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Strolling towards the harbour gate, the hoplite idly contemplates the city walls. Somewhere over there, up by the ramparts, is his great-grandfather’s tomb. It’s a contemporary pastime in Athens, to wander the city walls and locate parts of the family property jammed into them.
The current walls surrounding Athens were built in a hurry. It all started at Thermopylae. To hear the Spartans tell it, Thermopylae (480 BC) was a great victory. In fact, it wasn’t. It was where King Leonidas and his Spartans were crushed by the overwhelming force of the invading Persian army. The Spartans were valiant and defiant, but they were crushed nonetheless. (The Persians had to go through the Spartans instead of ferrying their army around them because Greek warships blocked their path. That – mainly Athenian – fleet did at sea what Leonidas failed to do on land. Few remember that now. Poets prefer pointless but heroic deaths to businesslike battles fought and won.)
After Thermopylae, the Persians descended on Athens with vindictive fury and flattened the city, taking perverse pleasure in completely destroying its protective walls. Without walls, a Greek city is as helpless as a snail outside its shell. Therefore, Athens shuddered collectively when, after the Persians had been thrown back, the Spartans said, ‘Athens does not need walls. Our protection is enough. Friends look after friends. And we are friends, are we not? We would be very upset, otherwise.’
The hoplite now looking at the present walls was not even born when they were raised. His father was a boy at the time, and even at his tender age was pressed into the wall-building project. Themistocles, the Athenian leader, told the Athenians to throw up a wall as fast as they could, while he went to Sparta to assure the Spartans that the Athenians were doing nothing of the sort.
All available stonework was used by the desperate Athenians. There was plenty of rubble, because the retreating Persians demolished whatever they could not burn or loot. But even standing houses were dismantled, carried to the walls and fitted into the rapidly rising stonework. It’s why the Athenian city walls are a mess. You can see a column here, part of a frieze there, and everywhere lumps of stone rudely shaped with chisels for a rudimentary fit.
Meanwhile, everyone travelling to the Peloponnese was politely detained in Athens. Of course, rumours got through. Isolated in the Eurotas valley Sparta might be, but word of such a large and controversial Athenian building project was bound to get through eventually. Themistocles, encamped in Sparta, denied every rumour. Then, as reports kept coming in, he announced he would send a delegation to find the truth.
That delegation failed to return to Sparta, while the Athenian walls kept rising. When the citizen-builders ran out of suitable stone they stripped the tombs outside the city, which is how the hoplite’s great-grandfather ended up in the ramparts. By then, Themistocles confessed that Athens did indeed have walls. Large, solid and very defensible walls. What did the Spartans intend to do about it?
The walls were a rushed job, but they worked. When, inevitably, the anti-Persian alliance fell apart and Sparta and Athens were later at loggerheads, the Spartans marched right up to those walls of Athens, but they had not a chance of taking the city. That much the hoplite had seen. By then he had been an ephebe, proudly standing in armour alongside his father.
Today he has sentry duty. With Athens at peace the only danger the hoplite faces is of falling asleep through boredom. He is pleased that today he won’t be patrolling the city walls, with their irregular steps and treacherously sloping surfaces; instead, he will pace at ease alongside the Long Walls to start his shift at a station overlooking the harbour.
The Long Walls are everything that the city walls are not. When the Athenians came to build them their city was flush with cash from the silver mines at Laurion and contributions from their unwilling allies. The walls are built on solid limestone foundations with custom-carved stone. It’s actually easier to take the walkway along the ramparts than to walk between the walls to the Piraeus.
The Long Walls are a set of two walls running in parallel, 500 paces apart, and effectively insulate Athens from the surrounding countryside to make the city an island. Invaders might wreak havoc on the countryside of Attica, but so long as the navy of Athens is supreme, supplies will land at the Piraeus and be protected between the Long Walls on their journey to the city. Besiegers can only watch, while the occasional guard on the Athenian ramparts insultingly lifts his tunic to flash his buttocks at them.
