SERVAAS and life writing in the Vita Erasmi: young Desiderius

Whatever scruples Erasmian scholarship has shown over the letters to Servaas, any doubts about their authenticity were dismissed by Allen in his survey of principal editions of the letters of Erasmus in 1906. Along with other letters attributed by Merula to the period at Steyn, Allen surmises they belonged to an early autograph letter-book.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In a first flirtation with collecting his own letters, Erasmus asked Franciscus Theodericus to look for letters in Gouda, of which there survived multas (many) to Cornelis Gerard, plurimas (more) to Willem Hermans, and nonnullas (a few) to Servaas.Footnote ¹⁰¹ From these, Erasmus says, “I have a plan to publish a single volume of letters.”Footnote ¹⁰² This letter, also in Merula’s Vita Erasmi, confirms that these are his principal early correspondents. All three were Augustinian canons.Footnote ¹⁰³ The publication in 1607 in a vita is therefore significant for a second reason, marking the gradual transformation of the letters of Erasmus from an authorial literary collection to a sourcebook for a life. As for chronology, this had to await Le Clerc in his collected works of Erasmus begun in 1703. The extent to which Allen directed all subsequent uses of the Opus epistolarum to see them as quasi-biographical documents cannot be overestimated.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ As for Erasmus, his first experiment in publishing letters was apologetic, as a way of justifying the Praise of Folly.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Only in Farrago (1519) is all pretense dropped, as Erasmus begins the lifelong task of presenting collections on the classical model of the Epistolae familiares of Cicero.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Erasmus, therefore, was establishing a genre of letter-writing, rather than seeking to recreate his life. He included very few letters from his earliest friends, whether in the Netherlands, or in his Paris period, or during his first visits to England. Farrago nonetheless contains almost all the letters before 1514 printed in his lifetime. To these Erasmus often assigned a date, a majority of which prove wrong. Allen puts this down to faulty memory.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Perhaps, although Erasmus is good at remembering things when he wants to. Since the order of letters even when dated is not chronological, it appears he wanted to present not a narrative life but an example of elegantia, or literature. Even in the Opus epistolarum of 1529, when friends urged him to arrange letters in order of time, or by subject, he refused. It would ruin the impression he wanted to convey of life’s variety. Nonetheless, Erasmus seems positively indifferent to his youth. Only two letters dated by Allen to the monastic period—epistles 26 and 29, both to Cornelis Gerard—appeared in print during his lifetime.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

When scholars classify the letters to Servaas as essentially literary they create a double bluff, because all letters by Erasmus are literary in some sense. Treating letters as “life writing” in this context is inherently problematic. Of course, they are invaluable in reconstructing the biography of Erasmus. Allen’s indefatigable detective work confirms that much of what they contain indeed happened, in some order, although once or twice Allen puts Erasmus in two places at once as a result. More beguiling, though, is the sense conveyed by Allen that the letters record verbatim what Erasmus originally wrote at the date Allen provides. Allen largely leaves unsaid what must be a reasonable inference—that Erasmus revised or embellished for publication, or even, in some cases, made a letter up. This question awaits a different context for full consideration, but it is important to remember that it is Merula in 1607, not Erasmus in his lifetime, who desires a vita Erasmi.

In the most recent biography, Erasmus: Dwarsdenker (2021), Sandra Langereis takes Allen’s chronology of the early letters at face value. However, Merula’s Vita scatters the letters to Servaas through his second volume, in quite a different order from Allen’s. This order is repeated in the 1642 London Opus epistolarum, which includes the new letters, where they are placed in book 31 (the last).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Le Clerc in 1703–06 placed them in the same order, but for the first time grouped them together, along with three new letters to Servaas, never published before. Presented with a plethora of new sources, Le Clerc found them impossible to date. In spring 1705 (the edition already in press), the enterprising publisher Pieter van der Aa obtained two other manuscripts: one now in the Athenaeum Library in Deventer, and a second derived (Allen speculates) from a letter-book “belonging originally” to Hermans.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This hodgepodge of epistolae ineditae hid the Servaas letters in plain view as a scattered corpus within the corpus.

Everything hinges on language. When Erasmus calls Servaas “my one hope, the half of my soul, the consolation of my life,” the question is about language as much as who did what.Footnote ¹¹¹ He addresses Franciscus, another Augustinian monk at Sion, also as “half my soul” (“animae dimidium meae”).Footnote ¹¹² To Gerard he writes that he has mistaken a poem by his boyhood friend Willem Hermans as one of his own, but this is said to be hardly surprising since Willem is his own alter ego.Footnote ¹¹³ Writing a little later to Jan Mombaer, another Augustinian canon at Windesheim, Erasmus wonders if Jan might become another Willem for him, since, like Hermans, he is “the other part/half of my soul” (“altera pars animae meae”).Footnote ¹¹⁴ If the phrase is an Augustinian commonplace, it is employed in a professional circumstance thirty years later. When Simon Grynaeus visited England just after Erasmus wrote a preface for Grynaeus’s edition of Aristotle, Erasmus called him “half of my soul” (“dimidium animae meae”).Footnote ¹¹⁵ What is striking about the Servaas letters is not so much their individual love phrases as their artlessness, which may be the reason he did not publish them. Biographers like Langereis analyze the letters against an assumed life-content; Erasmus ignores life for literary liveliness.

The question is not, as Stewart argues so skillfully, that individual words denote proof of a sexual relationship, but that the language of friendship and of sex are on the same spectrum. In epistle 7, Erasmus asks Servaas if he alone will not be moved by a lover’s remonstrances “or softened by a lover’s tears.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ The phrase echoes Dido’s tears in the Aeneid, thus subliminally raising the question of effeminacy.Footnote ¹¹⁷ However, the Latin word molles was also habitually used in monasteries to designate a passive role in same-sex relations; or else masturbation, as in the vision of fornication described by the Augustinian canon Peter of Cornwall.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Effeminacy is a social code that can switch between opprobrium and fantasy; indeed, the same sentence can describe attraction and self-mortification. “Can your nature be like that of a young girl so that my torments yield you pleasure?” Erasmus goes on.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Servaas is always forgetting Erasmus—“for I will speak more softly” (“loquar enim mollius”), he complains in epistle 13.Footnote ¹²⁰ The language of mollis crosses readily into contexts that could be nonsexual, where it remains ambiguous what is being referred to. In the letter to Gerard where his own poetry is mistaken for Willem’s “Ode to Saint Bavo,” Erasmus writes that Cornelis might think he and Willem are one soul in two bodies (“vnum animum duobus inesse corporibus”).Footnote ¹²¹ Deflecting the sexual connotation, well known from Plato’s Symposium as well as the Christian marriage service, he avows that in the future he will “write nothing which does not breathe the atmosphere either of praise of holy men or of holiness itself.”Footnote ¹²² Yet at the same time he hopes Gerard will enjoy hearing in his songs something softer (“the song will seem to sound softer at the same time”)—poems that (the Toronto translation euphemistically renders) might seem “more self-indulgent than is proper.”Footnote ¹²³

Erasmus and his fellow monks exchange poems, and sweet nothings, and perhaps other things. Cornelis is apparently older than Erasmus, perhaps an uncle of Willem, who is almost exactly Erasmus’s age and was confessedly his companion from youth before they joined the monastery together. Servaas is younger, someone to whom Erasmus plays tutor, as Cornelis played tutor to him. In a later letter to Willem from Paris in 1498, Erasmus addresses him with “Salve mea vnica voluptas,” which the Toronto translation gives prudishly as “my only joy.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Erasmus says he has a letter from a friend who has opened his heart to him; he does not praise literary pursuits, saying many disapprove of them. “He complains a great deal,” Erasmus goes on, although “it does seem that he is fond of me.” This is the language of young male friends—gossipy, flirty, bitchy, jealous, warm and cool by turns. Erasmus is staying, he confides, in the company of two gentlemen, at the house of “a very civilized English nobleman.” This may be William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, then in the process of becoming Erasmus’s lifelong patron. “Give him an account,” Erasmus encourages Willem, “of the pleasure that literature affords.” Again the word is voluptas—a term that, like Roland Barthes’s jouissance in Le plaisir du texte (1973), slides easily between the sexual and the textual. In their schools, monks learned from Ovid’s Heroides from an early age, even as choirboys. From there, they graduated to the poems Erasmus tells Servaas to read in his role as quasi-tutor, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Ars amatoria, or from Horace’s to Catullus’s Carmina. “Extol the combination of scholarship and morality,” Erasmus continues, in an enigmatic tone that may be mock seriousness, or a serious in-joke.

