The "Effeminate Dancer" in Greco-Roman

Egypt: The Intimate Performance of Ambiguity

Andrea Deagon

I n the year 245 CE, in Egypt's fertile Fayyum region, an estate-holder named Demophon
wrote to his agent Ptolemaios1 with instructions about the preparations for some upcom-
ing local festivities:
By all means [he says] send me the flute-player Petous with both the Phrygian and
otherflutes;and if any expenditure is necessary, pay it and you will be reimbursed by
me. Send me also Zenobios the malakos with the tympanon and cymbals and krotala,
for the women want him for the sacrifice; and let him be dressed as elegantly as pos-
sible. (Westermann 1924,140)
This study concerns Zenobios and a group of other men performing in Roman Egypt in
the first three centuries of our era; the men were known as kinaidoi (singular kinaidoi) and
malakoi (singular malakos). My aim is first to take us as far as the evidence allows in deter-
mining the material realities of what and how they performed and, next, to contextualize
this variety of performance in the chora, or countryside, of Roman Egypt, as well as in the
wider Greco-Roman world.
Following the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 330s BCE, Egypt had been ruled
by Greek kings from the newly founded Alexandria, while a wave of Greek immigrants into
other areas of Egypt had a marked effect on local society and economy. By the end of the first
century BCE, following the defeat of Cleopatra VII, Egypt had become a Roman province.
Roman rule spurred a new wave of immigration and social change. Consequently, the per-
formances of these Egyptian kinaidoi and malakoi in the chora took shape within a complex
intermingling of the Egyptian majority with an established and prosperous Greek population,
along with an admixture of ethnic Persians, Syrians, Libyans, and Italians. Greek continued as
the linguafranca of the area and is the language of most of our source evidence.
Demophon's letter gives us a few pieces of concrete evidence about Zenobios. He was a
professional performer. He was a soloist, as most of the other kinaidoi and malakoi whose
names survive appear to be. Unless he worked with Petous, the flute-player also hired, he
would have been expected to get his musical accompaniment, to the extent that he needed
it, from local musicians or even house slaves; other papyri suggest such collaborations.2 At
least some of the time, he traveled for employment, leaving his town-based home for smaller
villages or the estates of prosperous landowners. In his performance he was expected to play
and most likely to dance with the frame drum called tympanon, cymbals, and the handheld
clackers or cymbals called krotala. These instruments are commonly played by women at
various sorts of celebration. He was hired to perform "for the sacrifices." This may imply a
liturgical role, but it is far more likely simply to signify that he was to perform in the festivi-
ties that accompanied religious festivals and drew attendees from all over the surrounding

