Fig. 4.1 Attic red-figure calyx krater in the collection of the Museo Nazionale di Napoli (inv. no. 205339) and formerly in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu. Source: Drawing by Christina L. Kolb (CLK in logo).
The reforms of Solon, the early sixth-century lawgiver whom the Athenians regarded as the founding father of their democratic system, included a number of provisions having a direct impact upon the private lives and even bodies of individuals – adult male citizens, citizen youths, metics (non-citizen residents), women, and slaves. Laws affecting women included regulations about the marriages of heiresses – fatherless girls without brothers, whose children would succeed to the paternal estate – as well as those prohibiting dowries (later disregarded) and limiting bridal trousseaux, restricting the accessories carried by females in public and their extravagant weeping at funerals, punishing adultery and rape and allowing a father to sell an unchaste daughter into slavery (Plut. Sol. 20.2–4, 21.4–5, 23.1–2). Solon is also credited by the comic poet Philemon (fr. 4 ap. Ath. 13.569d–f) with establishing a chain of inexpensive brothels, which gave young men the opportunity to relieve sexual urges without molesting virtuous women or embarrassing themselves financially. Furthermore, he was supposed to have founded a temple of Aphrodite Pandemos (“Aphrodite of the Common People”) with the proceeds (Nic. FGrH 271–2 fr. 9 ap. Ath. 13.569d). Scholars doubt Solon’s actual involvement in promoting prostitution, but no one denies that in Athens the sex trade was a source of civic revenue: subject to a special tax, it flourished openly.
From his erotic verses ancient readers concluded that Solon himself was privately inclined to the love of boys (Plut. Sol. 1.2–3; Apul. Apol. 9). Several decrees indirectly attributed to him, styled as “the lawgiver,” in Aeschines’ speech Against Timarchus sought to regulate pederastic practices. Among other provisions, opening and closing hours were imposed upon schools and gymnasia; unauthorized persons were forbidden to enter schools; ages of attendance were specified and accompanying slaves put under supervision; a minimum age of forty was fixed for those who instructed boys in choral dancing (Aeschin. 1.9–11). Still other laws specified a public lashing for slaves who formed liaisons with freeborn boys and prohibited slaves from entering gymnasia (Aeschin. 1.138–9; Plut. Sol. 1.4). The latter decree had the effect of sanctioning the gymnasium as a venue for courtship when conducted by freeborn individuals (Scanlon 2002: 272).
Lastly, a law frequently examined by students of Greek sexuality barred an Athenian citizen who had prostituted himself from addressing the assembly, holding public office, or even entering a temple (Aeschin. 1.19–21, 28–30, 32, 40, 73, 195; Dem. 22.21–32, 73). This statute was the one under which Aeschines prosecuted Timarchus in 346/5 BCE, a case discussed at greater length below.1 It was one clause in a blanket injunction penalizing offenses against the social order, which also included physically abusing parents or failing to support them; evading military service; showing cowardice in battle; and squandering one’s estate. The legislative intent was not to regulate private sexual mores, which were thought to be beyond the scope of the law, but instead to protect public spaces from those who had shamefully violated communal standards (Cohen 1991: 72–4). That did not prevent Aeschines, though, from high-mindedly invoking civic morality to win his suit. A corollary law, designed to prevent the disenfranchisement of future citizens, punished relatives and guardians for prostituting citizen boys under their supervision, together with the clients who had paid for the boys’ services; under those circumstances the youth was not deemed at fault, since he was a minor. Procuring for a free boy or woman was also condemned (Aeschin. 1.13–14, 184).
None of these regulations made homoerotic behavior itself illegal, as each addressed only the motive for rendering sexual services. If gratifying a lover out of affection was equivocal, doing it for money was indisputably base. Slaves and foreigners might market their bodies with impunity, since they had no stake in government; but a citizen youth who did so, according to Aeschines, gave notice that as a participant in public affairs he would “readily sell out the common interests of the polis” (1.29). Unfortunately, the law as written opened up a large gray area because it applied not merely to professional prostitutes registered as such for tax purposes but to amateurs (1.51, 119–20). Thus any citizen, no matter how well-born or well-to-do, who had behaved with less than perfect discretion as an adolescent might be vulnerable to prosecution if he took part in public life as an adult. In addition, appealing to gossip, hearsay, and “common report” to bolster allegations was legal in an Athenian court. Aeschines, who candidly admits the difficulty of proving his charge through witnesses, cites salacious rumor at every turn. The strategy worked, for Timarchus was convicted and his civic privileges abolished (Dem. 19.284).
Whether owed to Solon or not, this corpus of regulations indicates that radical democracy intruded into the personal lives of men and women and imposed some state surveillance on their sexual conduct. In fact, as Halperin (1990: 104) points out, Athenian democracy during the classical period (490–323 BCE) functioned as a gender, as well as a political, system, implicating democratic institutions in conceptual structures of masculinity and femininity. For example, the ideology responsible for suppressing citizen women’s visibility in the public sphere (as an ideal, if not altogether in reality) and reducing them to the position of legal dependants was bolstered by democratic goals of curbing ostentatious displays of wealth and guaranteeing status equality among male-headed households, along with legitimate succession (Pomeroy 1975: 57; Fantham et al. 1994: 74–6). In fifth-century Sparta, on the other hand, the military unit, not the oikos, was the basis of social organization, competitive instincts found their outlet in combat, and austerity was promoted as an ethical norm. Women therefore continued to be publicly visible and to exercise considerable economic rights. Athenian legislation excluding children of irregular unions from inheriting served the same purpose: it discouraged elites from fathering children with concubines as well as wedded wives and so “put every citizen on the same reproductive footing” (Lape 2002–3: 132; cf. Ogden 1996: 43).
Thus widespread availability of cheap male and female prostitutes and barring the male prostitute from the privileges of public life were “complementary aspects of a single democratizing initiative in classical Athens intended to shore up the masculine dignity of the poorer citizens – to prevent them from being effeminized by poverty – and to promote a new collective image of the citizen body” (Halperin 1990: 102–3). Despite attempts to defuse tensions generated by economic stratification, however, sexual conduct remained embroiled in unresolved class conflicts, for scrutiny of behavior by legal means ran counter to aristocratic traditions of policing social deviations through shame. Consequently, we need to apply both class and gender as complementary analytical categories if we are to grasp the full import of Athenian sexual discourses.
The spirit of democratic egalitarianism made slow headway at Athens, for wealthy oikoi connected by marriage dominated its politics and retained control of its institutions until the last decades of the fifth century BCE. Pericles, the great general and statesman under whose administration the city rose to the height of its power and prestige during the 440s and 430s, was himself a member of one of the noblest of the Athenian propertied families. Extravagance was part and parcel of the elite code. At the beginning of his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, writing toward the end of the fifth century, gives a snapshot of proper dress for the oligarchic class of a previous generation (1.6.3–5):
The Athenians were the first of the Greeks to put aside their weapons and turn to greater luxury through a permissive lifestyle. Indeed, the older cohort of wealthy men who pursued a luxurious way of life only a short time ago stopped wearing linen tunics and binding up the hair on their heads in a knot fastened by golden grasshopper clasps. Spread through kinship ties, the same fashion prevailed for a long time as well among the elders of the Ionians. The Spartans, on the other hand, first began to dress in simple style, the way we do now, and in other respects as far as possible the rich comported themselves similarly to the majority in their standard of living.
Thucydides is speaking of a revolution in taste precipitated by external events and internal tensions within the Athenian polis. In the late archaic age, just before the wars between Greece and Persia, Athens had maintained very close ties with the Ionian Greek settlements on the coast of Asia Minor. From Ionia, Eastern luxury goods flowed into Athens to enhance the private lives of aristocrats, making the city a locus of the cult of habrosynê. Puzzling red-figure vase paintings from this period depict male symposiasts decked out in Eastern costume, wearing flowing robes, turbans or headbands, and carrying parasols; they are popularly thought to commemorate the lyric poet Anacreon, a native of Ionia then resident in Athens, and his “boon companions” or wealthy patrons (Miller 1992: 96–100). However, Greece’s prolonged struggle with Persia from 490 to 479 made imports from the East unpopular, and throughout the fifth century the growing power of the Athenian dêmos popularized the notion of all citizens enjoying equal civic rights, whatever their economic status. Habrosynê became a term of reproach, associated with effeminacy, as opposed to the manliness of those who had defeated the Persians at Marathon and Salamis.
Two popular assumptions lay behind this disapproving response to the Orientalizing habits of the rich (Kurke 1999: 104). One was economic, a rising conviction that some portion of surplus wealth ought to be earmarked for the common good through private generosity to those less fortunate, or by liturgies – voluntary contributions to the state, like underwriting a chorus for a dramatic festival. By the beginning of the fourth century, when Athens, having lost the Peloponnesian War, was no longer mistress of a tribute-paying empire, such financial support for the polis was actually mandated on a rotational basis and supplemented by occasional tax levies. As a corollary to the expectation that the rich should pay their share, a new civic ideology arose: if all citizens were in fact equal under law, the more prosperous should not flaunt their greater means through ostentatious possessions. It is this latter belief that accounts for the change in fashion observed by Thucydides (Geddes 1987).