JOINED BY THE LONG WALLS, THE VERY DIFFERENT CITIES OF ATHENS AND PIRAEUS
A flight of stone steps leads to the ramparts near the harbour gate, and the young hoplite is about to ascend these when a jovial call stops him in his tracks. An elderly man sits under the awning of a street tavern. The hoplite immediately recognizes him as one of the city’s most famous sons, the playwright Sophocles.
Sophocles says to the friends who sit with him around the table, ‘It’s one of the city’s heroes – the hoplites who keep us safe.’ He waves the young man over. The hoplite hesitates, but this is Sophocles. He can hardly say no.
This is the man who led the city’s paean – the choral chant to the gods – in gratitude for the victory at Salamis over the Persians. This was a friend of Pericles, and a drinking buddy of the general Cimon. During the Samos campaign twenty-five years previously, Sophocles was a general himself. The man is famous and powerful, and has famous and powerful friends. Unless the hoplite wants to clean latrines for the next month, he had better be polite. He comes over.
‘Take a seat, my boy. Take a seat,’ says Sophocles genially.
‘I, um, must be on duty soon,’ says the hoplite nervously. He perches next to the playwright on the edge of the bench.
One of Sophocles’ hangers-on pours wine from a clay jug, splashes in some water to fill it to the brim and passes it to the hoplite, who reluctantly shakes his head.
‘He can’t drink that – he’s going on duty,’ says Sophocles reprovingly. ‘I’ll take it. Careful, it’s full. Pass it slowly – like a hetaira to her lover on the next couch.’ He is referring to a woman who blurs the distinction between a courtesan and a high-class prostitute.
‘Now you’ve made him blush,’ says one of Sophocles’ companions. ‘How did the poet Phrynichus put it? “Shines his crimson cheek like the light of love”. Beautiful.’
Sophocles was born in 496 BC in the deme of Colonus, soon after the battle of Marathon. He died ninety years later, at the end of the Peloponnesian War. For most of that time, Sophocles was an active playwright who composed some 123 dramas, the last of which – his award-winning Oedipus at Colonus – was written the year he died, sixty-two years after he won his first dramatic award in 468.
With his Theban plays, and above all with his dramas featuring Oedipus, Sophocles took Athenian theatre to new heights, and his seven surviving plays are still regularly staged all around the world.
‘Yes, you are learned in poetry,’ says Sophocles, ‘but Phrynichus was wrong to call a beautiful boy’s cheeks crimson. If the painter smeared this boy’s cheeks with crimson, he would no longer seem beautiful. It’s quite wrong to compare beauty with what is not beautiful.’
The discomfited hoplite is well aware of the cruelty underlying the cheerfully inebriated badinage. He is also angrily aware that he is now blushing all the more furiously. He intends to pass the cup to Sophocles and be gone, and to Hades with good manners.
‘Oh, you’ve got a fleck of straw in there,’ says the poet to the hoplite, gesturing at the wine cup. ‘Do please take it out. You want me to enjoy my wine, don’t you? No!’ Sophocles winces. ‘Not with your finger. We don’t know where it’s been. The cup is full enough. Just blow it out.’
The hoplite lifts the cup and purses his lips to blow. As he does so, Sophocles leans in closer. Suddenly he whips his arm around the youth and pulls him in for a long, intimate kiss. Stunned, the hoplite sits still in his seat, while the others burst into whoops and shouts of applause. For some reason, all the hoplite can think about as this goes on is setting the wine beaker on the table without spilling the contents. As he does this, the poet’s tongue pushes past his lips. With a struggle, the hoplite pulls free, and leaps to his feet.
‘You managed that perfectly!’ one of the companions tells Sophocles, who preens with self-satisfaction.
‘I am practising strategy, gentlemen. Pericles said that I knew how to make poetry, but not how to be a strategist. Well, this stratagem fell out just right for me, didn’t it?’
