Su Fang Ng makes (I think) a pretty compelling case that that Hobbes ‘rejects the story of Lucretia’s rape as the foundational myth of Rome in favour of the wolf suckling Remus and Romulus, which represents a more monarchical aetiological myth of state formation.’ According to the story, Lucretia, a Roman noblewoman, is raped by a king’s son named Tarquin (a name I had come across before as the kind of thing a stereotypically posh British person might name their child, which it turns out is extremely fucked up thing to do) and kills herself. This suicide prompts a rebellion amongst the Roman aristocracy, following which Rome ceases to be a kingdom and becomes instead a republic. It makes sense that Hobbes, obsessed with making sure that there’s ultimately one person with the power to decide, and much more worried about the threat of political dissolution than he is about abuse of sovereign power, would be less interested in this kind of origin story than he is in the one where two brothers, more or less identical, fight to the death to decide which one gets to be the decided. But reading Ng made me wonder whether a similar argument could be made about Augustine.

According to The City of God, the story of Romulus and Remus encapsulates the truth of the earthly city: a society in which everyone loves themselves above everything else, and which conflict emerges out of pride, selfishness, and the desire for mastery. Augustine contrasts the story of the warring Roman twins with the biblical story of Cain and Abel, which for Augustine exemplifies not the war of all against all which characterises the earthly city but the conflict between the heavenly city — Abel, a pilgrim — and the earthly city — Cain, who exemplifies ‘the devilish envy that the wicked entertain towards the good for no other reason than that they are good, whereas they themselves are evil.'(15.6).

Lucretia does appear in The City of God, not as an avatar of republican revolution but as a thought experiment on the ethics of sexual violence and of self-murder (Augustine rejects the suggestion that women should be held morally responsible for their violation by others, but also, because he can’t just be kind for once in his life, does insist that to kill oneself in the wake of violation is to add ‘to the crime of others a crime of [one’s] own’ (1.19)); and then briefly in a later discussion of how the Roman kings met their ends which seems to me (on an admittedly superficial reading) intended to demonstrate that the fortunes of Roman leaders should not be straightforwardly understood as indicative of divine judgment: in service, that is, of Augustine’s broader insistence that the declining fortunes of the Western Empire can not be laid at the feet of Christianity’s rising influence.

All of which is to wonder whether, on the one hand, Augustine’s favouring of Romulus and Remus can, as for Hobbes be seen as a rejection of a republican model of imperial (and perhaps also divine) power; and also (in light of Anthony Kaldellis’ argument that Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire, can best be understood as continuing the Roman Republican tradition) whether we might see the division between Western and Eastern Roman empires as in part a division between these two different models of imperial power.

Thomas Hobbes’ biographer Arnold Rogow writes that, “Hobbes … may never have loved a woman, but no one has ever hinted that he was homosexual” (Radical in the Service of Reaction, 66). Even if that was true at the time Rogow was writing (1986), I’m sure it can’t possibly be true any more; but I spent some time digging around Hobbes scholarship over the summer (with the generous support of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies) and came up empty-handed. Let me then be, perhaps, the first person to suggest it: I think it’s possible that Hobbes was gay. Here are some of my reasons:

• Rogow’s claim comes in the middle of his discussion of Hobbes’ extremely close friendship with notorious homosexual Francis Bacon.
• As Rogow notes, Hobbes never married and was described by his biographer John Aubrey as not ‘a woman-hater … but … even in his youth, (generally) temperate, both as to wine and women’ (66).
• One of Hobbes’ early pieces of writing was a Latin poem about a cavern in Derbyshire called the Devil’s Arse (‘partially so-called because the rocks supposedly look like the buttocks of a person bending over. The rocks are enormous and between them is a very deep cavern, in which the sun never shines’), in which he also discussed another local cave called “Poole’s Hole”. (A P Martinich, Thomas Hobbes, 73)
• Rogow writes, ‘References to human anatomy in the Peak do not establish that Hobbes and the second earl shared an interest in the more intimate physical aspects of life, but we may doubt that Hobbes would have included these references had the earl, for whom the poem was written, be displeased by them’ (71) — the earl here is Hobbes’ student as well as his employer, and also a close companion. Of the earl, Hobbes writes in a. poem full of bawdy innuendos the following lines: “Magnificent, not lavish, still he spends/His riches freely, and amongst his Friends’ (73).
• Rogow suggests that these images of holes and caves haunted Hobbes for the rest of his life and that the Devil’s Arse may have inspired Hobbes’ last reported words before his death: ‘I shall be glad to find a Hole to creep out of the world at’ (71).
• Hobbes was convinced that the secret to a long life was ridding the body of excess moisture, and so as an old man he would play vigorous games of tennis or go for long walks to work up a sweat and then, according to Aubrey, “give the servant some money to rub him” (Brief Lives, 165).
• Also, apparently in quest of a less moist life, Hobbes would lie in bed at night singing ‘prick songs’ (Rogow, 226). Here ‘prick’ refers to a particular form of musical notation, but also, I mean, come on
• Aubrey also recounts a story told to him by Hobbes about a time that Hobbes was hired as a tutor to the young Duke of Buckingham, according to Hobbes a man of ‘great naturall parts’ and a quick wit, who was however slow to comprehend Hobbes’ instruction; this, it transpired, was because he was “at mastrupation (his hand in his Cod-piece)” (Rogow, 153).
• At the heart of Hobbes’ political theory is an (unusual!) insistence that authority has no gender, that the distinctions between men and women are overwhelmingly artificial rather than natural, and that the same therefore goes for any societal norms around sexual behaviour

Obviously none of this is conclusive. But I do think that it’s at least worth both asking the question, and also wondering why it is that the question has not been more seriously considered (in the process of writing this post I began to wonder whether Rogow — a psychoanalyst and close friend of Gertrude Stein — was, in fact, hinting at the possibility of Hobbes’ homosexuality). I do think it’s symptomatic of a general gap between political theological readings of Hobbes which tend to be better at thinking about the symbols, metaphors and underlying metaphysics of Hobbes’ thinking but tend to ignore questions of gender and sexuality, and the feminist scholarship of Hobbes which tends to a somewhat literalist reading of Hobbes which tends to assume that his ideas about gender can primarily be inferred from the times when he explicitly discusses gender and not say, his ideas about snakes and frogs and rivers of blood. Rogow says, when discussing Hobbes in relation to Bacon, that both expressed ‘more than a hint of misogyny’. I’ve not finished the Rogow book so it’s possible I am missing something, but what I’ve read so far suggests that it is not so much that Hobbes — who worked for women, left money to women, and could imagine a world in which women ruled over men — hated women as that he was just more personally interested in men.