Yet it would take more than laying aside gold hair ornaments to deflect envy. During the fifth century, the “middling ideology,” which defined the citizen body as a homogeneous group of householders possessing moderate resources, emerged as the dominant Athenian political discourse. Male citizen birth made all participants in government equal; other factors such as birth, wealth, education, or occupation theoretically did not matter. “Rich” and “poor” were therefore categories of exclusion (Morris 2000: 113–19). In practice, this ideology glossed over the reality of a very unequal distribution of wealth, which has been identified as the “most politically problematic condition of social inequality” in the city-state (Ober 1989: 192). Only 5–10 percent of the Athenian population lived off the income of their investments; most worked for a living, the vast majority as craftsmen or small farmers. While “rich” and “poor” are relative terms, among the former, the plousioi, were approximately 300–400 persons of the “liturgical” class who could afford to fit out a warship or sponsor the performance of a set of plays, and among the latter, the penêtes, were those for whom only the modest stipend paid for attending the assembly or serving on a jury – half a workman’s daily wage – enabled them to participate in government. Yet there was no property qualification for the exercise of citizenship rights. Hence Aristotle could identify the difference between oligarchy and democracy as that between rich and poor, and characterize democracy as “the rule of the poor” (Pol. 1280a.1–4). As noted above, though, the existence of class divisions was seldom acknowledged as such by the Athenians themselves, whose fear of stasis, civil disturbance, led them to play down the economic gap – the rich voluntarily foregoing certain conspicuous luxuries such as elaborate housing, and the less affluent often proudly comporting themselves as though they were not at material disadvantage (Davidson 1997: 233–4).
In addition to class, which was defined strictly by wealth, status, as determined by blood and behavior, was the other deciding factor in establishing social rank. Not all wealthy persons were necessarily well-born, for there were affluent metics. An Athenian was an aristocrat if he belonged to one of the clans composed exclusively of families claiming grand lineage. Although some clan members were not rich, those who were continued to pursue activities engaged in by their seventh- and sixth-century ancestors: athletic competition, hunting, horse breeding, participation in symposia, and homoerotic love affairs. Rivalry for distinction was common within this set. At the same time, noblemen as a group attempted to differentiate themselves from the masses and even from prosperous men of lesser birth.
Aristocratic ideology linked high birth to two other desirable attributes: physical attractiveness and moral excellence. The most familiar descriptive term for bluebloods, at least among themselves, was kalos k’agathos, “beautiful and good.” Because of its poverty, on the other hand, the dêmos was morally suspect: the Old Oligarch declares that lack of money is why the masses are more wicked and more ignorant than “the best people” ([Xen.] Ath. pol. 1.5).2 Appreciation of merit, along with beauty, as a defining trait of the nobleman meant that in pederastic discourses exceptional stress was laid upon the lover’s virtue, since the example of courage, integrity, and manliness he set for his protégé justified pederasty as a social institution. During the late archaic age, then, the figure of the erastês became the embodiment of aristocratic magnanimity, the practitioner of a sacred, as opposed to profane, love, and the freedom-loving patriot, enemy of tyrants.
Oligarchic discourse alleges that the common man is motivated only by greed or lust, but the kalos k’agathos is an enthusiast of beauty. In his encomium for Theoxenus (fr. 123 S-M), probably commissioned as a present by the boy’s suitor (Hubbard 2002: 260–5), Pindar speaks in the persona of the model admirer of youths. Whoever glances upon the flashing rays from Theoxenus’ eyes and does not swell with a wave of longing, he says,
has a black heart of steel or iron
forged in a chill fire, and scorned by crescent-browed Aphrodite
either labors compulsively for money
or is carried along by female insolence
down every cold road, enslaved.
The speaker’s passionate reaction to the boy’s glance is favorably contrasted with the indifference of hypothetical foils distracted by greed and women. Only the concerns of grubbing for a living, which gentlemen do not do, or a degrading obsession with the female sex can explain such apathy. It is noteworthy that what we would call “sexual preference” is here conceptualized as two mutually exclusive tendencies: interest in women is incompatible with attraction to youths. The presence of one or the other inclination, however, is not ascribed to nature or upbringing but is instead determined by the subject’s ethical disposition. Although emotionally susceptible to the charm and appeal of boys, the pederast preserves his masculine autonomy, while the womanizer surrenders to impulse and passively subjects himself to a courtesan’s will. Implicitly, too, his dealings with hetairai involve him in disgusting commercialism as he buys sex. Conversely, the lover presenting tokens of favor to his beloved participates in the honorable economy of gift exchange.
Virtuous admiration for boys is by this reckoning a sublime manifestation of erôs quite separate from carnal desire. When we discussed the origins of Aphrodite, we noted that Hesiod and Homer respectively transmit two different accounts of her parentage: in Hesiod, she arises from the severed genitals of Ouranos, and in Homer from the sexual union of Zeus and Dione. Those conflicting myths later gave rise to the distinction between Aphrodite Ourania, “Heavenly Aphrodite,” and Aphrodite Pandêmos, “Common Aphrodite.” The domain of the Aphrodite who sprang from Ouranos’ member without sexual congress, and therefore partakes only of the male, is chaste homoerotic affection, but her counterpart who participates in the natures of both male and female oversees carnal homoerotic relations as well as all forms of heterosexual relations. Drawn to his beloved by qualities of intellect and soul, the worshipper of Aphrodite Ourania abstains from intercourse because the desire he experiences proceeds from a goddess who “has no stake in hybris,” that is, physical subjection of another (Pl. Symp. 181c). Although it is Plato’s spokesman Pausanias who gives classic expression to this doctrine, it was current long before his time as a key element of the discursive code by which the aristocracy attempted to distinguish its way of life from that of the masses.
The bond of erastês and erômenos was also associated in oligarchic discourse with resistance to despotism. Anonymous drinking songs circulating orally at late sixth-century symposia praised the heroism of the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogiton and celebrated the assassination of Hipparchus, brother of the tyrant Hippias, in 514 BCE. Earlier in the century, their father Pisistratus had staged a series of coups that eventually gave him firm control of Athens, to which Hippias succeeded upon his father’s death in 527. Although the Pisistratid dynasty respected Solon’s laws and furthered the economic growth he had initiated, Aristogiton and Harmodius, lover and beloved, conspired to kill both brothers. Legend says that they were motivated by an altruistic desire to abolish one-man rule, but Thucydides instead ascribes the conspiracy to private enmities: Hipparchus had made an unsuccessful attempt to seduce Harmodius away from Aristogiton, and, after being spurned, had publicly insulted Harmodius’ sister (6.54–59). The pair managed to slay only Hipparchus and were themselves killed in retaliation, and Hippias’ rule then proved even more despotic (Hdt. 6.123). Four years later, through the intervention of Sparta, Hippias was expelled from power.
Aristogiton and Harmodius quickly became emblems of the courage and devotion fostered by pederastic erôs. With the passage of time, a conceptual opposition between tyranny and homoeroticism arose. Supporters of pederasty advanced the political argument that erotic bonding was more productive of citizen unity than kinship ties (Leitao 2002: 157–62). Men and youths united in friendship were said to be particularly devoted to freedom and the protection of civic institutions. Once again we can call upon Plato’s banquet speaker Pausanias to articulate those sentiments (Symp. 182b.6–c.7):
In many parts of Ionia and elsewhere where they live under Persian rule pederasty is thought to be reprehensible. To the Persians it is wrong, along with philosophy and dedication to sport, because they are governed by tyrants. For I do not think it suits rulers that their subjects should conceive high ambitions or form strong bonds of affection and partnership, which those two other institutions and Eros in particular greatly tend to produce. In fact the tyrants here learned that lesson well, since Aristogiton’s love [erôs] and Harmodius’ affection [philia] destroyed their regime.
Later in the fifth century, however, the ideological split between mass and elite narrowed as the less privileged began to adopt certain upper-class ways. The symposium, for example, was taken up by a wider public. References to sympotic procedures and etiquette permeate Old Comedy, implying that practices were well known to audiences and that sympotic issues were of enough concern to become a recurrent dramatic theme (Fisher 2000: 358). While the banquet still possesses upper-class associations in comedies such as Aristophanes’ Wasps, other plays show poorer citizens enjoying the pleasures of formal drinking or dining (Wilkins 2000: 202–13). Incidence of sympotic scenes on cheap tableware may indicate that merchants, artisans, and even rural households participated in such gatherings, on a less lavish scale, of course (Pellizer 1990: 181). Davidson actually posits a “continuum of consumption that parallels the socio-economic continuum”: quantity and quality of food, wine, and entertainment would have varied, but conviviality followed the same protocols (1997: 238).
Since institutionalized pederasty was so closely integrated with the symposium as a cultural phenomenon, did pederastic observances trickle down as well? Inscribed potsherds from a dining hall in the agora, or civic center, of fifth-century Athens, where officials drawn from all social and economic classes ate together at public expense, indicate that the “discourse of pederasty” was in vogue there, for graffiti designate certain named youths as kalos, “beautiful” (Steiner 2002: 357–61). Similarly, references to Aristogiton and Harmodius as founders of the Athenian political system in Aristophanes (Eq. 786–7) and the Greek orators (for example, Dem. 19.280, Hyp. 4.3, 6.39) indicate that the tyrannicidal pair were now honored as popular heroes; their pederastic love had become “part of the sexual ideology of the democracy as a whole” (Wohl 2002: 6). Even Aeschines acknowledges them as public benefactors, differentiating their “pure and lawful love” from the base affairs of his adversary (1.140). Yet embracing a convivial tradition or admiring the bravery of a legendary historical couple need not rule out manifestations of disapproval in other contexts.