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 countryside. Apparently, elegant clothing was essential to him accomplishing the purposes
and providing the entertainment for which he was hired. It is the women who want to hire
him—or at least, Demophon says it is.
The most enigmatic piece of evidence is simply his job-title: malakos. The professional titles
of Zenobios and his Egyptian peers, kinaidos and malakos, are usually, in the Greco-Roman
world, derogatory terms that connote both effeminacy and sexual deviance. Both are difficult
to define with precision. They take their meanings not in the artificial constructs of "Greece"
and "Rome" but rather in the hybrid spaces of many different locales throughout the circum-
Mediterranean, North African, and Middle Eastern areas where Greek and Roman languages
and cultural concepts interacted with local perspectives and practices. Since the semantic fields
of both words relate to the problematic areas of performance, sexuality, and gender deviance,
differences in their local meanings are potentially profound. In addition, different usages may
be found in different strata of society, or in different ethnic groups within a multicultural society
such as Roman Egypt. Of course, their meanings change over time as well.
Latin cinaedus is generally accepted as deriving from Greek kinaidos; the etymology of
kinaidos remains obscure.3 Rather uncommon in Greek usage, the term li kinaidos" identifies a
man prone to degenerate indulgences of all sorts, including seduction of vulnerable women,
girls, or young men. As James Davidson puts it, "The classical kinaidos is an effeminate seducer
whose sometimes secret nature is revealed in his clothes and personal style" (2001, 23). Latin
cinaedus is, on the other hand, a quite common term of abuse. While it too implies effeminacy
and seductive tendencies, and while the cinaedus can certainly exert a corrupting influence on
women, the most typical specific deviancy of the cinaedus is desiring to be sexually penetrated
by other men.4 Still, he was not so much a sexual deviant as a gender deviant "who broke the
rules of masculine comportment" (Williams 1999,178). In both cultures, the effeminacy of the
kinaidos/cinaedus was understood as a manifestation of a pathological disrespect for social and
sexual mores that caused him to seek shameful experiences, such as being sexually penetrated,
performing oral sex, or seducing citizen wives, daughters, or sons. In abjuring the civic values
and moral attributes that define a true man, the cinaedus threatened the fabric of society (Richlin
1993; Halperin 2002; Williams 1999,172-83; Davidson 2001; cf. Butrica 2005).
The Greek kinaidos is not described particularly as a dancer, although skillful dance has a
longstanding place in Greek culture as a marker of the unheroic character (see, for example,
Homer's Iliad, 3.392—93). Yet at least for a while kinaidia (that is, carrying out the acts and
ideas characteristic of kinaidoi) was associated with a genre of performance. Performing ki-
naidoi appear in the third century BCE in Alexandria, the Greek city that was, in the local
terminology, by Egypt rather than being a part of it. There the *'kinaidos poetry," of Sotades
performance
poesía of Maronea was performed, combining obscenity, word play, and mockery of political tar-
danza
comedia gets.5 These features reflect the disruptive social threat of the kinaidos rather than his sexual
proclivities or, for that matter, his dancing abilities. Professional kinaidic performance is
illustrated on several near-contemporary painted bowls originating in Asia Minor. On one,
a troupe of kinaidoi appear to be performing comic incidents from Greek myth and are de-
picted with huge erections (Davidson 2001,23-24 n. 34).This artistic convention marks comic,
disruptive celebration; it was enacted in performance in Attic comedy of the fifth century
BCE, in which actors wore large leather "phalluses." In kinaidic performance, the massive
organ, in its obvious masking of the far less impressive reality, also serves as a destabilizing
sign of failed masculinity (see Garber 1990,48-54), especially since, in the Greek worldview,
rampant desire in and of itself reveals the failure of masculine self-restraint.
A similar sort of boisterous, obscene performance was offered by soloists called magodoi,
but magodia, apparently most common as a street or banquet performance, lacked political