While biographers regularly return to the singular case of Servaas, there are two other times, explicitly if still covertly, where a dangerous crossover between friendship and “sodomy” leaves its trace. Both letters appear in Farrago: perhaps by 1519 Erasmus trusted himself to kick over his own traces, although Allen at least is alert to the letters’ connotations, even if others choose to set them aside.Footnote ¹²⁵ The first is a letter to a young English pupil, Thomas Grey (epistle 58). Erasmus addresses Grey as adolescens generosissime (a very generous youth), saying “fortune has never deprived me, nor ever shall, of my love for you.”Footnote ¹²⁶ He represents Grey’s guardian as mixing circumspect obscurantism with outright hatred. He is a senex fucatissimus, a satyr who nonetheless deprives others of pleasure. His only motive is envy, Erasmus adds. He is a braggart soldier, a Cerberus, who uses religion to hide his filthy desires. Yet he won’t succeed in parting the pair, who live together in literature if now in separate houses. Erasmus ends with a eulogy of his beautiful friend, “very dear Pirithous” (“Pirithoum charissimum”) to his Theseus, for whom he feels desyderium (longing/desire).Footnote ¹²⁷ Within a few years this curious Latin word, meaning something between desire and longing, became an invented praenomen for Erasmus himself: Desiderius.

A year later in Paris, Erasmus seems to be worried about a similar inference about his relationship with Jacob Batt: “I will not allow that you are more ardently affectionate to me than I to you, but I am firmly of the opinion that the warmth of our affection should not become too heated.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Is this a note of caution or self-censorship? Flagres and caleat mingle with a language of sodomy, while desyderio marks the Erasmian limits of friendship.Footnote ¹²⁹ They need to be careful what they say to each other. This is, to paraphrase Foucault, one of the many forms of Erasmian silence, which permeate his ways of formulating emotional or passionate discourse. In another letter, he writes that they must watch out in case people take the wrong meaning from how close they are. Despite this, the florid exchange of letters still blossoms. As ever when he is deflecting the question of sex, Erasmus accuses his friends of not attending enough to literature: “Indeed, I am not sure whether you even take pleasure in literature anymore. You take my meaning,” Erasmus assures his confidant Batt.Footnote ¹³⁰ The Toronto editor laments that the meaning is still not clear, although surely it is easy enough to take the hint.

Erasmus, Servaas, and Saint Augustine: sodomy and amicitia

There is another letter from Erasmus to Servaas that, unlike all the others, was published in his lifetime. However, it is not in Farrago or any other letter collection by Erasmus, but appears on its own in four quarto leaves with the title Erasmi Roterodami Epistola qua se excusat cur mutarit monasticam vitam, item habitum (A letter of Erasmus of Rotterdam in which he excuses himself for abandoning the monastic life, as also the habit). There are at least two printings (with no mark of printer or date) of this defense of the renunciation of his vows and habit, as well as a posthumous one, in the year of Erasmus’s death in Ghent.Footnote ¹³¹ This last version contains some passages and words in Greek, in an effort to stave off offense. Augustinus Steuchius read the letter and called it a scandal on account of its calumnies against the Augustinian vows.Footnote ¹³² Erasmus denied the slur in a letter to the Mejía brothers in 1533.Footnote ¹³³ Erasmus, while disowning the publication, clearly recognizes this letter as his own. Petrus Scriverius sensitively described its style as nervosa (nervous) and captures Erasmus’s later embarrassment at it.Footnote ¹³⁴ Merula in 1607, the London edition of 1642, and Le Clerc in 1703–06 all print the version with the Greek additions. A Dutch translation was also printed in 1628 and reprinted three times up to 1651.Footnote ¹³⁵ Yet there exist also two manuscripts, neither with the Greek: one from a miscellaneous selection of Erasmian speeches and letters in a sixteenth-century hand now in Deventer; the other in a large composite manuscript now in Brussels Royal Library in the hand of Maarten Lips (Lypsius), a notable fellow Augustinian and long-term collaborator.Footnote ¹³⁶

Fragmentary and equivocal though it is, the letter could be called an embryonic Confessions of Erasmus. Lypsius describes it as communicated mysteriously under oath by Erasmus to the bishop’s chaplain and transcribed ex noctu.Footnote ¹³⁷ Towards the end, Erasmus declares, “I have now told you the whole story of how I live and the principles on which I act.”Footnote ¹³⁸ For long years after his departure from the monastery at Steyn in 1493, there were no letters from Erasmus to Servaas until 1505–06, when Servaas, who was by now prior of their old convent, received news in letters posted by Erasmus from London, Florence, and Bologna. These, too, first appeared in Vita Erasmi.Footnote ¹³⁹ Eight more years passed before a final, crucial letter arrived posted to Servaas by Erasmus from Hammes Castle near Calais.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Servaas had suggested (in a letter now lost) that it was time to return home and settle down.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Erasmus replies that he is a traveler like Solon, Pythagoras, and Plato; or like Saint Paul or Jerome, who would turn up now in Rome, now in Syria, now in Antioch. Erasmus acknowledges that he does not deserve to be compared with them, but boasts in any case of having friends like the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dean of St. Paul’s.

Unasked, Erasmus then regales Servaas with a list of publications: Enchiridion, Adagiorum opus, Copia, and editions of Jerome and the New Testament. He reminds Servaas of his erudition in the Greek language and in manuscripts. Then he returns, as if to an itch that cannot be scratched, to the question of his choice of garb: the black gown with white scapular. What began as a habit has ended as an extra skin.Footnote ¹⁴² Nonetheless, he concludes, he does not long for home. What would he do in Holland, where he has not lived for decades? At present he is heading for Basel; afterwards he might go to Rome. Perhaps on the way back he could see Servaas, as it is better to confide in person. Details in letters, he warns his prior, can get into the wrong hands. He laments the passing of old friends from the monastery—Willem and Franciscus and Andrew—and greets the few that remain. He concludes: “Farewell, once my sweetest companion and now my reverend Father.”Footnote ¹⁴³

It is a letter that says too much and too little, brimming with intimacy yet holding much in reserve. It digresses into a summary of his life, and ends with a premonition of death, yet the weight of the letter lies at the beginning. Here, confession feels already belated. By the time he comes to the point, he has avoided it. Your letter only arrived after I left England, Erasmus confides: “it gave me extraordinary pleasure [voluptatem incredibilem]” (again relying on that voluptuous word voluptas). It is a word he soon repeats in another context. His reply is brief since he is traveling, yet this is by far the longest letter he has ever written to Servaas. Erasmus by now is approaching fifty years of age. His “youthful passions” (“iuveniliter sensi”) are long gone, “checked by advancing age and experience.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Now begins an apologia pro vita monastica. For, despite leaving the cloister twenty years since, he says he has given up neither its lifestyle nor mode of dress. This is not because they suit him, but so as not to give offense. This genre of self-censorship dominates the letter.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ It should not escape notice that scandalum is a word used inside monasteries for offenses, including sexual, that a monk might need to report; and that Servaas, as prior, is still the proper confessor to whom Erasmus technically owes obedience. The letter is thus a confession within a confession.

