Billy Budd: The Eromenos Has to Die

Abstract

This essay reads Billy Budd as a textual and sexual reconfiguration of classical pederasty, as described in Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus, two works Melville knew well. According to the terms of this ancient Greek relationship, Billy is an eromenos, a handsome young man, and Vere and Claggart are two erastai, older men attracted to Billy's youthful beauty. As Christopher Looby has demonstrated, the novella deploys "juggling temporalities," with three overlapping historical regimes of sexuality: the regimes of the (sodomitical) act, the (homosexual) species, and "sensual tendencies." This essay argues there is a fourth, intertextual regime in this text: that of ancient Greek pederasty. The modern homosexual is born on the remnants of this classical relationship, which Melville conveys intertextually. On board a ship sailing at the end of the eighteenth century, in a novella written at the end of the nineteenth century, Billy, the eromenos, is historicized. And what happens to the classical eromenos when he is confronted with contemporary discourses on homosexuality? He dies. But he also lives under new forms: the eromenos becomes his own intertext.