70 2 0 0 8 CORD PROCEEDINGS • DEAGON

overtones. It was still going strong in the fifth century CE, when the lexicographer He-
sychius of Alexandria dismissed it as "an effeminate dance" (Perpillou-Thomas 1995, 229).
The third-century CE author Athenaeus, whose roots were also in Greek Egypt, explains
that the performance of the magodos "acquired its name from the fact that they recited, as
it were,'magical'verses and exhibited powers like those of enchantment" (1937, XIV, 62id).
He continues,
The magodos has tambourines and cymbals, and all his garments are feminine; he not
only makes indecent gestures, he does everything that is shameless, at one time acting
the part of women as adulteresses or pimps, at another, a drunken man going to meet
his mistress in a revel rout. (XIV, 621c)
Magodia, then, offered a combination of burlesquing shamelessness, female impersonation,
and kinaidic deviance. Since it also involved the tympanon and krotala, it is likely to have
featured dances in feminine persona, perhaps that of the unsavory characters its sketches
represented. Despite its raw content, the performance of the magodos can apparently be
called enchanting, which probably reflects one of the accusations leveled against all kinds
of movement-oriented art in the Greco-Roman world: that it pulls men away from ratio-
nality and sinks them into chaotic desires (Lada-Richards 2007, 64-78, 87-99). In playing
out these repugnant but compelling roles, the magodos embodied the constellation of moral
violations—drunkenness, prostitution, adultery, and drag—that are only to be expected of a
kinaidos. Yet while the actual kinaidos, especially one as witty and outspoken as Sotades, may
be understood as a real social threat, I doubt that the gender-bending masquerade of the ma-
godos could really be construed as performing masquerade's modern function of "unsetd[ing]
and disrupting] the fantasy of the coherent, unitary, stable, mutually exclusive divisions"
(Tseelon 2001,3). As a public performer, by definition disreputable, the magodos might be
expected to portray the low life. The deliberate repugnance of his chosen subject matter,
his overt and penetrable impersonation of women, his dancing and playing of percussion
instruments, and the directness of his transgressions mark the magodos as a performer whose
vulgar act provides pleasure (prurient or reluctant) for his audiences, while at the same time
distancing, through satiric enactment, the social troubles he represents. His well-contained
performance, like that of the striptease artist in Barthes's famous essay (1972), inoculates the
audience against more potentially destructive moral challenges.
Kinaidic performance is attested in Alexandria in the third century BCE. Magodia is
described by Alexandrine authors in the third and fifth centuries CE, although the term is
not attested in the papyri of the chora. If the effeminate dancer Zenobios's performance is to
be interpreted in accordance with this model, we would expect it to offer short, coarse, acted
or danced narratives steeped in consciously transgressive sexual, social, or political humor.
But a very different Roman model exists for kinaidic performance, one that expresses both
the dance- and gender-related anxieties of the Roman elite. If one adapts George Becker's
work on the social regulation of sexuality (Becker 1984) to the social regulation of dance,
the Romans could be termed "dance-ambivalent," in that positive assessments of dancing
as elegant and attractive struggled with forcefully stated views of dance as an undignified,
unseemly weakness, particularly for men. Dance, for example, played a role in the enactment
of various religious rituals, yet the orator Cicero succinctly expressed popular views in his
comment, "No sober man dances—unless he happens to be insane" {Pro Murena 6.13).
Or, perhaps, unless he is a cinaedus. Both the earliest Roman satiric poetry (Gaius Lucilius,
c. 130s BCE) and comedy (Plautus, c. 220S-180S BCE) highlight the cinaedus's dancing skills.
A fragment of Lucilius is directed against someone who "foolishly went to dance among

DEAGON • 2 0 0 8 CORD PROCEEDINGS Jl

 the cinaedi" (Krostenko 2001,50). In his plays Plautus links cinaedic behavior and dancing
in several contexts: a character in Miles Gloriosus claims, "No soft cinaedus is a better dancer
than I am!" (686) while the Stichus ends with an exhortation to "all you cinaedi" to party
hearty, requesting a "cinaedic melody" for the dancing and commenting, "What Ionian or
cinaedus can do this sort of thing as well as I can?" (759-60,773,769).
While the kinaidos was an annoyance in the Greek world, the Roman cinaedus was seen
as striking at the roots of the social order. His degeneracies are a common trope that is used
to polarize masculine behaviors into the acceptable and the deviant. The effeminate cinaedus
minces along, his knees knocking together, his head nodding, glancing from side to side. His
skin is soft, his long hair perfumed, his chin soft and round, his gestures languid (Gleason 1994,
62—67). When the conservative politician Scipio Africanus Aemelianus launches an attack on
modern morals, he lambastes dancing schools that were, he alleged, run by cinaedi who were
likely to corrupt "maidens and innocent boys" of good family (Macrobius 1969,14.7 [232]).
It would be nice to know whether "cinaedus" were an actual professional title, but the
evidence is equivocal. Scipio could simply be commenting on the supposed effeminacy and
sexual deviance of dancing teachers when he called them cinaedi. Craig Williams suggests
that Pliny the Younger's description (Epistolae 9:17) of a banquet at which cinaedi performed
along with "jesters and buffoons" implies that *'cinaedus" is a "technical term referring to
dancers" (1999,176); I think it more likely that Pliny describes a company of comic perform-
ers, one or some of whom specialize in satirizing the foibles of effeminates. In any case, if
ambivalence existed in the Romans'valuation of dancing itself, there was none in the assess-
ment of professional dancers, as people who, as Karin van Nieuwkerk says of contemporary
Egyptian dancers, "use their sexual bodies in public space to make a living" (1998,30). They
were tainted by their profession. Indeed, many performers were slaves whose lack of control
over their own sexual and personal choices was taken to represent their own moral inadequacy
rather than that of their owners. The effeminate cinaedus, in assuming a similar penetrability,
danced away both the privilege and the responsibilities of Roman manhood.
As Rome's involvement in Eastern conquest intensified, tropes of the softness and ef-
feminacy of the Orient multiplied, and at this point the dance of the cinaedus was increasingly
portrayed as the buttocks-wiggling, languidly gesturing, drum and cymbal clattering dance
of the East. As Williams suggests, "the image of an effeminate Eastern dancer lurked behind
every description of a man as a cinedus." (1999,176).6 Substantive Roman evidence suggests
that in the Levant, Egypt, and the former Phoenician colony of Gades in Spain, a form of
solo-improvised dance was practiced in which a base in hip and torso articulations was comple-
mented by hand and arm movement,7 a form that, reasonably enough, bears similarities to
some dance styles of these regions today. The Romans, like the Western travelers who visited
the Middle East in the nineteenth century, interpreted the hip movement of Eastern dance
as specifically sexual; they also interpreted the arm movements, whether performed by men
or women, as expressive of weakness and excess. References in a number of first-century CE
authors suggest that hip-oriented dancing could be seen in Rome performed by both former
residents of Eastern lands and artists, including slaves, whose ethnic origins remain unclear.
However, these professional exotic dancers are all female. There is every reason to suppose
that somewhere in the East in the Roman era there was a category of "male professional
performer of hip-oriented dance," given the stream of evidence for such performers over the
next two millennia, but there is no concrete evidence for his existence specifically from Rome.
The trope of the soft, feminized dancing of the cinaedus predates its Oriental elements, and
his association with Eastern techniques might only mark his unmanly practice of a particu-
larly feminine style of dance. But of course, when we are confronted with Zenobios and his