His narration of his early life and profession of vows consistently turns him into a victim of circumstance, his parents dying or guardians interfering. The monastery acted against nature, in the coercion of habit, celibacy, fasting. He was constantly awakened by the divine offices of prayer; then, when allowed, could not sleep. In this he was deprived of the one freedom he craved: “My mind was attracted solely to literature, which is not practised in your community.” Liberty and necessity are his big themes, enforced by a sense of the voluntary servitude and compulsive fetishism of life within a monastery. This triggers an astonishing analysis of happiness (foelicitas) in relation to custom (consuetudinis). The profession, he claims, “was utterly repugnant to my mind and body alike.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ He could bear neither the regulation prescribed by ritual order nor the hardships forced upon his body. It was a bodily regimen for which no amount of training or probation could prepare him, with his sensitive nature and bookish temperament. Indeed, literature both provoked pleasure and incited inhibition. It is this aspect his editor Lypsius emphasizes in the arguments he places at the head of the letters in his manuscript, creating a dialogue between Erasmus and himself about vows of prohibition.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Now Erasmus reaches the part of his narrative most personal to himself and Servaas:

What is he confessing, repressing, or displacing, in these vexed phrases, forced from him yet potentially concealing scandal? The passage is bolted together by negatives (Nihil…non…nunquam…nec…nunquam), in a bravura display of praeteritio or apophasis—drawing attention to something by denying it. This is truest when Erasmus asks whether he has been slave to passion or pleasure and answers no: “Voluptatibus, etsi quondam fui inclinatus, nunquam seruiui.”

Inclinatus (inclined) is the reading preferred by Allen, and as translated in Toronto and used by William Barker to justify skepticism about Erasmus’s same-sex “physical desires.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Allen plucks the reading from a single manuscript, against four readings with inquinatus (defiled, polluted), including Lips, a version also accepted in the London edition of 1642 and Leiden of 1703, and by the modern French edition.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ It is also the sense followed in the Dutch translation of 1628.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Allen’s note is defensive, recognizing open rejection of a lectio difficilior: “In spite of the authority of Augustine, Confessions 3.1, I do not think that Erasmus would ever have described himself as inquinatus, even in a confidential letter.”Footnote ¹⁵² He doubles down by using the Deventer manuscript as copy-text on the grounds of this variant, despite describing variants from this same manuscript in another letter “mere degenerations.”Footnote ¹⁵³ Allen gives his game away by citing a scandalous yet obscure passage in Augustine. Arriving in Carthage, Augustine is confronted by “a melting pot of illicit passions” (“sartago flagitiosorum amorum”).Footnote ¹⁵⁴ He was not in love so much as in love with the idea of being in love, “itching to be scratched with the sensual touch of physical things.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Carolyn Hammond draws attention to an astonishing “impression of reflective openness” as well as explicitness in the Augustine passage, which is also oddly obfuscatory: “So I used to defile the stream of friendship with the filth of sensual desire, and to overshadow its brightness with my fiendish lust.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶

The word coinquinabam is translated by Hammond as “defile.” The metaphor is of bodily fluids, connoting extreme corruption and moral turpitude. Hammond suggests an inference of homosexual affairs in the early books of the Confessions, and John Boswell in Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (1980) made this passage a proof-text.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Alan Soble has written a lengthy refutation, arguing the passage cannot be made specific to same-sex acts.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Augustine, Soble reminds us, contemplated marriage, and beforehand had a baby with a long-term concubine. However, the pertinent point here is not about acts but amicitia, a key word in Roman society.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Nowhere in Cicero’s voluminous writing on the topic, well known to Augustine, is the term used in relation to women.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The question is not how Soble or Boswell reads the passage but how a late antique Roman might take it: the unquestionable inference is that Augustine strayed over a boundary in male-male relations from mental to physical.

Soble follows a thousand years of Christian historiography in preferring the licit scandal of Augustine contemplating betrothal to a ten-year-old girl or fathering a son with a concubine to the illicit scandal of what was commonplace in ancient Roman as well as Greek society—having a male lover. The tradition dates back to Augustine’s condemning stupra in masculos (male same-sex acts) in Sodom in The City of God.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Indeed he censures “unnatural acts” in Confessions, although there, as in Jerome, he may mean sodomy between men and women as well as men and men. It is possible the Carthage passage refers to sodomy as well, although the worry in late antique Rome would be more about whether he was the passive partner.Footnote ¹⁶² Perhaps the crucial question is whether he is still an adolescent, since the prohibition at risk is the idea of an adult male being the receiver rather than the giver. In book 2, where Augustine also discusses the “boundary of friendship” (“limes amicitiae”), he still suffers the “spurts of adolescence” (“scatebra pubertatis”).Footnote ¹⁶³ The first three books of Confessions articulate different concepts of sexuality according to age (infancy, adolescence, adulthood). In Carthage, where maybe he considered himself a fully-grown man, to be seen as the passive partner would represent a different order of defilement.

Discussion of the place of Augustine in the thought of Erasmus has mainly concerned theology.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Yet within the Augustinian order the Confessions held a special place, as a vita of the titular saint, for regular consumption during readings at refectory. What the intensely literary friends of Erasmus’s circle made of these passages can only be guessed, but it is surely certain that he and Servaas knew what inquinatus meant, as Allen himself confesses by denial. The licit scandal of the word conceals a scandal of memory that Erasmus prefers to keep private, insisting that Prior Servaas do the same. It will never be known what they did, but it is possible to know how Erasmus read. He uses the word inquinatus again in relation to the Confessiones, in the preface to the Froben edition of 1529.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ What kind of a man was Augustine, he asks Alonso de Fonseca—who was himself not only a nobleman and politician in the service of Charles V but also an archbishop and the son of a concubine with another archbishop. There is an element of teasing in one son of a priest telling another there is no shame in Augustine having taken concubines. With both these women Augustine observed conjugal fidelity, Erasmus reassures wittily, which is something modern priests and abbots do not seek to emulate, he continues in the same vein. Worse than sexual misdemeanor, he suggests, is Augustine’s flirtation with heresy. “He was lured into the sect of the Manichaeans, the most pernicious group of men that the world has seen,” Erasmus recounts. How could the saint have been taken in by this notorious group, he adds with feigned indignation, who went in for “false claims, prodigious fasts, feigned poverty, a sham continence, and other monstrous and draconian regulations”? This is a dig at modern monks, especially those under the regula of Augustine.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Recalling the sham diet and sexual habits of his order, he praises Augustine, but rather halfheartedly: “his desires were holy, his error human and naïve [simplex].” But he is hardly being simplex himself in the next clause: “He was not tainted, however, by the vices of the Manichaeans, nor did he cling long to their impious doctrine” (“Nec tamen illorum viciis inquinatus est, nec diutius haesit impio dogmati”).Footnote ¹⁶⁷ That fatal nec, again: for why bring up a word associated with sexual impropriety (inquinatus again) in relation to doctrine? It is yet another case of a licit scandal, since everyone knows Augustine did more than flirt with Manicheism. Manicheism, especially in the late Middle Ages, was associated strongly with sodomy.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The sentence means, “at least Augustine was not a heretic”—that is, in Erasmus’s or Servaas’s vernacular, a ketter: they both know what that meant, a synonym for anal sex between men from Rotterdam to Basel. The two instances of Erasmus using inquinatus, both referring to Augustine’s Confessions, are the proof that Erasmian scholarship has always denied, that he admits knowledge of same-sex physical acts and comes as close as possible to confessing them himself.