In the later fifth and fourth centuries there is evidence of considerable objection to the arrogance of the wealthy and well-bred, which, taken to extremes, could result in abusive treatment of other citizens – one of the offenses punishable under the law of hybris. Since the oligarchic ideology of entitlement to rule was grounded upon claims of innate moral superiority, democratic rhetoric sought to expose the wickedness of the upper classes. One explicit attack upon the condescending manner and dissolute lifestyle of the nobility is contained in the fourth-century forensic speech Against Conon. This is an indictment composed by the orator Demosthenes and written for delivery to a panel of jurors by the plaintiff in a trial for assault and battery.3
The accuser is Ariston, a young soldier in training, who claims he was physically beaten by the defendant Conon, a man of over fifty, his son Ctesias, and a group of supporters. Ariston describes how Conon, imitating a victorious fighting cock, then flapped his elbows like wings and crowed over him while he lay stunned on the ground (Dem. 54.8–9). Later he accuses his assailants of gross depravity at their symposia: “for these are the people who initiate each other with the rituals of the erect phallos, and do the kinds of things that ordinary human beings cannot even speak of, let alone do, without incurring great shame” (54.17). The witnesses Conon will call to testify to his innocence are tarred, he adds, with the same brush because they are moral degenerates given over to shocking forms of private vice (“men who by day wear dour expressions and affect Spartan airs and put on threadbare cloaks and thin-soled shoes, but when they assemble and are among themselves leave nothing vile or shameful undone”), ready to perjure themselves in order to assist other members of their hetaireia (54.34). Finally, Conon’s own youthful conduct is advanced as further proof of his godlessness, for he supposedly belonged to a gang of rakes that blasphemously devoured offerings to the underworld goddess Hecate and collected and dined upon the testicles of pigs slain as purificatory sacrifices at the beginning of the Athenian assembly (54.39). Elite exclusivity thus lends support to a charge of impious and unspeakable orgies.
The allegations found in Against Conon seem at odds with K. J. Dover’s sweeping claim that Greek culture as a whole recognized adult male homosexual desire as natural and legitimate (1978: 1). Though the availability of male prostitutes made sexual gratification quick and easy to obtain for anyone whose tastes lay in that direction, pederasty as a system was class-marked because courtship required leisure and money. Relations of lover and beloved were charged, as we have seen, with considerable moral tension, and not only because of the law concerning self-prostitution. In Plato’s Symposium Pausanias admits that the code of conduct for the Athenian erastês, as opposed to those in force in certain other city-states, is complex and apparently self-contradictory (180c–185c). But, he adds, concerns about pederasty pertain to the welfare of the erômenos and not to the intrinsic moral quality of the practice: “it is not clear-cut, but, as I said at the start, pederasty is neither good nor bad in itself, but good when conducted properly and bad when conducted improperly” (183d.4–6). On the surface, however, the rhetoric of Against Conon might appear to be condemning same-sex intercourse as something all decent folk denounce and only a lawless minority dare to engage in. Was romantic pederasty, then, a cultural phenomenon accepted by the masses, or was it stigmatized? Those who argue for general social hostility to the custom have recourse to two kinds of evidence: excerpts from Old Comedy and additional speeches from Athenian law courts.
Old Comedy was a state institution that, like the modern political cartoon, mocked civic leaders for conduct deemed inappropriate, helping to mold public opinion of their policies. Playwrights display a self-reflexive awareness of their role as topical commentators, especially in the parabasis, an interlude in the middle of the performance when the chorus breaks dramatic illusion and “steps forward” (parabainein) to address the spectators on behalf of the author. Comedies were staged under government sponsorship, subject to review by the official appointed to authorize the expenses of production, and presented at either the Great Dionysia or the Lenaia, two annual religious festivals celebrating the communal authority of the Athenian dêmos. Thus they can be used as evidence for determining which matters the populace as a whole regarded as urgent or problematical (Henderson 1990: 286–91, 293–307, esp. 296). For his part, the Old Oligarch is grimly cognizant of the institutional character of Old Comedy, its ideological bias, and, most of all, its corresponding propensity to serve class interests ([Xen.] Ath. pol. 2.18):
Furthermore, they [the dêmos] do not allow playwrights to satirize or speak poorly of the citizen body, in order that they may not hear bad things about themselves. But if one individual desires to attack another, they encourage him to do so privately, well aware that the satiric victim is for the most part not of the citizenry or the majority, but either a wealthy or a well born or an influential person, and that few of the poor and common folk are lampooned in comedy, and not even those unless it is for meddling in others’ affairs and striving to get more than the rest. Hence they are not upset when such figures are ridiculed.
On the basis of the Old Oligarch’s testimony, we can assume that the treatment of sexuality in Aristophanes – the only representative of Old Comedy whose plays survive entire – would not be greatly at odds with the sentiments of the general public. The fact that in Aristophanes’ plays homoeroticism is never treated in a romantic way, but instead stripped of all emotional coloring and couched in crude physiological terms, therefore requires investigation.
The lofty and self-serving assertions of oligarchic ideology made the protocols of boy-love an easy target of ridicule. It is no surprise, then, that comedy raises a laugh by debunking such pretensions: all professed advocates of chaste pederastic erôs are shown as hypocrites, all boys yield out of venality. To cite one example of how Aristophanes discredits the posturing of aficionados of pederasty: in the central scene of Clouds (889–1114), personifications of the traditional and the newfangled ways of training the young, labeled respectively the “Just” (Dikaios) and the “Unjust” (Adikos) Argument, conduct a debate over education. The conflict is presented from an elite standpoint, with Just Argument defending the time-honored regimen and Unjust Argument attacking it. Just Argument begins with an encomium of old-style paideia in the Spartan manner, emphasizing silence, orderliness, rote memorization of traditional songs, self-restraint, and above all modesty. It soon becomes evident, however, that his concern over adolescent decorum veils an unwholesome preoccupation with genitals (973–7):
When sitting in the gymnasium, the boys had to extend a thigh
so as never to show anything offensive to outsiders,
and then, when they stood up again, to smooth the sand,
taking care to leave no trace of their boyhood for lovers.
No boy then would ever oil himself below the navel, so that
dew and down bloomed on his tender parts as on a quince.
As the scene continues, the unmasking of Just Argument becomes more drastic: his moralizing rhetoric is dismissed as wholly outmoded, and his use of mythic examples made to betray itself as self-contradictory. Finally, Unjust Argument crushes him by demonstrating that his most loaded term of reproach, to be “wide-arseholed” (euryprôktos) from constant buggering, can be categorically applied to all who set standards of behavior for the community – prosecutors, tragedians, politicians – and finally to most of the spectators.
Costuming and staging enhanced the buffoonery. An ancient commentator on Aristophanes informs us that the two Arguments, dressed as fighting cocks, were brought on stage in wicker cages. An Attic red-figured kalyx krater dated to the 420s BCE, formerly in the J. Paul Getty Museum but now repatriated to Italy, portrays two actors costumed as roosters with a flute-player standing between them (fig. 4.1). Both figures are markedly ithyphallic and poised to attack each other. Although the scene was first identified as a contemporary representation of the chorus of Aristophanes’ Birds, Taplin (1987) makes a good case for it being an illustration of the contest of the two Arguments in Clouds.4 Csapo (1993), who agrees with Taplin, unpacks the symbolic meanings of the fighting cock in ancient Greek culture, including its associations with warfare and specifically with young men of military age, with the erect phallos (another reason for the presence of the phallos-bird in vase-painting iconography), and, in the case of the defeated rooster, with the passive male homosexual. For this reason, he argues, both the “virile” Just Argument and the “effeminate” Unjust Argument are appropriately garbed as cocks. Csapo’s analysis helps us realize how viciously Conon had insulted Ariston’s manhood: in allegedly crowing over him after knocking him down and beating him, the older man was effectively calling the younger a pathic.
Accusations of passive homosexuality, encapsulated in allusions to the width of the anus and in the stock jibe katapugôn (conventionally translated “buggered,” but etymologically summoning up the picture of the rump, pugê, offered for penetration), are the most frequent form of abuse in the plays, applied to audiences and public figures alike. One constant running joke is that the most eminent politicians have the most spacious prôktoi (“anuses”); it carries a hidden charge of elite nepotism, implying that these leaders have achieved power by calling in favors earned through juvenile sexual submission. Another assumption is that all holders of public office take bribes as a matter of course, having learned to do so when, as boys, they solicited gifts from admirers. In the late play Wealth the analogy between receiving courtship presents and prostitution is explicitly drawn. Like courtesans, boy whores ask for money, but good (chrêstoi) boys ask instead for a fine horse or a pack of hunting dogs (149–59). Hubbard notes that chrêstos is an “aristocratic code word,” a synonym for kalos k’agathos (1998: 52). Horses and hunting dogs, too, place these erômenoi in the circles of the nobility. Comic differentiation of “good boys” from “whores” replicates the ideological dissociation of virtuous erôs from ordinary physical desire, satirically aligning it with moralizing rhetoric in which chrêstoi designates “ourselves” as opposed to the rude dêmos.
Fig. 4.1 Attic red-figure calyx krater in the collection of the Museo Nazionale di Napoli (inv. no. 205339) and formerly in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu. Source: Drawing by Christina L. Kolb (CLK in logo).