72 2 0 0 8 CORD PROCEEDINGS • DEAGON

fellow kinaidoi and malakoi in Egypt, the most obvious interpretation of their kinaidicity,
so to speak, is that they are just exactly the sort of dancer effeminate Romans are accused of dos modelos:
griego: burlesco, trasgresor y alegre
being. So in multicultural Egypt, the Greek and Roman worlds had produced two radically romano: danzante, afeminado y
oriental
different models for kinaidic performance: the rollicking, transgressive burlesque descended
from Sotades and others in Alexandria by Egypt, and the Roman vision of a dance by too-
graceful effeminates using techniques associated with the East.
To return to the evidence from the Egyptian chora: the papyrus evidence, scant though it
is, offers some indications of the material realities of the kinaidos's profession. It suggests that
he was a soloist, though one malakos performs in a larger troupe. One kinaidos mousikos also
sang or played instruments.The inferred reliance of most of the kinaidoi on musicians they had
not worked with extensively suggests that their dancing was improvisational and that it relied
sufficiently on a shared tradition that common ground between musicians and dancers could
reliably be reached. But was that shared tradition Greek or Egyptian? Francoise Perpillou-
Thomas infers that another category of performer in the chora, known simply as "dancer"
(orchestes [masculine] and orchestria [feminine]) were performing traditional Egyptian dances,
in that their names and employers were mostly Egyptian. She also observes the versatility
of kinaidoi: they work for both Greek and Egyptian audiences, for secular banquets and in
religious situations; and they have both Greek and Egyptian names (1995,227-29).
The performance of the kinaidos/malakos must also be considered in the light of panto-
mime, the Roman dance f o r m e r excellence. Pantomime had its immediate origins in Alex-
andria, and, as Ismene Lada-Richards shows in her indispensable Silent Eloquence: Lucian pantomima
la forma de danza romana por
and Pantomime Dancing (2007), it remained a vibrant theatrical tradition until well into the excelencia
estrellas, grandes audiencias,
Christian era. Pantomime dancers who caught the public fancy could become stars, drawing teatros, entretenimiento
substantial audiences in major civic theaters, and the form must have had an effect on the
types of entertainment to be found even in the chora.
Pantomime emerged from the mainstream theatrical conventions of the Greek world,
which involved gender impersonation. Seven hundred years before Zenobios, in the fifth
century BCE, Greek drama evolved a form in which three or fewer actors played all of the
parts in a complex drama, donning different masks and adopting different body language
for each character. It was, of course, possible for drama to have evolved in other ways, so
apparently from early on the actor's ability to transform himself, and quickly, became a vital
element of the form, as he might play back-to-back scenes as male and female, old and
young, naive and villainous, etc. The literature surrounding the function of masks in Greek
drama is vast, but a commonplace conclusion is that the protean actor was stabilized by the
mask, the timeless qualities of which also interwove the communal theatrical experience of
the here and now with the timelessness of mythic narrative.
By the first years of the Roman Empire, pantomime was a vigorous form of popular
entertainment. The material of pantomime, like that of tragedy, was the corpus of myth
uso de máscaras:
that formed the basis for cultural literacy in the Greco-Roman world. Like tragic actors, los actores pasan de un género a
otro, para interpretar un personaje
pantomime artists wore masks; unlike them, their dramas were played out wholly in danc-
ing that involved both acrobatic pyrodynamics and subtlety of gesture and interpretation.
Pantomime artists, too, had to have this capacity for the quicksilver shift.
Like Greek actors, pantomime artists, at least in the civic theaters where they attracted
their largest and most fervent audiences, were males who played both male and female
roles. Ismene Lada-Richards observes that pantomime artists were suspect precisely because
of their versatility, especially their willingness and ability to "become" female on stage. In
the discourse of the often disapproving elite, the pantomime's body was described as soft,
broken, shifting, oscillating—terms quite similar to those used about the socially defined