Sileni Alcibiadis and the shadow of Plato: sexual pleasure in the Adagia

Whether or not Erasmus and Servaas shared a bed, they shared a culture and a language. Augustine’s Confessions provided a private code for Augustinian monks, one in which the trials of adolescence and sexuality could be covertly negotiated. Augustine himself declares that he was seduced at a young age by the pleasures of literature, which he needed to throw off as much as the pleasures of sex. In doing so, he established a seductive analogy between the two, offering readers fertile ground for potentially amorous ambiguity. All the Augustinians in Erasmus’s entourage—who include the scribe Maarten (who happily accepted the reading inquinatus), as well as Willem, Cornelis, Frans, and Servaas, know the words, insinuations, and denials that surrounded same-sex desire. This grouping is also represented in his fiction. In Antibarbari, printed in 1520, Erasmus is joined by Willem, a friendship he compares with those in ancient mythology between Orestes and Pylades, Pirithous and Theseus, Patroclus and Achilles, and Damon and Pythias: a more handsome homoerotic pantheon it is hard to imagine.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ They are joined in Antibarbari by his close confidant Jacob Batt, of whom it is said at one point (jokingly or sarcastically) that he used to be keen on girls but has now turned to literature. To be a lover of literature is to be one of the initiated few, the sacred band. The implied vow of celibacy assuredly includes keeping male company only.

In adage 3551, Sacer manipulus (“A sacred band”), which Erasmus added to the 1528 edition of the Adagia, the meaning of the title is explained in explicitly homoerotic terms: “Athenaeus says in book 13 that at Thebes a part of the army was called the sacred band and was made up of men who were lovers. The Thebans’ greatest strength in war rested on these men because love gives men the greatest courage, emboldening them even to the point of thinking nothing of death.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ In Latin the reference to classical social codes of homosexuality is clearer: “eam constitisse ex amantibus et amatis.” His source is Athenaeus, where an active and older partner (ἐραστής, erastēs) is distinguished from the passive and younger one (ἐρώμενος, erōmenos), usually defined as pubescent.Footnote ¹⁷¹ In a digressive aside relating to the classical term, Erasmus adds ironically that “an example of its use will be if anyone were to say that today Christendom depends on a sacred band, meaning monks.” Mischievously comparing the male lovers in the Theban army to Christian monks, Erasmus, in a way typical of the Adagia, uses anachronism to play it both ways. In an obvious satirical barb against the vow of continence in monasteries, Erasmus undermines the holy reputation of monks and perhaps espouses reform. He is clearly alluding to the commonplace satirical association of monasteries with sodomy.Footnote ¹⁷² Yet he also has his cake as he eats it, expressing a yearning for a code that cannot tell its own name: “The Thebans’ greatest strength in war rested on these men because love gives men the greatest courage, emboldening them even to the point of thinking nothing of death.” Tragic elegy meets eros in the death drive. Not every reader will catch the implications of the references he makes here, which require context and interpretation to make sense. Nonetheless, Erasmus was nothing if not a subtle reader, and his adages require equally subtle readers who are sensitive to the implications of his celebration of the Theban warrior lovers.Footnote ¹⁷³

The remainder of this essay explores the wider context of a language of same-sex love in the Adagia. The adage, Erasmus declares in his 1508 preface, is a literary form which combines concealment with discovery. The Greeks displayed the “conduct of life” within “the outer covering of metaphor.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Explaining this to a reader is an art of discovery that does not always work in the same way. For Erasmus, this combines erudition, playfulness, and revelation, but also sometimes hermeneutic obfuscation. Sacer manipulus is an exemplary case. If monastic sexuality is articulated via euphemism, classical sexuality can be expressed by franker or even flagrant discourse. Erasmian negotiations between repression and explicitness may be compared with Michel Jeanneret’s concept of “rebel Eros.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Plato is always an uneasy presence in love’s economy.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Sileni Alcibiadis, expanded in the 1515 Adagia, is a classic of the Erasmian canon, a set-piece adage frequently reprinted as a standalone, then translated into other languages. It is a metaphor for metaphor and for spirituality, hinging on an outward meaning (the ugly surface) which contains the beautiful, ineffable, or immortal. The image comes from the speech of Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium, which is applied as widely as Erasmus dares, either to scripture as the literary container of the mystery of Christianity, or to Christ himself in an uncanny parody of the eucharist, the corporeal carrier of the divine. In addition to taking these theological risks, early in the adage Erasmus includes a daring reference to the treatment of Socrates and forbidden love in the text of the Symposium: “He was thought to admire good looks in young men, he was thought to know the meaning of love and jealousy, though Alcibiades of all people found him a whole gamut removed from such emotions.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ There is no hint of admonition or disapproval.

The speech in the Symposium most redolent of homosexuality is of course the pansexual genesis myth in the voice of Aristophanes, in which a perfect originary body is split, and heterosexual partners are joined in loss by two different kinds of same-sex partner, male and female. This passage was explicated in the Renaissance in Marsilio Ficino’s Commentary.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Erasmus, who owned a copy of Ficino’s translation, used it in Adagia. He also used Ficino’s Platonic commentaries, which sidestepped a reference to pederasty in Plato by translating the Greek παιδεραστοῦσι (lovers of boys) as et in etate virili constituti, ipsos adulescentes diligunt (having reached manhood, they love those adolescents).Footnote ¹⁷⁹ In this way, what Plato expresses forthrightly as sex between ἐραστής and ἐρώμενος is sublimated so that the adult male succeeds in love by devoting himself to friends, rejoicing in what is similar to himself: “he devotes himself to his friends, taking joy always in what is kindred” (“amicorumque studiosus efficit, cognato semper congratulatus”).Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Ficino, in other words, not unlike modern commentators, deflects same-sex desire into generalized all-male friendship.

Todd Reeser argues that Erasmus, too, in Sileni Alcibiadis “evokes same-sex eros in order that it might be written away.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ Erasmus does so, Reeser insists, by suppressing adolescence as soon as he refers to it, applying to the adage a hermeneutic principle in which an intelligible and visible world is rejected in favor of a spiritual one. Reeser’s reading is sophisticated but runs into the problem that Erasmus habitually mentions things in passing without being overly explicit, and habitually uses one hermeneutic principle to counter another. Reeser notes that François Rabelais in the prologue to Gargantua also slips in a reference to sodomy via Sileni Alciabiadis.Footnote ¹⁸² Yet Rabelais is the first to admit that he learned how to do so from Erasmus. The crucial point is that Erasmus engages a second homoerotic frame from Symposium, when (in Rabelaisian fashion) Alcibiades gate-crashes the feast, drunkenly molesting Socrates and his argument. Reeser contrasts Rabelaisian dialogism with “the normativity of Erasmian hermeneutics.” Yet Rabelais himself discovers alternative forms of sexuality by reading widely in the Adagia. Here, it is far from clear that Erasmus is writing normatively.Footnote ¹⁸³

Reeser makes it seem as if Socrates’s predilection for adolescent boys were a secret, whereas in Xenophon as well as Plato it is glaringly obvious.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ While the culmination of the Platonic argument is Socrates’s speech of Diotima, which erases the homoerotic framework to express love at its most abstract and ethical, Plato has Alcibiades ignore this as sanctimonious waffle. Socrates is believed not because he is more rational but because men fall in love with him, despite his being old and ugly. Indeed, that is how he resembles the Sileni, because beneath an unattractive surface he is lovable and beautiful. In that way he tricks Alcibiades (and other young men) into thinking he is the ἐραστής while making himself more like the ἐρώμενος. Everyone in the dialogue laughs because it seemed Alcibiades “was still in love with Socrates.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ The joke continues when Agathon joins Socrates and Alcibiades at the dining table. Is Socrates flirting with Agathon, Alcibiades asks, or is he jealously trying to keep the two younger men apart in case they hook up? “There we go again as usual,” says Alcibiades. “When Socrates is around it’s impossible for anyone else to get a share of the handsome ones.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶ The implication, for a moment, is that Socrates is using philosophy as a pick-up line.

