Satire in Green: Marked Clothing and the Technique of indignatio at Juvenal 5.141-45

Hopman, Marianne Govers

doi:10.1353/ajp.2003.0060

Cited by 5 publications

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References 20 publications

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“…-See, for instance,Braund (1996) 149: "The colour is associated with women [...] and with effeminates".4 -Such seems to be the argument ofHopman (2003) 569: "Viridis is the general term for green, whether light (galbinus) or dark (prasinus), and green is a marker of bad taste and sexual deviance when worn by men". 5 -Cf.Olson (2008) 11-14, and(2017) 138-145.…”

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Cinaedus Galbinatus: Cultural Perception of the Color “Green” and its Gender Association with Pathici in Rome

Gazzarri

2019

Eugesta

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Unlike Greek, where a word for the color green, if not absent, is certainly inconspicuous, the Latin language possesses a basic term: viridis (connected to virere “to be vigorous”, vis “strength”, and vir “man/male”, cf. n. 24). Like Greek χλωρός, galbinus corresponds to a hue between yellow and green. Unlike viridis, galbinus, when referring to persons, is utilized mainly to describe women and cinaedi. Because of the lack of effective mordants and the difficulty of mixing yellow and blue, the color green did not enter the Roman wardrobe until the early empire. Even then it became a color not for the objects encountered in everyday life, but for those witnessed at unusual occasions and events. Furthermore, ancient medical lore describes the hue on the color spectrum between green and yellow as typical of a variety of gynecological pathologies, which were eventually grouped by early modern doctors under the heading of “χλώροσις”. Whether cinaedi purposefully elected galbinus as their hue of choice, or such representation stemmed merely from the imaginations of caustic Roman satirists, this otherwise exclusively feminine element of ancient fashion suggests that its connection with cinaedi involves a more public dimension to their identity than the passive role ascribed to them during the sexual act, at least as they are defined by constructivist scholarship. Rather, the link with this color seems to be part of their identity, which is not limited to the moment of sexual submission; indeed, it defines cinaedi as figures also identified with constructions of women, their esthetics and sensitivity, and more crucially their physiology. The galbinus attire, while reinforcing the interpretation of cinaedi as a gender-deviant marginal group, simultaneously invites a more complex assessment of these individuals: one that possibly involves the notion of identity.

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