DEAGON • 2 0 0 8 CORD PROCEEDINGS 73

 cinaedus. Yet "what transforms the dancer's body into an object of aesthetic fascination is
precisely its much-maligned ability to transcend the dominant culture's gender-norms"
(Lada-Richards 2007,129).
Pantomime artists also worked the festival circuit in the Egyptian chora. Presumably,
since the terms kinaidos and malakos appear to be professional titles, these descriptives were
needed to distinguish what they did from other prevailing styles. The most likely inference
is that the performance of the kinaidos/malakos was not based on Greek myths. Possibly
it was not even narrative. Certainly it involved some theatricalized use of effeminacy, and
religious practice was or could be evoked or performed in some way.
One consistent motif of both the performing and the social kinaidos is that he plays the
tympanon. In the circum-Mediterranean and Levantine cultures of the Hellenistic and Ro-
man worlds, the tympanon, a handheld, circular frame drum, was overwhelmingly a feminine
instrument, associated with all kinds of celebrations, from civic occasions, to family or com-
uso de la música, munity revels, to state-sponsored rituals, to private religious celebration. In the Hellenistic
el tympanon y
los krotalos
world the primary iconographic representations of women with tympana were of worshippers
of Dionysus and of Cybele; both deities offered their worshippers the potential for celebra-
tions that involved ecstatic self-loss. In addition, in myth both deities had an Eastern origin
(Cybele's is historically attested [Roller 1999, 9-115]), so that their ecstatic potentials could
be attributed to the East and thereby conceptually separated from the mainstream of Greek
and later Roman society. This range of women's experience was inscribed as threatening and
irrational in the Greco-Roman world, while at the same time provoking masculine fascina-
tion, precisely because in religious ecstasy women overturned social restraints to become
loud, forceful, uncontrolled, self-willed, overt.8
By casting the cinaedus as a player of cymbals and tympana, a dual purpose was real-
ized. The unconventional man was thrust into a particularly problematic area of women's
social excess. At the same time, this implied equivalence trivialized that range of women's
experience by insisting that it signified only the kind of weakness and deviancy ascribed to
the effeminate man. To the extent that the cymbals and tympana fetishized the dangerous,
mobile, yet ultimately penetrable woman, the same fetishization, with its emphasis on self-
loss and penetrability, was ascribed to the cinaedus.
There is some evidence that the kinaidos could play a liturgical role, in a graffito in which a
visitor to the temple of Isis at Pherae self-identifies as a "'kinaidos of the temple of Dionysus."
Was "kinaidos'' an official role in the parlance of the cult of Dionysus, or a less formal term
in common use, or neither? Was it effeminacy that caused him to self-identify as a kinaidos}
Or was it a propensity toward and ability to evoke and express the ecstasy signified by the
frame drum and cymbals, which was, in the mainstream discourse, defined as outside of the
role of typical masculine experience? As with other instances in Roman Egypt, it is difficult
to determine with certainty whether the term "kinaidos" represents a professional role, a
social and personal identity, or something in between.
Unless the state of the evidence changes, which is not out of the question, much about
the kinaidos has to remain unresolved. On the other hand, a shift in perspective may allow a
little more light to filter through. Certain cultural assumptions of our own about male per-
formance of femininity have colored our reading of the kinaidos, casting his performance in
terms of masquerade and transvestitism and situating it in the realm of the scopophilic and
fetishistic.9 To the extent that we are social scientists, and inheritors of the inquisitive habits
that are the legacy of European patriarchies, we are honed to seek out the transgressive and
subversive, since through these breaks in the seams of society filters the light of difference.

