Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in 2015, and, at the end of 2017, he was awarded a Marsden Fund Grant by the Royal Society of New Zealand to pursue research into desire between men in the medieval Byzantine empire.