Classical Corner

FORTEANA fROM THE ANcIENT WORLd cOMPILEd BY BARRY BALdWIN

(Titular honours to Woody Allen for his segment of the 1989 film New York Stories)

Apart from showing himself capabel (Sorry, capable) of inventing fratricide, Cain inaugurated incest, marrying ( Jubilees 4. 9) sister Awan.

Of course, in the sparsely populated Land of Nod, he hadn’t much choice – probably lucky not to end up a sheepshagger.

Not the only biblical case of keeping it in the family. Albeit from different mothers, Abraham and wife Sarah (Genesis 20.12) were both sired by Terah – Qué Terah Terah...

Brother-sister marriages were standard with the Egyptian Pharoahs. The best-known, King Tut, himself product of an incestuous fling between Akhenaten – fancy playing away when you’ve got Nefertiti in your boudoir – and a sister, married his own half-sister Ankhesenamun – Tut Tut!

The Ptolemies maintained the tradition, most notably Elizabeth Taylor (er, Cleopatra VII) who married sons Ptolemy 13 & 14, her own ancestry comprising three uncle-niece and three brother-sister unions.

As evidenced by the 270 census returns from Roman Egypt, incestuous marriages continued to be the norm, both brother-sister and father-daughter. A typical horoscope reads: “If a son is born when the Sun is in Mercury he will be brave and tall and will acquire property and moreover will be married to his own sister and have children by her” – Can’t imagine seeing that in our newspapers’ astrological columns.

Keeping property within the family is one explanation of the practice. Another might be a desire to emulate the Pharoahs of their country’s glorious past; cf. Keith Hopkins, Comparative Studies in History & Society 22 (1980), 303-54, expanding R Middleton’s pioneering study in American Sociological Review 27, 1962, 603-11.

The Greeks and Romans were somewhat schizophrenic on the subject. They had no apparent difficulty with Zeus/Jupiter being married to sister Hera/Juno. Homer had his Land of the Phæcians (Odyssey) ruled by married siblings Alcinoos and Arete (‘Virtue’ – Sister Virtue in Doctor in the House is quite another matter). Adonis as the product of Myrrha being shagged at a party by her dad Cinyras – a case of Beyond the Minge? – caused no obvious concern. But when Canace gave birth to her brother’s child, it was flung out to die and she was forced to kill herself with a sword provided by outraged father Aeolus (Hyginus, Fables, ch238; Ovid,

Heroines, no11 – a shame Euripides’s Aeolus is lost). Given his own track record (see below), it’s appropriate that Canace was one of Nero’s favourite acting roles (Suetonius,

Nero, ch21 para3) – his fat belly made pregnancy-simulation easy, and all the more so that another was Oedipus.

The Theban king remains as incest’s default position, his marital ménage unimprovably summed up in Tom Lehrer’s ditty: “Yes, he loved his mother like no other, His daughter was his sister and his son was his brother. One thing on which you can depend is, He sure knew who a boy’s best friend is.”

Spartan King Leonidas, hero of Thermopylæ, was marred to niece Gorgo, daughter of his half-brother Cleomenes – an aspect tactfully elided in relevant Hollywood celluloid epics.

Cimon, otherwise a paradigm of clean living, was married to sister Elpinike (Plutarch, Cimon, ch4, paras5-7, until he redeemed his reputation by selling her off to a rich suitor.

Virgil ( Aeneid, bk6 v623) depicts his hero in the Underworld (almost as horrific a place as the Underground) as being shown the prisoners enduring eternal torments in Tartarus, one being pointed out as Hic thalamum invasit natæ vetitosque hymenæos – “This one invaded a daughter’s room and forbidden union.”

The most notorious woman in Virgil’s Rome was Clodia, probably (cf. TP Wiseman, Catullus and his World, 1983) Catullus’s girlfriend Lesbia, sister of the gangster-boss Clodius (Rome’s Tony Soprano). Cicero in his funniest speech ( In Defence of Cælius), alleges an incestuous ménage thus: “Clodia’s husband Clodius – Oh, SORRY, always making that mistake!” For good measure, he implies she poisoned her legal hubby, Metellus.

Accusations of incest were flung about in Rome; cf. Tacitus’s Annals, bk6 ch19, bk12 ch8. Many were doubtless trumped- up, but their frequency implies Roman credulity.

At the imperial level, Caligula democratically shagged all three sisters (Suetonius, ch24 para1), though the notorious foetus-ripping-eating scene in I,

Claudius came from some script-writer’s over-heated imagination – a defoetused attitude?

Having married and disposed of his second cousin Messalina, Claudius’s fourth venture into matrimonial bliss was with his niece Agrippina. This being illegal under Roman law, Claudius cut the legal Gordian knot by changing it. On their nuptial day, Agrippina’s maternal second cousin Junius Silanus, falsely accused by her of sibling incest, committed suicide – a welcome wedding present.

Post-Claudius, Agrippina attempted to bind Nero more closely to her apron strings or knicker-elastic. I’ll let Suetonius (ch28 para2) tell the tabloid tale: “Whenever he rode in a litter with his mother, he had incestuous relations with her, which were betrayed by the stains on his clothing.” Obvious precursor of Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress decorated with globules of presidential spunk. Still, Rome did have a litter problem – street accidents (cf. Juvenal,

Satire 3) were common – and their sexting was less hazardous than would have been texting.

An imperial edict of AD 295 attempted to restrict Roman incest whilst allowing the Egyptian brand to continue – The Bangles could have made a song out of this. Not the end of the story. Constantine’s excuse for executing wife Fausta and son Crispus was that they were having it off. The most notorious Byzantine offender was Heraclius (AD 610-641), whose marriage to niece Martina was punished by God in this ingenious way: “Whenever he urinated, he was obliged to lay a board across his stomach to prevent it spurting in his face” (Nicephorus, History, bk7 ch11)

Don’t know if Bill Clinton’s curved cock (Peyronie’s Disease) give him similar problems. But, it justifies half of this prescription attributed to various wits, most probably Thomas Beecham –Arnold Bax the runner-up ahead of Oscar Wilde and (naturally) Stephen Fry: “You should try everything once except incest and folk dancing.”