74 2 0 0 8 CORD PROCEEDINGS • DEAGON

But the transgressive-subversive matrix, I think, is not adequate to explain the professional
kinaidos of the Egyptian chora, and other paradigms are in order.
Despite the vast differences between the Roman-Egyptian chora and the medieval to
modern Islamic Middle East, the male dancers of the later period nevertheless provide a useful
paradigm for the kinaidoi and malakoi of the earlier. From the fifteenth century CE onwards,
Western travelers chronicle these "dancing boys" in various manifestations (for example,
the Uzbeki batcha, the Egyptian khaiual, the Turkish kocek). These Western observers often
mistakenly described them as wearing women's clothing or as impersonating or parodying
women. Yet a careful investigation of these accounts, in Anthony Shay's cross-cultural study
of male dancers in the Middle East from the fifteenth century to the present, shows that such
dancers "did not imitate or parody women, except as part of the occasional play-acting... they
attracted large male audiences particularly because they were popular as male performers."
Although they adopted some elements of female attire, there were always differences that
define their garb as "special clothing and costumes suitable to show off their movements and
to make them unique and attractive as dancers and entertainers" (Shay 2005,70).
This seems relevant to the self-presentation of the kinaidos. To begin with, even allowing
that a kinaidoss clothing may be referred to as feminine, what exactly is "feminine clothing"
in Roman Egypt? Both sexes wore, essentially, large rectangles of cloth that were variously
belted, pinned, or buttoned. These fabrics could be coarse or fine, and one's choices might
have as much to do with one's financial status as one's gender (or gender deviancy). There
were many circumstances in which it was proper for men to wear garments to the ankle rather
than to the knee. In addition, in the Egyptian tradition at least, both men and women made
use of cosmetics. I do not mean to dismiss the codes that signified gender-related conformity
within the culture, but it is also apparent that the elaborate and intentional gender masquerade
implied in modern Western society by "feminine clothing" is not applicable here. In any case,
it is elegance, rather than impersonation, that Zenobios's employers wanted Ptolemaios to
ensure. Perhaps, as a malakos, Zenobios was expected to appear in rich, "unique and attractive"
clothing. Perhaps, like his later counterparts, Zenobios wasn't impersonating anything.
It is a long way from the third to the fifteenth century CE, but I would like to further the
analogy of the male dancers of these different times. Adopting the phrase from Cassandra
Lorius's work on Cairene weddings, Shay proposes that like the bride, and like female danc-
ers, the male dancer functioned as "a repository of sexuality" (2005, 71). The intermingling
of masculine and feminine in the dancers' costumes would further this liminoid function.
Despite the fascination of Western observers (whether colonial travelers or postcolonial
scholars) with the motifs of gender impersonation, deception, and masquerade, the cul-
tural dynamics that fuel such concerns seem to be lacking for these male dancers and their
Eastern audiences. Rather, the performative space of the dance provides a type of pleasure,
both experiential and social, in which ambient tensions, whether sexual or otherwise, find
embodiment and release.
Again, this model provides valuable perspective on the kinaidos, in that it evades some
of our ingrained conceptions of masquerade and gender impersonation. The kinaidos or
malakos of Roman Egypt was not demonstrably countercultural or transgressive; rather,
he was apparently welcome and appreciated in all walks of life. The gender ambivalence
Zenobios represented, though called by the convenient Greek term, did not partake of the
fierce struggle over social mores that entangled the Greek and Roman kinaidos/cinaedus. A
marker of this is the fact that not only did women appreciate his performance, but also that