By referring, if only in passing, to formas adulescentulorum (good looks in young men), Erasmus recognizes the physical form of the adolescent male body as essential to Plato’s philosophical argument. The phrase videbatur amare et zelotypia tangi (he was thought to know the meaning of love and jealousy) similarly imitates the structure of Athenian same-sex love triangles evident in the way Alcibiades negotiates between Socrates and Agathon.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Perhaps Reeser is right in one way, as the Silenus of physical love provides a container for the spiritual bounty beneath. Nonetheless, this is a two-way street, since the mystical content is also dependent, in turn, on eros. At the same time, Erasmus recognizes (as some modern readers of Plato do not) the comic irony of the Symposium, which is both a rhapsodic eulogy of philosophy and a mock manual for sex relations. As Alcibiades proposes, Socrates is a better philosopher because he is a better poet, and a better theorist on love because he is a better lover. At the same time, he deconstructs the dichotomy between active and passive lovers to play both roles. Thus, if the adage Sacer manipulus queers the monastery, Sileni Alcibiadis, by contrast, sanctifies sodomy. In any case, Erasmus is much more self-conscious about the roles of ἐραστής and ἐρώμενος than Reeser represents him. Plato haunts the cloister as well as the humanist study. Socrates and Phaedrus, in the dialogue of that name, meet at midday and flirt with each other, joking about hiding things under their cloaks.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ In adage 1594, Lydus in meridie (“A Lydian at midday”), Erasmus tells us the men of Lydia are so addicted to the venereal arts that the nights are never enough, and they use their hands to provide midday relief.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Manibus peragentes (agitating/finishing off with the hands) is an obvious enough synonym for manustupra (masturbation), and Erasmus gives the rest of the game away by referring to the Lydians’ “luxury and effeminacy” in Athenaeus.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ To calm themselves down, Socrates and Phaedrus sit under a “chaste tree”—the flowering vitex.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Abbey cloisters cultivated this species as an antaphrodisiac, commonly known as monk’s pepper.

In Phaedrus, the lovers exchange positions to quell their libido, and as the dialogue ends, declare themselves equals, so that friendship overcomes servitude to sexual pleasure. In Testulae transmutatio (The turning of a potsherd, with the meaning “changing places”—admittedly a very obscure adage), Erasmus interprets “the turning of a potsherd” as indicating “of things changed suddenly into their opposites.”Footnote ¹⁹² With considerable ingenuity, Erasmus speculates that the proverb refers to an ancient children’s game, ὀστρακίνδα (a game played with potsherds on black-and-white surfaces, analogous to heads and tails), in which two sets of boys play with potsherds painted white on one side (representing day) and black on the other (night). When the reverse side comes up, places are exchanged, day turns to night, and fugitives and pursuers change roles. Innocent so far, until Erasmus introduces an example of the game from “Plato’s amatory dialogues” (he means here Phaedrus), in which the game (now merged with something like tag) takes on a sexual meaning: “It is uncertain whether the image is taken from a kind of game which in Greek is called ostrakinda. This is hinted at by Plato in his amatory dialogues, in fact in the Phaedrus: ‘At length,’ he says, ‘he makes his escape from this, and becoming of necessity a defaulter, he who was formerly a lover changes in the turning of the potsherd and runs away; while the other one is obliged to follow him, indignant and protesting.’”Footnote ¹⁹³ The reference is better explained in a concealed citation from Aristophanes’s Knights, not picked up in the Toronto edition, where a sausage-seller vies with Cleon for the favors of a politician, for all the world as a potential ἐρώμενος, toying (so the sausage-seller says) like children over a game of ὀστρακίνδα.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Exchanging potsherds turns out to mean changing sexual positions, day for night, on top for underneath, fugitive for pursuer. Erasmus implies that ἐραστής and ἐρώμενος can change places like tossing a coin. Testulae transmutatio is a highly troubling metaphor for fortune, taking the sex drive as a Freudian game of fort-da, which not only disturbs the norms of ancient Greek sexuality, but also makes sense in the cloistered world of a late medieval monastery, in which boys turn into young men and then older men all the time.

Adagia may be famous for its sententious set pieces like adage 3001, Dulce bellum inexpertis (“War is sweet to those who have not tried it”), or scholarly and autobiographical digressions as in adage 2001, Herculei labores (“The labours of Hercules”), but elsewhere Erasmus constantly pulls his readers up short with brief comic games in unexpected areas. A vivid example of this is in adage 3699, Orphica vita (“The Orphic life”), when he writes that Orpheus demands a life that is innoxia, “free from sin” and “untouched by luxury”: secretive, innocent, vegan, and all-male, as Ovid teaches.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ The key clue here is that Orpheus was a notorious lover of boys. Adage 301, Non est cuiuslibet Corinthum appellere (“It is not given to everyone to land in Corinth”), appears at first sight to be an exercise in geography, twisted metaphorically to refer to anything that is dangerous or difficult to approach. While elaborating on this, Erasmus forges a sexual undertow, playing on the fact that Corinth as a harbor faces both ways, with passages leading forwards and backwards. He then leapfrogs onto a story about the Corinthian temple to Aphrodite, where a thousand prostitutes worked: “Others prefer to relate this proverb to all the harlots of Corinth in general; their rapacity was also commented on in the Old Comedy, Aristophanes says in the Plutus.”Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Corinth is a place of unrivaled voluptuousness and extravagance, so it is “not for everyone” in another sense. For this mental leap, he brings in a Greek text from Aristophanes, Plutus (“Wealth”):

If a rich client passes by, the prostitutes turn their backs invitingly. “I would not hesitate to translate these lines into Latin if they were as decent as they are elegant,” Erasmus winks knowingly at the reader, having already been happy to quote the indecent Greek.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ In a work extravagant in its use of translation, Erasmus refuses to translate the word πρωκτὸν (anus), while also drawing attention to it. Two lines later he does the same with a word from Strabo, where he gives pertexui (weaved, worked off) to translate καθεῖλον, without telling the reader that the Greek verb contains a double entendre comparable to “getting off” with or “going down” on someone.