The political allegory of Knights is grounded on a metonymic fusion of political opportunism and sexual depravity. Old man Demos, who represents the Athenian populace, is in thrall to his cunning slave Paphlagon, a thinly disguised surrogate for Aristophanes’ habitual target, the demagogue Cleon. Frustrated by Paphlagon’s sway over their master, two other slaves find a Sausage Seller who is even more of a rogue and cheat and support him in a successful bid to become the new favorite of Demos. Pederastic courtship is a dominant motif in the latter part of the play, since rivalry for influence over the foolish old man is persistently rendered as competition for a pretty boy’s affections. Here we must pause to analyze the topical content of that trope.
Pericles himself may have popularized the image of the good citizen as a lover (erastês) of his city (Dover 1972: 91). When re-creating his funerary oration over those soldiers who fell during the first year of the Peloponnesian War, the historian Thucydides makes him say at its climax that the survivors must develop an even firmer resolve and daring, not by listening to speeches but rather “by gazing at the genuine power of Athens day by day and becoming her lovers” (2.43.1). In this transferred political context erastês is a noun that still retains its prior associations with sympotic, and particularly pederastic, verse (Ludwig 2002: 145–50). Whether Pericles coined it or not, that metaphor would greatly appeal to the average citizen: by invoking erotic literary conventions, it turned the listener, no matter how poor or base, into a manly and honorable subject whose patriotic admiration could reflect his own idealized image of himself (Wohl 2002: 55–62). But Pericles’ death in 429 marked a crucial break with the past and the beginning of Athens’s long slide toward ruin. Thucydides testifies that Pericles had exercised decisive leadership by relying on his own moral authority, but his successors, jockeying for power, catered instead to the people’s pleasure and took direction from them (2.65.8–11). It was thus an easy step for Aristophanes to cast his two scoundrels as self-professed suitors of Athens’s collective male governing body.
In Knights the figure of the patriotic lover is thoroughly debased (Wohl 2002: 80–92). Paphlagon and the Sausage Seller begin their courtship of Demos by declaring themselves rivals for his affection (732–3). Unfortunately, the Sausage Seller complains, “you are like all these erômenoi: you don’t accommodate the noble and good [tous … kalous te k’agathous] but give yourself instead to lampsellers, cobblers, shoemakers, and tanners” (736–40).5 Sexual submission, tricky enough for the beautiful adolescent boy to negotiate, is, of course, utterly disgusting in the case of a senile old man. In a travesty of aristocratic gift-giving, the suitors aggressively lavish delicacies upon their beloved. Comedy sees no dividing line between gifts and payments, so Demos’ eager reception of presents brands him a prostitute. His admirers are likewise prostitutes: indeed, the Sausage Seller finally proves he is Paphlagon’s destined replacement by confessing how he had made his living: “I dealt in sausages and was fucked some” (1242). “Throughout Knights,” Wohl observes, “the scandal of prostitution lies close to the surface of the love affair between demos and demagogue, with each party occupying by turns the position of whore and john” (2002: 88).
References to sundry uses for oral and anal cavities pervade the drama. Gratifying the masses with flattery is comically transposed into indulging them with food (they are to be “sweetened with gastronomic phraselets,” 215). The Sausage Seller recalls being spotted as a promising politician when he hid a piece of stolen “meat” up his ass (423–6). Athens’s reaction to the doings of its politicians is to gape in stupidity; at 1263 it is labeled “a city of gapers.” But the verb “to gape,” chaskein, is regularly applied to a pathic’s stretched anus (Henderson 1975: 211), and Paphlagon is described as standing “with one leg on Pylos, the other in the Assembly … his ass is right among the Chaones [i.e., the ‘Gapers’]” (75–8). The open mouths of the combatants, polluted with the foul abuse they hurl at each other, are likewise assimilated to the yawning anus. References to buggery are interlaced with scatological humor and jokes about crepitation: about to make his maiden speech in the Assembly, the Sausage Seller is delighted when a pathic (katapugôn) farts on his right, taking it for a favorable omen (638–9). The casting of Demos in the subject position of the erômenos within a context of anal and fecal imagery underscores the idea of buggery and so breaks the taboo mentioned by the Old Oligarch against depicting the populace in a sordid manner.
In contrast to the negative way in which Old Comedy handles sex between males, heterosexual activity, especially in the context of marriage, is closely associated with such positive Aristophanic themes as peace, abundance, prosperity, rural piety, and celebration. Acharnians closes with the hero swaggering off to a party, a pretty girl on each arm, and two other comedies, Peace and Birds, end with a triumphant wedding procession. The classic affirmation of the societal importance of conjugal relations is Lysistrata, not for its farcical treatment of the wives’ sex-strike – which blandly ignores other means of relief open to their husbands – but for its siting of the comic action in and around the Acropolis. Athena’s symbolic partnership with Aphrodite in furthering Lysistrata’s peace process is corollary to their divine collaboration in promoting the continuity of families from one generation to the next (Loraux 1993: 147–83). In this play, as on contemporary vases, marital sexuality is shown as integral to the survival of both the oikos and the polis.
All scholars agree that the basic orientation of Old Comedy is heterosexual, but they debate how seriously audiences were expected to take the jokes about pervasive sexual degeneracy in these and other plays. Dover (1978: 135–53) can find no passage in which erotic interest in boys per se is castigated, and Henderson (1975: 216–18) maintains that the poet’s real intent in choosing to target pederasty was to deflate the moral snobbishness of the nobility. On the other hand, Hubbard (1998: 50–9) maintains that “[h]omosexual acts of any sort tend to be associated with elite self-indulgence and corruption” in Aristophanes because the cult of boy-love, with its web of secret influences and connections, helped the upper class to monopolize power and live well at the expense of the resentful poor. Cantarella understands the playwright’s witticisms as historical evidence: she thinks they indicate that the practice of “protracting homosexual relations beyond the proper age limit” was so common that it was creating a hostile reaction against pederasty, exacerbated by concerns over the decline in manpower resulting from the Peloponnesian War (1992: 64–5). The most accurate assessment must fall somewhere between those extremes. In the context of a fertility festival honoring Dionysos, outrageous sexual shamelessness – manifest in the leather phallos worn by comic actors – was ritually meaningful, and pederasty lent itself to particularly blatant and shocking expressions of obscenity. The exploitation of whoring and penetration as controlling metaphors in Knights certainly bears out Hubbard’s claim, but pejorative references to pederasty in other plays seem more informed by class tensions than by forthright moral opposition. Yet the notorious elusiveness of humor, culturally specific and thus hard to evaluate at a distance of 2,500 years, probably means that we will never be able to agree on the tone of many of Aristophanes’ jokes or to identify the groups in the audience to whom they were intended to appeal.
Most of our surviving forensic speeches, an extensive collection including all the canonical Attic orators, were delivered in the early to mid-fourth century BCE, slightly later than the heyday of Old Comedy. Law court speeches had to appeal to a panel of several hundred jurors made up, for the most part, of ordinary citizens. Certain passages have accordingly been cited to demonstrate that the erotic preoccupations of the few were the focus of strong social disapproval among the many (Hubbard 1998: 59–69). In Lysias 3, for example, a wealthy older man, accused of striking his rival Simon in a brawl over a youth, pleads that he himself was the victim of far worse injuries at the other fellow’s hands. He did not bring a lawsuit, he explains, because he feared that exposure of his infatuation would make him look stupid and ridiculous (9). One awkward feature of this case is that Simon claimed the boy was hired under contract; if true, the speaker, who had at one point absconded with him, was legally in the wrong (10, 22).6 Other courtroom opponents are accused of wasting an estate on affairs with boys (Isae. 10.25) or of hiring a citizen boy as a sexual partner (Dem. 45.79). Each time there is a mercenary underpinning to the relationship, in shabby contrast to the rhetoric of virtuous erôs promulgated by the aristocracy. Davidson (2007: 447–65) believes that an ethos of commercial sex was encroaching upon traditional ideals of courtship, trailing cynical opinions of all same-sex bonding in its wake. However, none of the examples given here indicates that affairs with boys, free or slave, were themselves censured, for anticipated hostile reactions on the part of the jury would arise from such accompanying circumstances as age-inappropriate conduct, extravagance, and inducing a citizen to prostitute himself. Among addresses to Athenian juries, then, Against Conon may be exceptional in its attempt to cast the homoerotic activities of the rich in a menacing and ugly light.