Sophocles was a general with Pericles on a certain naval expedition. When he praised the beauty of one of the young men, Pericles told him: ‘Sophocles, a general does not only keep his hands clean but his eyes as well.’
PLUTARCH LIFE OF PERICLES 8
They ignore the hoplite, who turns his back and walks off, trembling with helpless anger and humiliation. A single sarcastic farewell follows him up the steps to the ramparts.
Shortly after, when the watch commander does his inspection, the hoplite makes a formal complaint. But the commander is dismissive. Everyone knows what Sophocles is like and the hoplite should have expected as much when he sat at the table and shared a beaker of wine with him. And there’s nothing he can do about it now anyway. He wasn’t on duty yet, so Sophocles wasn’t interfering with the watch. The hoplite could ask his father to complain on his behalf, if he doesn’t mind making enemies unnecessarily, but it’s not worth it. He knows he needs to forget the whole thing. It was just a bit of horseplay, after all.
Sophocles the Lecher
The incident with the wine beaker is recorded in the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus (13.81). In the text, the event has been moved from a dinner party in Chios to a tavern in Athens, and the youthful hoplite has replaced a young man called Hermesileus. Otherwise the incident happened as recorded, right down to the dialogue.
The guard sharing watch duty with the hoplite is equally philosophical. ‘That Sophocles is a pervert, and no mistake. Men are attracted to boys around the age of puberty. That’s natural. But to look for an eromenos – a boy love – in an adult man is unnatural. If he wasn’t Sophocles, someone would have done something by now.
‘Hey, did you hear about Sophocles and that thing with Euripides? Shows that there’s no fool like an old fool.’
The hoplite lives a rather sheltered life with his parents. Not wanting to appear totally naive and out-of-touch he says cautiously, ‘Go on.’
The guard begins his story. A while back Sophocles was outside the walls when he met a farm boy. The boy was evidently fairly used to accommodating well-off older men and they quickly reached an agreement. This ended with the two naked on the ground on the boy’s cloak, with the cloak of Sophocles protecting whatever modesty the pair had left. Afterwards, the boy stood up and walked off with Sophocles’ cloak.
It was an expensive cloak, and all Sophocles got out of it was the boy’s smelly old thing of cheap Euboean wool. The old man made the mistake of complaining publicly about the theft – everyone laughed at him about it. Euripides made a joke of it – a quick verse about losing only a few pleasurable moments, but not his cloak. Sophocles hit back with one about Euripides’ affair with a Thracian merchant’s wife.
Closing his eyes, the guard recites:
I was stripped naked by the heat of the sun, not by a boy.
Unlike you, Euripides, kissing someone else’s wife
...
Those who plant their seed in another’s field
Are unwise to accuse Eros of snatch-and-run.15
‘Look, after our shift, let’s hit that tavern – the one over there by the docks. The owner doesn’t mind if we park our kit behind the counter and have a beaker or two of wine on the way home. I’ll introduce you to Athena – despite her name she’s none too wise, but she is very sociable. She also lacks a grey beard, because she’s fifty years younger than your last romantic acquaintance. What do you say?’
In a literal sense, homosexuality did not exist in ancient Athens. The word itself is actually less than 200 years old. The ancient Athenians had a completely different outlook on the matter, and took the attitude that sex was sex. By and large, as long as a man took a ‘man’s role’, he was a normal macho male, whether the recipient of his affections was a male slave, a teenage boy, a prostitute or his wife.
That same lust for teenage boys which today would lead to a long jail sentence was encouraged in Athenian society. An older male would take an interest in his young lover’s development, give him little gifts, and mentor him until he became a mature, bearded male. Thereafter the erotic part of the relationship was meant to stop, though the couple might remain firm friends for the rest of their lives.
A mature male who was on the receiving end of male affections was mocked as what Aristophanes refers to as a euryproktos – a ‘wide-arse’. Such men were considered pathetic. Literally. The passive partner in an Athenian sexual relationship was the patheticos.