The Toronto edition repeats such wordplay by likewise elaborately refusing to translate the words into plain English. This may be taking either inhibition or scholarly gamesmanship too far, building as it does on the idea that Greek and Latin are the repositories of the unmentionable, something that has been part of the classical tradition since the beginnings of Christianity. Scholars, monks, grammarians, and editors glory in failing or hesitating to translate rude words. Modern scholars cannot help themselves from giggling at their own erudition to this day.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Euphemism and exhibitionism are equally in evidence in adage 301, when Erasmus both alludes to and conceals a reference to anal intercourse. In other places he is less tentative. Adage 3615, Callipygos (“Beautiful butt”), refers to a story told in Athenaeus, book 7, about two sisters who vie for beauty, setting up a competition as to which is more “‘well-buttocked’ because of their outstanding beauty.” A local temple is set up to Venus so that her Καλλίπυγον can also be worshipped. Then the adage takes a queer turn: “An expression with similar meaning is pale-bottomed men [πυγάργους], as we have related elsewhere.”Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Here he refers to adage 1043, Ne in Melampygum incidas (“Don’t fall in with Blackbottom”). Blackbottom is slang for Hercules, whose arse is unshaven. This is contrasted by Erasmus with the Greek terms πυγάργους καὶ λευκοπύγους: “For effeminate and unwarlike men and those who lead a dissolute and luxurious life are called in Greek bright-rumped [πυγάργους] and white-bottomed [λευκοπύγους], and conversely they had a habit of calling strong and valiant men blackbottoms, as we learn from the scholiast on Lycophron.”Footnote ²⁰⁰ Once again, the allusion is encrypted, but one later reader who recognized the homoerotic Hercules was Pierre Bayle, who referred to “the softness of Hercules” (“la molesse d’Ercule)” in his dictionary article on Hercules.Footnote ²⁰¹ In fact, references to “Blackbottom” are a running joke in Erasmus, as in a series of adages in the second Chilia, where he makes fun of the Cercopes, an untrustworthy Greek tribe in Ephesus, “who behave in a dissolute fashion” and are said to look like animals that “wag their tails to attract favorable attention.”Footnote ²⁰² The word Cercopissare perhaps does not even need translating to be funny, but in any case the modern genus Cercopithecidae refers to old-world European monkeys and baboons who puff out their red arses to all comers.

The anal zone has not hitherto featured as a classic term in Erasmian scholarship, but in case of any doubt, he knows perfectly well that τὴν πυγήν is the standard phrase in ancient Greek for anal sex, which is used assiduously in Athenaeus, the source for Callipygos and one of Erasmus’s favorite books cited within the Adagia.Footnote ²⁰³ Oral sex is no stranger to Erasmus, either. Here, as with sodomy, he employs an artful strategy of bringing in homosexual references through the backdoor, by beginning with women giving pleasure to men. Adage 1943, Lesbiis Digna (“Fit for Lesbians”) performs this without explicitly revealing anything specific, something that eludes the Toronto translators.Footnote ²⁰⁴ Erasmus assumes that his readers will expect female same-sex relations here, since he knows perfectly well that Lesbian Sappho is a lesbian. Yet not all Lesbians are lesbians: indeed, some Lesbians in Greek literature are famous for fellatio.Footnote ²⁰⁵ In an aside, Erasmus calls them “dirty and impure” (“sordidos atque impuros”). But for readers to catch on, they must look up a reference in Aristophanes’s Wasps, line 1346, with its flagrant allusions to oral sex with men.Footnote ²⁰⁶

Erasmus in the Adagia does a lot of explaining, but part of his point is forcing the reader to encounter the original Greek. Not every reader would have the skill or inclination to follow. This becomes a game of educational hermeneutics as well as teasing and chafing. In the case of sex, the pleasure of reading goes hand in hand with forbidden knowledge, one form of excitement muddying the other. In Lesbiis Digna, he inserts conspurcare (to defile) to agitate the reader’s interest, then half-translates the line from Aristophanes: Spurcabit ac jam polluet convivium (he will defile and pollute the feast). Toronto translates only the Greek—“They’re ready now to play a Lesbian trick on their fellow-drinkers”—but the Latin contains an extra conceit: that feasters at the symposium have their mouths wide open to be polluted.Footnote ²⁰⁷ This reverses the direction of the sexual act, so that the men are fellating as well as being fellated.

In adage 3052, Reddidit Harpocratem (“He turned him into Harpocrates”), Erasmus quotes verbatim a whole poem by Catullus:

The English title given in Toronto (“He turned him into Harpocrates”) does not quite capture the flavor of the Latin, which could equally be rendered as “He returned Harpocrates the favor.” The uncle of Gellius is a prude and loudmouth reprover of other people’s pleasures. Gellius gets his own back by having his way with his uncle’s wife. (The Latin perdespuit [scorned] given by Erasmus is emended in modern editions by perdepsuit, a word for working dough, so that one translator gives “assault.”) This shuts the uncle up, so Gellius is the winner. Even if he sucks the uncle’s cock, the uncle stays silent. All of this is a way of Erasmus interpreting the proverb to mean “to impose silence”—a neat recall of the silent vice—which Erasmus backs up via illustrations of the Egyptian god Horus. Yet there need no pagan gods to swallow this point.

Blandiloquentia: Renaissance language games of sexual identity

It would be wrong to infer biography from the Adagia any more than the letters, and it cannot be known how far the sexual pleasures pleasurably described by Erasmus derive from experience. Philosophers enjoy displaying knowledge of many things. Rousseau refers knowingly to reading books with one hand only, titillating the reader with suggestions of masturbation and pornography, while Freud boasts to Viennese professors that he is not afraid to call a spade a spade. Rousseau is unabashed in telling the reader of his predilection for sadomasochism; Freud is better at describing the perversions of others than his own. As for Erasmus, he writes movingly against the beatings that went on in the schools of his own time, even though he must have been aware (as historians have noted today) of the sexual implications of such practices in schools and monasteries.Footnote ²⁰⁹ There is, perhaps, a moment when Erasmus lets his guard slip in a tiny revision in the 1536 edition, the last in his lifetime. Crassiore musa (“The more vulgar muse”) appeared in the very first edition of 1500 as part of Collectanea 402, paired with “a stupid Minerva,” meaning to speak roughly and uneruditely, or else clearly and openly.Footnote ²¹⁰ After 1508, it settled into position as adage 38, later bolstered by Cicero at his most robust, “I am not speaking the language of the prosecutor”: “Latine loqui”—that is, “openly and simply,” without sophistication.Footnote ²¹¹ It is like saying in modern English “to speak plain English”: without censorship or beating about the bush, even though no one in England really speaks plainly about anything. For Erasmus it carries a connotation of frankness, unfussiness, but also lacking euphemism or embarrassment. Then in 1536 he adds a final example, from Priapeia:

“Simpler far to say, in plain Latin, let me fuck you in the arse.” It is a triumphantly uncensorious instance of Crassiore musa.

R. A. B. Mynors, who knew a thing or two about speaking in Latin, adds an illuminating footnote: “The speaker Priapus is represented as issuing a general invitation to any boy who may enter the garden of which he is the tutelary deity.”Footnote ²¹³ So, the fascinating question, which Mynors does not answer, is why in the very last edition of the Adagia does Erasmus suddenly include a reference to anal sex with boys in gardens? Revisions in the 1536 edition, when Erasmus was ill and preoccupied, were few and far between; there are only four new adages. To make matters murkier, for four hundred years the reference to paedicare was bowdlerized as praedicare, meaning to preach. It is a euphemism first used by Paolo Manuzio in his emended edition to satisfy the Roman Inquisition.Footnote ²¹⁴ From here it is transposed to Le Clerc.Footnote ²¹⁵ By a wonderful irony, a joke Erasmus used to satirize Dominican buggery was reversed to censor the queerness of his own text.