Aeschines’ speech Against Timarchus, on the other hand, comprises our strongest evidence for approval of institutionalized pederasty among the general citizen population, at least at the time it was delivered (Fisher 2001: 58–62). We must bear in mind that the prosecution case is absolutely circumstantial: Timarchus was not enrolled on the list of prostitutes from whom the authorities collected taxes (Aeschin. 1.119–20), nor were there witnesses to a contract for specified services (160–5). Aeschines is limited to arguing from probability. When pronouncing his indictment, then, he scrupulously distinguishes his opponent’s alleged conduct from the behavior of an honorable erômenos. First, though owning enough to live moderately, Timarchus freely chose (proêirêmenos, 40) to disgrace himself, being addicted (douleuôn, “enslaved”) to expensive habits, gourmandizing and women (42). There is no insinuation that he was himself inclined toward passivity or even enjoyed the acts performed upon him (Fisher 2001: 173; the nasty implication is summed up by Davidson [2007: 455] as “gay for pay”). Second, he supposedly went with not one but a whole succession of lovers, so that his activities can be categorized not just as hetairêsis, “being a (sexual) companion,” but as porneia, “whoring” (51–2). Third, he is disqualified from exercising his public rights on two counts, for he squandered his patrimony in addition to debasing his body (94–100). Finally, to draw an absolute line between Timarchus’ activities and the practice of decent love, Aeschines brings on a straw man, an unnamed “general” seemingly familiar with the pursuits of the gymnasium, that is, a man of considerable leisure (132). This speaker, he says, will defend Timarchus by charging that the prosecution is a hypocritical attack on venerated cultural traditions, including the self-sacrifice of Harmodius and Aristogiton and the splendid friendship of Achilles and Patroclus, by a man notorious for his own pursuit of boys. Into the mouth of this patronizing advocate Aeschines puts an appeal that takes social endorsement of pederasty for granted (133–4):
For if, he says, some persons malign physical beauty and reduce it to a hardship for those possessing it, will you not be publicly voting against the same thing you ask for privately? It will seem peculiar to him if you all, when about to have a child, pray that your unborn sons be handsome and noble (kalous k’agathous) in appearance and worthy of the city; but, persuaded as it seems by Aeschines, you disenfranchise those already born, of whom the city may rightly be proud, if they excel in beauty and youth and arouse passion in some and become objects of strife due to erôs.
Clearly the general assumes the jurors share his own conviction that attractiveness in young men, even to the point of sparking off erotic rivalries, is a desirable attribute. Aeschines, who professes himself firmly in agreement, goes on, now speaking in his own voice, to differentiate between self-prostitution and chaste, worthy love (137), drawing on the poets to remind his listeners of what the latter is. That he addresses the distinction at such length (141–59) indicates that there was no litmus test to divide good boys from bad apart from motive, which was not all that easily determined (Ormand 2009: 85). In the absence of hard evidence for Timarchus’ actual guilt, the verdict of the jury must be a repudiation of a perceived threat to democratic moral standards (Lape 2006: 144–8). Pederasty, it follows, was felt to have a role to play in the democratic state.
From the admittedly complicated evidence, what conclusions can reasonably be drawn about attitudes toward the institution of pederasty on the part of the dêmos? Since homoerotic desire is taken for granted and confessed without apology in forensic speeches, there must have been no stigma attached to interest in boys per se. Yet the rhetoric of pederasty was duplicitous, for it glossed over the physical aspects of the relationship and mystified its inequalities in order to validate elite moral superiority. Aristophanes’ plays unmask its apologists as frauds, gleefully allude to the otherwise unmentionable act of anal intercourse, and imply that political preference in return for sexual services was a standard trade-off. Such mockery could achieve its objective only by tapping into a vein of popular cynicism, as diagnosed by Davidson (see above). Closely linked as it was in the ordinary mind to both class privilege and hypocrisy, reference to elite pederasty could summon up corollary impressions of unbridled hybris. Ariston dwells upon the debauchery of Conon and his sons not because the jurors might disapprove of homoerotic activity but because they would react with horror to the subtext of the charge: the old man and his associates, who in the privacy of the dining-room “leave nothing vile or shameful undone” (Dem. 54.34), are equally unscrupulous about riding roughshod over others. Therefore, when aristocratic notions of entitlement clash with the democratic ethic of self-control and restraint, censure unerringly fastens upon the great point of anxiety within the pederastic system – the fear that the junior partner may not make the transition to adult masculinity, becoming a lifelong pleasure-mad effeminate, a despicable katapugôn or kinaidos.
Vampires may not exist, but they are good to think with, and for that reason they dwell among us. Ever since the late nineteenth century, when Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker first popularized the literary construct of an immortal blood-sucking fiend, vampires, female and male, have prowled our entertainment media – so much so that an extraterrestrial observer monitoring current television programming from a planet circling Alpha Centauri might be forgiven for assuming that such creatures pose a real and present danger to human life. Buffy’s adversaries, especially in the early seasons, were chiefly vampires of an old-fashioned stripe. In the last decades of the twentieth century, though, we also witnessed the emergence of the New Vampire, the angst-ridden protagonist of novels and films steeped in morbid eroticism. Expansion of the literary formula to allow for an empathetic and morally complex treatment of vampires was inevitable because as mythic residents of our imaginary they stand for a plethora of terrors – the universal dread of death, obviously, but also culturally specific fears such as formerly unmentionable sexualities (Auerbach 1995: 1–8). In Dracula, for example, desire may be “filtered … through the mask of a monstrous or demonic heterosexuality” (Craft 1984: 111), but for its Victorian readers the ghastliness of the novel was intensified by intuitive perception of the Count’s secret homoerotic designs upon the protagonist, Jonathan Harker. Thus the monster’s spellbinding allure evoked the fascination of what was forbidden, outcast, closeted. When homosexuality became a topic of open discussion, vampires were at last permitted to step into the role of protagonist and even teenage romantic hero. Despite our present-day frankness about the secret they once embodied, however, the Undead have lost none of their potency, as they have simply gone on to attach themselves to yet unrealized areas of the repressed.
That excursus into vampirology was not irrelevant because the kinaidos (or, in his Roman incarnation, the cinaedus) may have been to the classical world more or less what the vampire was, up until recently, to us. The two Greek stereotypes of aberrant masculinity, as Foucault defined them (1986: 81–2, 84–6), were the tyrant, who, taking advantage of his absolute power, indulges his passions freely, and the effeminate male. In Aristophanes, the latter is a katapugôn, but by the fourth century the word kinaidos had become the more familiar term (Davidson 1997: 167), and so the one we will use.7 According to John J. Winkler, that figure is the notional opposite of the hoplite or citizen soldier, whose honor was invested in the inviolability of his body. “The conception of a kinaidos,” Winkler states, “was of a man socially deviant in his entire being, principally observable in behavior that flagrantly violated or contravened the dominant social definition of masculinity. To this extent, kinaidos was a category of person, not just of acts” (1990a: 45–6). As far as real life was concerned, however, the category may have been a null set; it is conceivable, in other words, that there were no actual kinaidoi, any more than there are actual vampires. Nor would it matter. As a “scare-image” for enforcing the protocols of manhood and guaranteeing that those in the public eye would observe unspoken rules of decorum, the stereotype, in and of itself, had demonstrable social value. “While the hoplite warrior is the ideal self to which every well-to-do citizen looks, the kinaidos, mentioned only with laughter or indignation, is the unreal, but dreaded, anti-type of masculinity behind every man’s back” (Winkler 1990a: 46).
Kinaidoi were supposedly recognizable by external signs. Foppish, overelaborate dress was a dead giveaway, as were affected language and gestures and, above all, “feminine” appearance or demeanor. In the comic theater, such characters are true androgynes. Aristophanes’ Women at the Thesmophoria brings two of the tribe on stage: first the tragic poet Agathon (101–265) and, later, the infamous Cleisthenes, pilloried for effeminacy in several other plays (574–654). Agathon is represented as semi-transvestite, wearing a woman’s gown but equipped, incongruously, with both male and female accessories, like sword and mirror, which enable him to write parts for both sexes; his fellow tragedian Euripides describes him as “nice-featured, pale, clean-shaven, high-voiced, delicate, good to look at” (191–2). Cleisthenes is also masked as a smooth-cheeked cross-dresser, claiming to be a friend and enthusiastic supporter of the assemblage of Athenian women, whom he addresses as “sisters of my own sort” (syngeneis toumou tropou, 573). In a subsequent orgy of gender bending, the play’s masculine leads, Euripides and his Old Relative, wind up in drag. The hilarious contrast between their poor efforts to pass as females and the easy gender transgressions of the two “real” effeminates burlesques a fundamental convention of Greek theater – all women’s roles in tragedy and comedy were played, as on the Elizabethan stage, by male actors. In the world of comedy, then, the katapugôn character collapses the antithesis of male and female, one of the most rigid of Greek conceptual polarities, and in doing so self-consciously calls attention to the artificiality of all theatrical devices (Zeitlin 1996c: 385–6).
Outside comic fictions, though, what did the labels “katapugôn” and “kinaidos” really denote? Most current work on Greek sexuality follows the lead of Dover, who assigns katapugôn the very specific meaning of “allowing oneself to be penetrated anally” (1978: 142–3). Winkler adds a psychological dimension: if sex is construed as competition, with the penetrated always the loser, “the kinaidos is a man who desires to lose” and who, like a woman, derives pleasure from being mastered (1990a: 54). As noted above, however, Davidson believes that Dover’s and Foucault’s power-penetration model has been imposed upon ancient Greek culture erroneously (2001: 7–20; 2007: 101–66). Thus he argues that the terms designate not passivity but lack of self-control. A katapugôn is lustful and promiscuous, unrestrained in his pleasure-seeking. The kinaidos, too, is sexually insatiable, but he does not necessarily have a preference for the anal position; rather, it is in his inability to attain sexual satisfaction that he resembles women. Still, Dover’s and Davidson’s explanations are not mutually exclusive, for a slur often can be applied in both a narrow and an extended sense. Thus the epithet “kinaidos” seems to function on two planes, conceptualized “not only in anxiously universalizing terms but also in comfortably minoritizing ones” (Halperin 2002: 34, following a formulation by Sedgwick 1990: 1). While it serves to warn each citizen male of the dangers of abject submission to any of the bodily appetites, it can also designate a freakish outsider whose craving for perverse forms of pleasure can be attributed to physiological, mental, and/or moral abnormality.
