Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome by Anthony Corbeill

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome by Anthony Corbeill Matthew P. Loar Anthony Corbeill. Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. 204pp. Cloth, $45. Why is patria (“fatherland”) a feminine noun? How is it that virtus (“courage”), though etymologically linked with the masculine vir, is also a feminine noun? And more vexingly, what is it about a book (liber) that makes it masculine [End Page 551] instead of, say, neuter? When first-year Latin students ask these sorts of questions, our immediate impulse is to reassure them that grammatical gender is just that—grammatical. Trying to divine some underlying sexual characteristic that makes courage feminine or a book masculine is not only futile but also counterproductive to early language learning. As I tell my own students: theirs not to wonder why, theirs but to memorize. (Un)fortunately for first-year Latin students and their teachers, Corbeill’s book all but shatters the illusion of a sex/gender divide in the world of Latin grammar. Indeed, his central thesis is that grammatical gender and biological sex actually do, in some ways, correspond in the ancient Roman world. Not only that, but the correspondences between grammatical gender and biological sex, and the ways in which Roman authors exploit and/or manipulate them, directly contribute to what Corbeill describes as the “heterosexualization” of Roman culture’s worldview. In other words, language—and the notion that some innate quality of biological sex inheres in every noun—allows the Romans to conceptually divide the world around them into the fixed and stable sexual categories of male and female. At issue for Corbeill is how this process works and how it evolves over time. Written in five chapters preceded by a short introduction, the book essentially falls into two parts. With the first three chapters, Corbeill builds his case that ancient Roman authors, grammarians and lexicographers chief among them, were alert to and invested in explaining the relationship between biological sex and grammatical gender. Just as importantly, Corbeill highlights a critical historical development in grammatical gender and its role as an organizing principle for the Roman world: in archaic Rome, genders were far more fluid, and it was only through the authority of unnamed maiores and certain poets like Vergil that nouns acquired fixed genders. The last two chapters examine this “linguistic determinism” in action, offering a pair of case studies—on androgynous Roman gods and androgynous hermaphrodites in Rome—aimed at showing how language can simultaneously reflect and reify a heterosexualized worldview. As grammatical gender transitions from fluidity to fixity, Corbeill suggests, so too does the Romans’ understanding of sex and sexuality in their own world. The first chapter, “Roman Scholars on Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex” (12–40), painstakingly lays the groundwork for the subsequent chapters by tracking ancient scholars’ ideas about grammatical gender. It forwards two related arguments that are foundational for the rest of the book: first, according to ancient Roman scholars, grammatical gender and biological sex have corresponded in some form since the moment the Latin language was created. Second, when these scholars comment on authors’ unorthodox uses of grammatical gender, the primary issue tends to be less morphological and more semantic. To clarify what this means, it will be useful to cite an example from the book: on page 35, Corbeill introduces a puzzling lemma from Nonius’ De indiscretis generibus (“On Uncertain Genders”) for the masculine noun reditus (“return,” 222.11–17). Nonius cites Vergil (Aen. 11.54) as evidence that the noun is masculine, which it [End Page 552] always is throughout Latinity. But Nonius goes on to include three other entries containing feminine nouns with this lemma: reditio (Varro), regressio (Cicero), and reversio (Varro). These three nouns, however, are built from three different stems, so why would Nonius list these as examples of gender variation for the masculine reditus? Corbeill’s answer is that Nonius seems to be ascribing some masculine quality to the notion of returning, and thus Nonius expects all semantically related nouns to also be grammatically masculine. The other primary point that emerges from the first chapter, encapsulated in...