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 it was socially acceptable for them to do so (since otherwise Demophon would not, we can
assume, publicly ascribe the desire to see Zenobios to the women of his household).
What little we know about the kinaidos or malakos of the chora suggests that he is better
understood not in terms of the fetishizations and scopophilic appropriations of his audiences
but rather as an agent through whom gender issues are not problematized but resolved. To
the extent that our data allow interpretation, his performance, rather than transgressive or
satiric, might be better read as local, traditional, and tending toward the sacred. It is likely
that the Egyptian kinaidos and malakos did not impersonate women so much as encapsulate
an ambiguity that was at the same time comforting and terrifying: that a man can dance
a range of experiences and subject positions that were usually the province of women. In
this paradigm, the kinaidos would not enact a masquerade so much as model a blending of
masculine and feminine characteristics in performance so that they could be reinscribed not
as polarities but as complementary and interwoven aspects of human experience.

Notes
1. Alternately, Ptolemaios may have been a local official who was agreeable toward assisting the
landholders in his region.
2. Another dancer contract, with a castanet-dancer named Isidora, also does not include musicians, and
a contract for the musical education of a slave, in tandem with many literary and epistolary references
from the Roman world, show that those who could afford it might well have slave musicians. Some
contracts are with agent/managers of larger troupes, which might include dancers; one troupe-related
document mentions malakol (Westermann 1924,1932; Perpillou-Thomas 1995).
3. It may have descended from words meaning to move or shake the body, although this is most
likely a folk rather than actual etymology; it may have been adapted from an Eastern language, as was
the general term for female erotic dancer/singer/musicians, ambubaia.
4. As in the majority of ancient cultures in the Mediterranean and Middle East, adult male sexuality
in the Greco-Roman culture of the early common era was defined as penetrative, with some objects
of desire, such as women and young men, considered more appropriate than others. It was regarded as
improper for an adult male to be sexually penetrated. Other kinds of culturally defined passivity, such
as giving oral sex to men or to women, were also defined as shameful for men.
5. He also, incidentally, is said to have invented the palindrome, with the twist that the backwards-
reading of the phrase would reveal an obscene meaning. His proclivities toward political satire ultimately
caused his unfortunate death (Athenaeus 1937, XIV, 620; Plutarch, 1949,14).
6.1 am not convinced that "Eastern dancer" is, as Williams suggests, the primary and original meaning
of kinados/cinaedus, but by the first century CE it certainly was. The quote continues, "and that behind
the Eastern dancer in turn lurked the image of the gallus" (1999,176), or eunuch priest of the goddess
Cybele.
7. For a description of the form in its modern manifestations, see Shay (1999);fora discussion of the
ancient evidence, see Fear (1991).
8. This kind of ecstasy was construed as particularly dangerous for men as well. Cybele's cult was
served by galli, eunuch priests who were said to castrate themselves while in a state of religious ecstasy.
These priests, who could be styled a "third gender," served as an embodied focus for the gender-related
anxieties of the Roman world in particular.
9. These interpretations largely derive from the discourse surrounding the meaning of kinaidos/cinaedus
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© 2008, Andrea Deagon

ANDREA DEAGON received her Ph.D. from Duke University in 1984. She currently coordinates the
Classical Studies Program at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, where she also teaches
women's studies. She has studied, taught, and performed Middle Eastern dance since 1975. Her articles
on Middle Eastern dance have appeared in both dance and academic publications.

DEAGON • 2 0 0 8 CORD PROCEEDINGS JJ