One text that seems to incorporate both meanings is Plato’s Gorgias 494a–495a. Socrates is there interrogating Callicles, a young nobleman anticipating an important career in Athenian politics, who eloquently champions the directives of nature as opposed to those of law. Callicles asserts that nature, physis, has destined the strongest to rule, justifiably exempting him from conventional constraints (nomoi) legislated by the masses to enforce a spurious equality (484b–d). For such a man it is, according to nature, right and proper to gratify all his desires without restraint (491e), and that kind of life will be, in turn, both a virtuous and a happy one. Socrates is attempting to refute the latter tenet:
SOCRATES: … And tell me, do you say such a life involves feeling hungry and eating when you are hungry?
CALLICLES: I do.
SOCRATES: And drinking when you’re thirsty?
CALLICLES: Agreed, and that living happily means having all the other desires and being able to gratify them with impunity.
SOCRATES: Good for you, my friend. Carry on as you’ve begun, and don’t hold back out of shame. It appears that I mustn’t refrain through shame either. So first tell me if living happily also means itching and scratching, having abundant freedom to scratch, and passing one’s life scratching.
CALLICLES: Socrates, you’re outlandish and an utter rabble-rouser.
SOCRATES: Callicles, that’s just how I both confounded and shamed Polos and Gorgias, but you will not be rattled nor shamed. For you’re tough-minded. So just answer me that.
CALLICLES: Very well, I agree that the person scratching himself might live pleasurably.
SOCRATES: And if pleasurably, then also happily?
CALLICLES: Of course.
SOCRATES: And what if he should scratch only his head …? Or need I ask anything further? Look, Callicles, what will you reply if someone should ask you in succession to this question all those that follow? The culmination of all such questions, the life of kinaidoi, is it not dreadful and shameful and sad? Or will you dare to say that those persons are happy if they gain what they want with impunity?
CALLICLES: Aren’t you ashamed, Socrates, to steer the conversation toward such matters?
SOCRATES: Am I steering it there, noble sir, or is it that man who says expressly that those who gratify themselves, however they gratify themselves, are happy, and does not distinguish among pleasures, which are good and which are bad?
The operative word in this passage is aischunthênai, “to feel or show shame,” which in Greek cultural terms could come very close to our notion of “losing face.” Callicles had previously objected that Socrates’ tactics of cross-examination unfairly compelled an adversary into contradicting himself to avoid making a statement that would shame him in the eyes of others, despite his private confidence in its truth. Because shame is a sanction imposed by convention, which Callicles rejects, he deems himself shame-proof. By alluding obliquely to the upsetting topic of kinaidoi through the euphemism “scratching one’s head,” Socrates demonstrates that there are social conventions even a Callicles instinctively respects.8
This passage establishes that in Socrates’ mind the kinaidos is “the paradigm of insatiability, of desire never-to-be-fulfilled” (Davidson 1997: 174). That does not fully explain, though, why Callicles is so disgusted: for him, a kinaidos must be something more than a mere symbol of unbridled appetite if decent men do not bring up the subject among themselves. One speaker thus employs the stereotype to represent the antithesis of manly virtue, while the other hears a direct reference to the forbidden subject of anal penetration. The gulf between the two senses of kinaidos is bridged by a system of medicine that can ascribe the insatiability of such a person to his physiological makeup. Semen, which in normal men flows into the testicles and penis, causing an erection, passes into the anal region (hedra) of those whose natural channels are blocked. The presence of that moisture provokes sexual arousal in the area where it collects. Because the secretion is slight, however, and cannot force an exit, and cools down quickly, pathics are insatiable (aplêstoi), like women ([Arist.] Pr. 4.26.29–30). Both the kinaidos’s desire for anal penetration and his sexual voraciousness are explained by his inability to experience a manly erection and orgasm with its consequent release.9
Of course, the scientific postulate that effeminacy results from semen leaching into the fundament is no less alien to human physiology than the superstition that vampires feed on blood. Consequently, we still have not determined whether there were “real” kinaidoi, as opposed to a stereotype that could be conveniently trotted out on the stage or hurled as a derogatory term at a political opponent – as today we might call someone who financially preys on the less fortunate a “bloodsucker.” The question is a knotty one because cultural differences play an important part. Among Roman social historians one item of debate is whether individuals defined themselves as cinaedi, employing the word to categorize their self-perceived sexual identity, like lesbians appropriating the offensive expression “dyke.” When depictions of the “katapugôn” or “kinaidos” turn up in classical Greek sources, though, the contexts are either fictional or pejorative, and therefore suspect as historical evidence. Still, there is one surprising exception, found in what has by now become our casebook for classical Greek sexuality, Plato’s Symposium.
At this point, we should take a minute to look at the dialogue in its entirety. The Symposium purports to be a record of a conversation that took place at the playwright Agathon’s house during a celebration of his first tragic victory at the Lenaia festival in 416 BCE. In lieu of the usual entertainment, the guests decide to offer extemporaneous speeches in praise of Eros, and six contributions are recounted verbatim, culminating in an account of the god that Socrates claims he received from the wise woman Diotima. Immediately afterward, the charismatic politician Alcibiades crashes the party and delivers his own drunken eulogy in praise of Socrates. His strained friendship with the philosopher in his youth still chafes him, and he betrays a seething mix of emotions, including obsessive yearning, resentment, and self-pity, which Socrates deflects with his customary noncommittal irony. Plato’s deft, urbane sketches of the historical figures present have been used as evidence of their actual personalities, but the validity of his characterizations may not be easy to pin down.
Among the guests is Pausanias, a firm advocate of the elite ideology of pederasty – and, not coincidentally, Agathon’s recognized sexual partner (Symp. 177d.8, 193b.6–c.5). His speech defending the educational benefits of a noble love expresses a conviction grounded upon his own private experience and vindicated by his protégé’s brilliant success (Penwill 1978: 146–7). Some biographical information about Pausanias and Agathon has come down to us.10 At the time of the party they had already been together for a number of years, ever since Agathon’s early adolescence (Pl. Prot. 315d–e). They remained constant companions, and when Agathon left Athens some time before 405 to take up residence at the court of king Archelaus of Macedon, Pausanias accompanied him (Ael. VH 2.21). Dover (1978: 144) conjectures that jokes about Agathon’s transvestitism arose from his practice of trimming his beard close so as to retain the appearance of youth expected of Pausanias’ erômenos.
Now, it should be obvious from what has preceded that Greek sexual rubrics created burdensome difficulties for partnerships that continued after the junior partner reached adulthood because the latter was understood to remain passive, compliant, and inferior – by observers, to be sure, as we have no idea what went on in the bedroom. Such relationships were discouraged, met either by disapproving silence or by overt hostility directed against the perceived subordinate member (Foucault 1986: 220). Taking his involvement with Pausanias as a given, however, Agathon’s friends at the symposium gallantly flatter his looks as though he were still a beautiful boy (at the dramatic time of the dialogue, he is in his late twenties). Agathon, for his part, goes along with the charade, toward the end camping it up with Socrates and Alcibiades, who pretend to be rivals for his affection (222c–223a). When Socrates invites Agathon to change places with Alcibiades and Agathon responds, “Gracious me [iou iou], Alcibiades, I couldn’t possibly stay here and simply must [pantos mallon] leave” (223a.3–5), the put-on falsetto is unmistakable; Agathon is playing the kinaidos for laughs. From the evidence of the Symposium, it appears that a relationship of two grown men, one openly accepting the role of passive partner, might in elite circles be the target of good-natured teasing but no revulsion. This suggests a “disconnect,” psychologically and ethically, between the polite conduct of a society where enduring male relationships, though rare, could exist if one partner was willing to brave the consequences, and the ideology of manhood with its disparagement of the kinaidos.
In Plato’s text, however, the relationship of Pausanias and Agathon is viewed from another, purportedly satirical, perspective by the dramatist Aristophanes, who is among the guests and speakers. (This dinner takes place five years before Aristophanes mounted his production of Women at the Thesmophoria. We don’t know whether he was ever invited back to Agathon’s house afterward.) Aristophanes speaks out of turn, having been temporarily incapacitated by a bout of hiccups. In contrast to the others, who have all delivered abstract eulogies of Eros, the playwright tells a fable (189c.2–d.6).11 In the beginning, the human race was perfectly spherical, double-bodied with four arms and four legs, and there were three sexes, male, female, and androgyne. As a punishment for their arrogance, Zeus split those ancestral beings in half. The bifurcated creatures, desperately missing their separated other half, neglected to provide for themselves and were in danger of dying off. Out of pity, the god bestowed sexual intercourse upon them so that the race might propagate itself and orgasm bring just enough temporary satisfaction to permit them to go on living. Ever since, we have been searching for our counterparts in an effort to fill the void we suffer because of our incompleteness.
Depending on the original nature of the entire being to which we once belonged, our desires are oriented toward partners of a given sex (191d–192a):
Any one of those men who are slices from the combined sex, the one previously called the androgyne, are lovers of women. Most adulterers descend from this line. Correspondingly, all those women who are lovers of men and adulteresses also originate from it. But whatever women are cuttings from the female sex do not even think about men, but are instead oriented toward women, and female “companions” are of this breed. Finally, those who are cut from male stock follow after the male, and as long as they are youths, because they are little slices of the male, they are fond of men and enjoy lying together with men and winding their limbs around them, and these are the finest boys and youths, because they are the most manly by nature. However, some say that they are shameless, but that’s untrue. For they don’t do such things out of shamelessness, but out of daring and manliness and virility, eagerly seeking what is like themselves. There’s solid proof for this, as, having grown up, such men are the only ones who enter politics.