All this strongly suggests that MacCulloch’s conclusion needs to be revised—that after Erasmus’s early experience with Servaas, “his passions were to remain as abstractions of the intellect.”Footnote ²¹⁶ Erasmus is well known for moralization on the question of temperance in general. For every adage indulging in sexual secrets, another holds back. Margaret Mann Phillips dubbed the 1515 edition “Utopian” in honor of its exemplary sanctimonious tone.Footnote ²¹⁷ If there is an air of confession about da paedicare, Erasmus is always careful about confession. To his textbook on the subject, entitled Exomologesis (1524), he prefaces an unusually personal apologia addressed to Jodocus Gaverius, professor of law at Louvain. In it, the phrase “I was never a slave to sexual love” (“Veneri nunquam seruitum est”) recalls the careful wording of the final letter to Servaas a decade earlier (“Voluptatibus…nunquam seruivi”).Footnote ²¹⁸ It is another apophasis, an admission (by a priest) that, while never a slave to sex, he is no stranger to it either. The letter to Gaverius adds the familiar complaint that he is too old for that kind of stuff (he was in his late fifties). At the least, the sentence is a direct admission by Erasmus that he has not always been celibate; and nobody has ever suggested a viable female partner.

On sodomy, Erasmus is carefully orthodox in explicit statements. How could it be otherwise? The annotation to the notorious condemnation of homosexuality in the New Testament, Romans 1:26–27, pauses on the correct understanding of what Jerome’s Vulgate calls “passiones ignominiae.” The Greek, Erasmus says, means “disturbances of the soul” or motus (emotions) or morbus (diseases)—or, as Quintilian prefers, affectus (affections). This is fitting, Erasmus adds, since Horace, too, calls effeminate lust a “disease.”Footnote ²¹⁹ Disease endorses theological commonplace about sodomy, or indeed heresy. Yet in the next annotation Erasmus lingers on the question in a different way:

Appetentia is a late antique word, used by Boethius to describe the proneness of bodily desire to human anxiety and penitential excess.Footnote ²²¹ There is a hint of self-naming in his note translating desideriis as “longing for themselves,” or in the phrase “mutual longing of males for one another.” After all the recent arguments about whether it was possible in Renaissance Europe to have a sense of homosexual identity, here Erasmus provides virtually a dictionary definition. Yet he also knows how to blur the boundaries. In a letter to the Bishop of Metz in 1525, coming to the rescue of a young literary friend charged with Lutheranism, he joshes that in that case, “sum hereticus.”Footnote ²²² Call me heretic, he dares the bishop, going on to recall in the next paragraph how Alcibiades escaped similar charges in Athens. Monks and priests, he writes slyly, have only themselves to blame for the heretical reputation that sticks to them. To convert to the life of Christ, it is first necessary to become lovable. In a daring maneuver Erasmus left unpublished in this draft, he adapts Ovid’s art of love to say it: ut ameris, amabilis esto (that you may be loved, be loveable).Footnote ²²³

If that reference is asexual, others are brazenly not. In adage 3716, Sterilem fundum ne colas (“Don’t cultivate barren land”—a clear reference to masturbation), Erasmus adds a needlessly pedantic note on Plato:

Venere mascula, interestingly, is not only plain Latin but perfectly comprehensible Italian, which Erasmus might have heard on the streets in Bologna in 1507, Florence in 1508, or Naples in 1509.Footnote ²²⁵ What is certain is that Erasmus is aware of other kinds of Platonism than those required for philosophia Christi. He knows in detail the social practice of erastēs and erōmenos. Indeed, Desiderius, which was not his given name, is a reasonable Latin translation of erōmenos, as Beatus Rhenanus noted when he commented on the names of Erasmus in his biographical letter to Charles V. In the same paragraph, he recalls Erasmus wishing he had chosen Erasmius as cognomen, for philological reasons; Erasmus does not need to add that this is as close as he can come to calling himself erastēs in adult life. It’s conceivable that Erasmus played both erōmenos and erastēs at different times in his life, or in different relationships. A clearly autobiographical passage in his 1526 colloquy Ιχθυοαγία (“Fish-diet”) refers to himself as Eros.Footnote ²²⁶

In establishing a “rhetoric of intimacy” in letter-writing, Kathy Eden remarks, Erasmus encourages his readers to adopt the style shared with close friends (quos familiariter amamus), to employ the jokes or fights shared with them.Footnote ²²⁷ In the Adagia, too, he not only writes about friendship but also encourages the reader to be like a friend in following his meaning. Yet if Erasmus is among the most self-referential of writers, almost everything he does in this regard is also oblique or deflecting. In relation to a subject so personal as sexuality, and so potentially dangerous as homosexuality, this is hardly surprising. Not even with friends can he afford transparency, however much he enjoins parrhesia or “frank speech.” Some readers will get the joke, or (as it were) follow the Greek. Others Erasmus allows to remain in the dark. No doubt some secrets he took to the grave.

Yet long after the early encounters with Servaas, Hermans, Batt, and Grey, Erasmus occasionally drops his guard. Late in 1528, beset by what he was now calling Europe’s religious tragedy, in the midst of accusations of bad faith from both sides, Erasmus made a new friend. Haio Cammyngha, a young Frisian nobleman, wrote to him asking to join his household as a paying famulus, acting as an amanuensis and courier. Even in the initial exchange of letters, Erasmus writes to him, there was some “secret affinity” (“arcana cognatio”) as if they already knew each other. Instantly he fell in love: “I immediately fell strongly in love with you.”Footnote ²²⁸ Some “secret force of nature” (“arcana vis naturae”) joins them, like a magnet attracting metal. A year later, he wrote to another Frisian, Hermann Phrysius, saying that he did not need to tell his news since Haio is the bearer of the letter: “my very thoughts and intentions are known to him as intimately as to myself.”Footnote ²²⁹ They are, he says (slipping into Greek), ἰσόψυχοι, identical souls. It is not a word Plato uses, but the idiom is inescapably Platonic: they share the same soul.

Epistle 2073 was published in Epistolae Floridae in September 1531 but excised from all subsequent editions in Erasmus’s lifetime, along with other references to Haio by name. The explanation given in Allen and elsewhere is that Haio had proved an unreliable courier and owed him money. Yet while Erasmus can be casually vindictive, he is also highly practical and does not usually waste a perfectly good letter by excluding it in new editions. That something more intimate might be going on becomes clear in Haio’s forlorn replies, which only survive in manuscripts discovered by Allen’s zeal. One, now in the Archives Municipales in Strasbourg, is perhaps the clearest example of a love letter written to Erasmus, now in his sixties. After a long silence (it is now 1532 or 1533), Haio has heard secondhand of a letter to him from Erasmus. But alas, “flattered [blanditus] and charmed by this idea” it turns out to be a false hope; the letter is to someone else, and Erasmus (he hears) is hostile and alienated from him. “As I kept turning this over in my mind, with many a sigh, continually lamenting my fate and fortune, my mind was struck with such great sadness that I was very close to despair.”Footnote ²³⁰ He admits his mistakes: he should never have turned back from Louvain to go to Italy when he was supposed to be delivering the letters. He was tricked into this by falling in with a group of men who seemed friendly but were really like kidnappers. If only Erasmus makes it up with him, he has a house and garden in Friesland where his old master can stay with him.