Whole arguments for and against the “constructedness” of human sexuality have been based on this paragraph. On a straightforward reading, it appears that Plato’s Aristophanes, alone among ancient Greek and Roman sources, is conceptualizing attraction to one or the other sex not as a matter of taste or inclination but as an innate psychological compulsion. Furthermore, he is saying that human beings can be divided into three groups according to sexual preference: heterosexuals, male homosexuals, and female homosexuals. This has been taken to prove the essentialist contention that object-choice categorization is universal (Boswell 1990: 77), or, at least, for the Greeks, thinkable (Thorp 1992: 61). Against that hypothesis several objections have been raised. Aristophanes’ profession as comic poet is underscored by his hiccups (a gesture toward Old Comedy’s preoccupation with bodily functions) and by the obvious cross-reference to his own jokes about “wide-arsed” politicians in Clouds and other plays; his typology of sexual preference may be a fantasy no less preposterous than that of spherical hominoids. Again, his class of males attracted to males pointedly conforms to the age-asymmetrical configuration of pederasty: he dwells upon the boys who, at an early age, are attracted to men but says nothing at this point about adult male lovers who are relative coevals. In this his notion of male homosexuality differs radically from ours (Halperin 1990: 20–1). Finally, all of the object-based categories represented here – adulterers and adulteresses, women who prefer women, boys eager to embrace lovers – are transgressive, comprising behaviors that violate Greek social norms. Plato, then, may have invented these essentializing categories of compulsive adulterers and their ilk to further the overall philosophical goals of the dialogue (Carnes 1998: 111–15). What is surely not debatable, however, is that Aristophanes’ taxonomy is a means to an end, underscoring his thesis about the homogeneity and universality of sexual longing. Precisely because they are tangential to his main point, and so remain unstated, the ramifications of that categorical paradigm will no doubt continue to generate dispute.
As he draws to a close, the comedian warns his listeners against finding a covert thrust at present company in the myth (193b–c):
And Eryximachus had better not interrupt me by making fun of the speech and saying that I’m talking about Pausanias and Agathon (although perhaps even they may happen to be of that sort, both male in respect to nature). What I am saying – with reference to all, women as well as men – is that as human beings we would be happy if we could achieve our desire and each revert to his original nature by finding his personal beloved.
In the phrase “perhaps even they” (isôs … kai houtoi) one might hear an implication that Aristophanes is rising to the couple’s defense because their affair “is looked at somewhat askance” by the other guests (Thorp 1992: 60), or, conversely, a snide thrust at two obvious counter-examples to his assertion that partners in homoerotic relationships have the manliest natures (Ludwig 2002: 39–40). Here, again, though, we need to observe the line of argument more closely. Aristophanes declares that he has made a generalization about human psychology, and he goes out of his way to specify that both men and women were included in it. This is not as otiose as it might seem; we saw that in Hesiodic myth women could be treated as a different species, while Hippocratic medicine (discussed in Chapter 5) viewed the female body as fundamentally distinct from that of the male. Consequently, the application of the parable is categorical. Where Pausanias and Agathon fit under its rubrics is simply beside the point. But implicit in the speaker’s refusal to consider their case further is the premise that Agathon, unusual as he may be, is not an anomaly; his constitution and desires fall within the limits of the normative.
Let me conclude with one last observation about Agathon’s characterization in the Symposium. He gets a bad press from most commentators, who pronounce him vain and shallow. Admittedly, his panegyric to Eros is elegantly crafted but superficial, and Socrates has no difficulty shooting down its main point (199c.3–201c.9). Even Penwill, who appreciates its verve, finds fault with the artist: Agathon “is attractive, but lacks the true sophia (‘wisdom’) which is a necessary part of virtue” (1978: 162). Although his giddiness is feigned, moralists take it very gravely indeed. In contrast to Socrates, and to the fiery Alcibiades, he is, according to Nussbaum, “without character, without choice … Agathon could stand their blandishments, because he had no soul to begin with” (1979: 168). For an expert in Greek philosophy, as Nussbaum is, it would be hard to say anything more damning. However, a curious incident at the beginning tells another story.
On his way to the dinner, Socrates had summoned along a chance-met friend, Aristodemus. Diffident about showing up without an invitation, Aristodemus agreed to do so, on condition that Socrates invents an excuse for bringing him. But just before they arrive at Agathon’s door, Socrates absent-mindedly wanders off, and Aristodemus finds himself suddenly standing, unescorted and embarrassed, in Agathon’s dining room. Without waiting for an explanation of his presence, Agathon asks him on the spot to join the company – adding that, on the previous day, he had sought him out, unsuccessfully, in order to invite him. But Agathon is telling a Noble Fib, as he really was at another, boozier celebration (174a.6–7, 176a.6–8).
In reading the dialogue one realizes here for the first time, though not the last, that Socrates, despite all his wisdom, is a problematic figure. From a perspective that sees Alcibiades as a quasi-tragic victim of erôs, Nussbaum remarks on the philosopher’s impassivity: “It is not only Socrates’ dissociation from his body. It is not only that he sleeps all night with the naked Alcibiades without arousal. There is, along with this remoteness, a deeper impenetrability of spirit” (1979: 165). Even in small things – casually pressing an acquaintance to put himself in an awkward position, then leaving him in the lurch – Socrates is not tuned in to others. But Agathon, with sharp intuition and perfect diplomacy – for him, those would be functional survival tools – quickly rescues Aristodemus from looking like a fool in front of his distinguished guests. The clumsy moment is smoothed over.
So much, then, for the scare-figure of the kinaidos.
“At first poets recounted all sorts of plots, but today the best tragedies are composed about a few families,” Aristotle notes in the Poetics (1453a.7). If Old Comedy took advantage of the obscenity traditionally associated with fertility rites to breach norms of communal decency, Athenian tragedy chose the household of the ruling family as its usual setting for case studies in the infraction of natural and divine law. Even when Aeschylus in the Persians selected a historical event, the defeat of the Persian army, as his theme, he set the scene outside the palace of Xerxes and dealt with the calamity as seen through the eyes of the Persian royal dynasty. In addition to kinship bonds, spousal connections, reciprocal obligations of host and guest, and suppliant ties, all invested with the same sanctions as kinship, were equally at risk, and violence against such relationships, which may be categorized generally as attachments of philia, is characteristic of tragedy as a genre (Belfiore 2000: xvi, 3–9, 13–15).
Crisis within the family unit was thematically arresting because the continuity of the city-state depended upon the productive and reproductive operations of the oikos and its corollary supervision of patrilineal inheritance. Because Athenian democracy regarded an ordered and disciplined erôs as crucial to those operations, late fifth-century vase painting promotes conjugal love as a stabilizing element in society. Some tragedies, like Euripides’ Alcestis and Helen, also present ideal portraits of the loving and faithful wife. But most instances of tragic erôs are disruptive, terminating in bloodshed for the principals. It is left to the chorus, which conventionally does not speak for itself but rather articulates the shared wisdom of the community, to remind audiences that Aphrodite brings joys and benefits when she comes in moderation.
Yet we should not assume that tragedy, even though sponsored by the state and staged, like comedy, at major civic festivals, was composed to justify the value system of democratic Athens. As they probe the established meanings of “key words in the discourse of social order,” the plays do as much to question those values as to articulate and reinforce them (Goldhill 1990: 123–4; cf. Foley 2001: 17–18). In ancient debate over the part sex ought to play in human life, the ethical term most frequently invoked was sôphrosynê – a compound noun derived from the roots saos, sôs “safe, sound” and -phrên “mind.” Although it possessed a large array of meanings, ranging from the strict notion of “physical chastity” to more general notions of restraint and common sense, it is usually translated as “temperance.”12 We associate temperate conduct with moderate consumption of alcohol, but Greek sôphrosynê was a virtue with far wider application, for the sôphrôn or temperate man was habitually guided in all his conduct by orthos logos, “correct reasoning” (Arist. Eth. Nic. 1103a.17–18, 1119a.20). When Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle discuss the wise use of pleasures, they assign to the intellect the job of restraining the passions, determining the proper occasions for moderate indulgence, and recognizing the end to which pleasurable activity should be directed (Foucault 1986: 86–9). Tragic choices made by the individual can therefore be framed in terms of an irreconcilable opposition between erôs and logos. Heroines such as Medea and Phaedra embody this conflict and articulate it most incisively – for in tragedy women can reason as well as men, to their sorrow.
We cannot examine all the plays in which sexuality is deeply implicated in the tragic catastrophe, but we can study one representative work in which the essence of sôphrosynê and the limits of rational deliberation are exposed to scrutiny. Our surviving text of Euripides’ Hippolytus is a revised version of a production that had created a scandal. In an earlier staging, Phaedra, the Cretan-born wife of King Theseus of Athens, approached her stepson Hippolytus, with whom she had fallen passionately in love, and openly propositioned him before the audience. Hippolytus fled, covering his head in shame – hence the title of that play, Hippolytus Kalyptomenos (“Hippolytus Veiling Himself”). Viewers were dismayed at Phaedra’s effrontery, and barbs about Euripides’ lewd female characters became a staple of comedy (Ar. Thesm. 546–50, Ran. 1043–4). Subsequently, in 428 BCE, Euripides put on a revised Hippolytus.13 In this adaptation, Phaedra has the most honorable intentions. She bitterly struggles against her love, characterized throughout as a sickness (nosos). It is impossible to overcome, however, for it is a god-sent obsession.