“For just as I have always wanted you to approve of me no less than you love me, so too (by Hercules!) I am plunged into deep grief.”Footnote ²³¹ Haio also includes intense jealousy for those who now possess the love of Erasmus. It is not that he envies their happiness so much as that “I am tormented by a pain which only you can relieve,” which induces Haio into a spurt of memory.Footnote ²³² He recalls the door of the room that Erasmus gave him in his house in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, on which some spiteful person, envying their love, wrote a message:

It is a line from Ovid’s Remedia amoris: “All love is vanquished by the succeeding lover.” For almost the only time in Erasmus’s life, it is possible to peek, if not inside the bedroom, then at least with the door ajar, where secret, insinuating lines from love poems are scrawled in mockery. To cap it all off, Haio signs the letter as “your friend and most dedicated slave” (“amicus addictissimumque mancipium”) and adds that he is his whether he wants him or not (“velis nolis”).Footnote ²³³

Mancipium, a word Haio also uses in signing epistle 2866, is undeniably strong, and could be sexual slang (it is used for a male prostitute in Juvenal, and in a sodomy trial in Bologna).Footnote ²³⁴ One of the curious aspects of Erasmus’s delineation of ancient same-sex practice is his sympathy for the κίναιδος, who subverts all the codes by enjoying the role of the passive partner in anal sex. In the 1500 Collectanea, he describes “Risus Ionicus. Olim iactatum in cinedos,” which Toronto translates as “laughter directed at homosexuals.”Footnote ²³⁵ In 1508, he expands his explanation to “said of the luxurious and pleasure-loving, as in the voluptuousness of the Ionians” (“In molles et voluptarios dicitur. Nam Ionum mollicies”)—not only analyzing sex jokes but also parading them in luxurious, pleasure-loving, and voluptuous quotations from Athenaeus and Aristophanes.Footnote ²³⁶ More daringly, adage 638, Spongia mollior (“Softer than a sponge”) expands from a brief reference in 1505 to a fulsome description of the allures of the κίναιδος, culminating in one of the filthiest lines in Catullus, Carmina 25:

“Oh Thallus, you catamite, softer than rabbit’s fur”: a metaphor easier to understand with the Latin puns on cunnus and culus (female pudenda and male anus) in mind. Nothing in ancient society was considered more sexually deviant than the κίναιδος, Winkler reminds us, who “flagrantly violated or contravened the dominant social definition of masculinity”—and who denotes a person, not an action.Footnote ²³⁷ In 1528, Erasmus confided to Lypsius that a Dominican had asked how Erasmus’s books broke the bounds of decency: he replies that he turns bishops into kinaedos.Footnote ²³⁸

It is often in playfulness that Erasmus and his friends are most indiscreet, since appearing to be outrageous is also pleasurable. Recognizable in this banter is MacCulloch’s brilliant description of the emergent and yet etiolated world of Renaissance homosociality, which he describes as “strategies for concealment and disclosure”:

An extraordinary commentary on this kind of literary process is provided in a 1519 letter by Christophe de Longueil, sometimes called the French Pico. Asked why François I preferred Erasmus to his countryman Budé, Longueil replied that in terms of learning the two men could hardly be separated. The difference lies instead in style:

It is an astonishing piece of literary criticism, yetalso a contrast of two social cultures, in which gender plays a telling part. “Ducit alter blanditiis, alter viribus trahit,” he goes on: the one leads by charm, the other by masculine force. Erasmus is sweet, smooth, witty, pleasing, beguiling; the only word missing here is effeminate. In case the point is not understood, Longueil puts the literary contrast into an explicitly libidinous context: “Erasmus to them is softer and more effeminate, Budé is harder and more austere” (“Hunc lasciuia molliorem, illum austeritate duriorem”).Footnote ²⁴¹ Effeminacy—gender’s ultimate taboo—is reclaimed as seductive literary style.

In a letter responding to this set-piece comparatio, Erasmus is not in the least unflattered, even as he professes himself pleased that Longueil has taken Budé’s side (when it is not clear he ever did). Erasmus basks in the idea of his feminine side seducing the literary world, for all the world like a sixteenth-century Proust:

In both sides of the exchange, literary terms commingle with sexual ones. To be mollis, it is understood, is to adopt an Ovidian mode of writing, or else a sexually passive role. Lascivia is a strange word, perhaps, for the characteristic style of an editor of the New Testament. In the midst of this is the virtually untranslatable term blandus. Beware a blandus amicus, says Cicero the severe, for whom blanditiis are always “flattering words.”Footnote ²⁴³ But Horace’s Epistles acknowledges that “bland” words win favors all the same.Footnote ²⁴⁴ Above all, there is the Ovidian allure, as in the imaginary letter of Helen to Paris in Heroides:

The interesting thing is the way that blandus avoids any air of the illicit even as it seduces everyone. It is not so much a word that suggests a language of love, as a loving dimension of language itself. Ah, says Quintilian, literature is ille blandus puer, the boy who leads everyone astray.Footnote ²⁴⁶ Literature makes friends, Erasmus is always saying; and sometimes it can make more than friends.

Historians and biographers sometimes behave as if a sleight of rhetoric can protect Erasmus from any inferences of real-life intimacy. It is an odd gesture, as if sexuality is not itself redolent of amicable language. Friendship is hardly a dialectical opposite to same-sex feeling, even if it is also not precisely the same thing. Monks and humanists alike knew these languages as complex codes. When Erasmus tells his students that Corydon and Alexis are unlike each other, he is letting slip an innuendo as well as teaching the virtue of disinterestedness. You and I are unlike, he tells Haio in his first letter; that is why we are metal and magnet. Similarly, the prohibitions on sodomy in ecclesiastical and secular sources bespeak real knowledge even as they disown it. Euphemism, scandal, and denial share the space in the sexual confessional at all stages. Erasmus can hardly be expected to have left behind clear historical evidence of his actions or relationships, like an epistemological used condom. If the lucubrationes of the bedchamber cannot be discovered, it is possible to learn to read his often playfully perverse writing with more sympathy, or perhaps less discrimination. MacCulloch’s phrase about early modern same-sex codes is hardly foreign to Erasmus’s literary mode: “a distinctive language and shared jokes which shaped a semi-public lifestyle shot through with parody and irony.” MacCulloch believes that it was only in the eighteenth century—maybe first in Amsterdam—that a less coded language became available for a “third sexual identity.”Footnote ²⁴⁷ In this, as in other ways, Erasmus of Rotterdam is a forerunner.

In 1533, Erasmus added an odd adage: Verbis coquinariis (“Cookery words”). He took it from Aristophanes’s Knights, to mean “soft, flattering and sweet words” (“pro verbis mollibus, blandis ac dulcibus”). In the same play, Aristophanes amusingly uses the phrase Ῥήματα μαγειρικά (cookery words) to mean soft, sweet, enticing words. Cooks use flavorings to sweeten something that is naturally rather bitter. In the play, one of the characters is being encouraged to butter up the Athenian people by saying things that will please them. The line reads: “Cajoling them with little bits of cookery words.” Aristophanes used the adjective cookery instead of sugary. A good use for this phrase will be to say that the philosophy of Epicurus seduces the minds of ignorant people “with cookery words,” because he asserts that pleasure is the highest good.”Footnote ²⁴⁸ He calls this blandiloquentia, which is as good an epigraph as any for the Erasmian self-image of cajoling the reader and the friend into smiling agreement. It is an axiom not without philosophy, for the Epicurean style, Erasmus suggests, is to seduce the reader by creating an aesthetic of pleasure. This is the meaning of saying that pleasure is the highest good: “quod voluptatem asserat esse summum bonum.”Footnote ²⁴⁹

In 1533 he contrasts the principle in adage 3700, Candidus sermo (“White speech,”) using a Greek phrase which he has apparently made up:

Metaphorically, it means a form of language that removes the distinction between seeing and feeling. It implies a purity of diction that is honest to the point of being guileless, frankness to the elimination of anything but the transparently literal. If Erasmus often seems to appeal to such a thing as the height of virtue in both politics and literature, he admits at some level that it is not something that describes him. He is a poet of blandiloquentia; he reveals by concealing. He speaks so smoothly that the reader does not know what he is up to, as he blandishes, sweetens the dish, and shares in the reader’s pleasure. If a single word were required to translate something of the powerful synergy of his use of the word blandus, it might even be “gay.”