Both Phaedra and her stepson are the victims of Aphrodite. Speaking the prologue, the goddess declares that Hippolytus, who worships chaste Artemis, has offended her by shunning sex and marriage and branding her “the vilest of deities” (13–14). For that blasphemy he must pay, and the means of revenge will be the innocent Phaedra, on whom Aphrodite has already inflicted a violent passion. Horrified by her own desires, the queen shuts herself away in her chambers, resolved to die, but is cajoled by her old Nurse into disclosing her secret. Determined to save her young mistress at all costs, the Nurse, having extracted an oath of silence from Hippolytus, tells him all in the hope that her words will act as a love charm upon him. In his shock and revulsion, he launches into a rabid tirade against women, making it clear that he thinks Phaedra the instigator, the Nurse merely her accomplice (616–68). Phaedra, stung to the quick, retaliates in kind. She had already resolved to commit suicide in a desperate effort to salvage her honor. Because Hippolytus has behaved so arrogantly (hupsêlos) in the face of her misfortune, she now decides he will “share in her illness” and himself “learn to be sôphrôn” (730–1). Leaving a note accusing him of rape, she hangs herself.
Theseus finds his wife’s body and damns Hippolytus using one of three curses bestowed upon him by the god Poseidon, his own father. Before departing into exile, Hippolytus protests his innocence, to no avail: he does not, however, break his oath of secrecy. His father’s curse is quickly fulfilled. As Hippolytus drives his chariot team along the shore, a terrifying subterranean rumble is heard, a huge tsunami wave swells up, seething foam, and from it there materializes a monstrous bull. (The abrupt emergence of a bull from the depths of the ocean has been plausibly interpreted as a symbol of repressed sexuality.) Hippolytus’ horses bolt, and, as he tries to rein them onto soft sand, the bull heads them off and drives them toward the cliff-side. The chariot capsizes and its driver, tangled in the reins, is dragged by his team. While he is borne back to the palace, barely alive, Artemis appears to Theseus in order to confirm his son’s virtue, expose Phaedra’s untruth, and lay bare the machinations of Aphrodite. As Hippolytus is carried in, Artemis promises him cult honors from girls about to marry and urges reconciliation between father and son. She departs, and Hippolytus, having forgiven his father, dies in Theseus’ arms.
Hippolytus’ purity of mind and body is absolute. His first act on stage is to crown Artemis’ statue with an “entwined garland from a virgin meadow [akêratou leimônos],” which “veneration [aidôs] gardens with river waters” (73–8). Paradoxically, this pristine meadow looks back to the erotic meadows and gardens of archaic love poetry into which the maiden ventures at her peril. As he makes his offering, the young man prays only that he may “reach the end of life as I began,” maintaining his virginity (87). Critics have struggled to find a motive for Hippolytus’ rejection of ta aphrodisia; two explanations have been put forth, one psychoanalytic and the other religious. He is, first, a bastard son of Theseus by a pallakê, the Amazon queen Hippolyta, now dead. Thus his chastity could be a reaction against his father’s domineering sexuality and his worship of the Amazons’ tribal divinity a symptom of a sublimated longing for a mother substitute (Segal 1978: 133–9; Mitchell 1991: 103–4). Hippolytus has also been suspected of religious fanaticism (Garrison 2000: 253). When Theseus, believing Phaedra’s lie, furiously denounces his son as a hypocrite, he connects him with the so-called “Orphic movement” (952–4):
Now go pride yourself, through a vegetarian regime
make a show of your diet, and with Orpheus as your lord
conduct your rites, honoring the vaporings of many books.
If we could take Theseus’ accusation at face value, it would provide insight into the conduct ascribed to members of this mysterious sect. Brief mentions by other authors such as Herodotus, Aristophanes, and Plato give some notion of Orphic beliefs. On the authority of writings attributed to the prophets Musaeus and Orpheus, seers conducted rites known as teletai that cleansed participants from the taint of wrongdoing and protected them from the horrors of the afterlife (Pl. Resp. 364e.3–365a.3). Believers also abstained from bloodshed (Ar. Ran. 1032) and avoided eating the flesh of beasts (Pl. Leg. 6.782c). Herodotus (2.81) suggests they went so far as to shun the use of wool garments, at least in burial. Socrates in Plato’s Cratylus (400c) ascribes to Orphic sources the etymological doctrine that the body (sôma) is, like a prison, a place of safekeeping for the soul (sôizêtai, “to be preserved”) until it pays the penalty for injustice. Combined testimony thus suggests that the Orphics drew an absolute distinction between soul and body, associated the latter with an inherited guilt from which the individual must be ritually cleansed, and prescribed observance of a special way of life that included staying away from animal products. Abstention from sex notionally fits into this framework as one additional way to prevent contaminating the soul with an attachment to things of the body.
However, this neat explanation cannot hold. While there were certainly poems attributed to Orpheus circulating in the fifth century BCE and communities of worshippers who, on the basis of those poems, adopted an ascetic way of life, there was no coherent religious movement properly termed “Orphism” (Dodds 1957: 147–9; West 1983: 2–3). Even if there were, Hippolytus does not comply with what would be one of its cardinal precepts, for he is a huntsman who sheds blood and consumes meat (Linforth 1941: 56–9). Theseus therefore cannot be saying that Hippolytus actually practices Orphic rituals, but is instead speaking hyperbolically: “Go on, profess faith in Orpheus, for all I care.” In addition, there is no evidence that lifelong sexual abstinence was demanded either of Orphics or of members of related groups, such as followers of Pythagoras in southern Italy or devotees of the Bacchic mysteries associated with Dionysos. We revisit testimony to early sexual asceticism in Chapter 5, but meanwhile we can conclude that it is erroneous to ascribe Hippolytus’ conduct to Orphic convictions. If he is a figure whose behavior, even if aberrant, makes sense to fifth-century Athenian spectators, it must be attributed to other causes.
In their entrance hymn, members of the principal chorus, young married women of Trozen, recall their sufferings in childbirth and express gratitude to Artemis for her timely intervention. This is a telling reminder of how limited Hippolytus’ appreciation of his patroness really is: in worshipping her only as maiden and huntress, an austere double of himself, he overlooks her societal role in mediating the passage from virginity to marriage and bringing human fetuses, the product of sexual union, to safe delivery (Goldhill 1986: 122; cf. Zeitlin 1996b: 238; Craik 1998: 33). That oversight also clarifies what is wrong with his conception of sôphrosynê. Chastity is a praiseworthy asset in unmarried adolescents of both sexes, but it is not a permanent possession, for marriage is the immediate next step (Cairns 1993: 315–19). Hippolytus’ protracted virginity is not a positive attribute, as he himself thinks, but instead an ominous mark of failure to make the transition to adult masculinity.
Greek tragedy frequently concerns itself with the precarious psychic condition of the adolescent on the cusp of manhood – Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae and Orestes in Aeschylus’ Oresteia are good examples (Segal 1982: 164–8). Dionysos, the god of theater, was strongly associated with the Athenian ephebe. Youths undergoing military training are known to have played a large part in the ceremonies of the Greater Dionysia and may even have customarily made up the tragic chorus (Winkler 1990b). Apart from its ritual association with Dionysos, unsuccessful ephebic transition was a predictable topic of drama because of the threat to civic order in a breakdown of generational continuity and the psychological dangers of lasting passivity. The ascetic Hippolytus is, to be sure, at the opposite extreme from the insatiable kinaidos, and, as a bastard, he does not have the obligation to perpetuate his father’s line that a legitimate son would have. Precisely because those secondary considerations are absent, however, he is an object lesson in the consequences of disobeying the imperatives of nature and presuming oneself superior to the human biological condition. That is a form of hybris, and therefore punishable: “I cast down those who think big toward me,” says Aphrodite (6). In addition, Hippolytus’ conviction that his innate virtue makes him better than others is characteristic of the oligarch who judges most of humankind bad. When brought into conflict with Phaedra’s own, no less aristocratic, determination to vindicate herself, that ethical stance leaves no room for negotiation.
Phaedra and Hippolytus are two of a kind. “Both” says Zeitlin, “are concerned with purity of body and soul, both would maintain the integrity of their inner selves at all costs, and both adhere to an outlook of aristocratic idealism” (1996b: 238). Above all, each strives to possess sôphrosynê. Though Phaedra aims for it, she herself concedes that she falls short. Yet over and over she betrays a consciousness of sharp eyes around her from whom she must conceal any weakness of character: she does not want her good deeds to pass unnoticed nor to have many witnesses should she commit disgraceful actions (403–4); she will not be caught shaming husband or children (420–1); she will not be shown up as evil in Time’s mirror. Her aspiration to virtue is inseparable from a desire for public recognition of that virtue. When the opportunity of doing the right thing is foreclosed by the Nurse’s treachery, she is left trying to maintain the appearance of virtue as her last remaining option (Cairns 1993: 335). In that, too, she fails.
Hippolytus, in contrast, staunchly lays claim to an inherent sôphrosynê. Defending himself before his father, he twice proclaims “there is no man more sôphrôn than I” (994–5, 1100) and repeats that statement on his deathbed (1365). We cannot doubt his integrity, for he abides by his principles and keeps his oath under duress, despite the injustice he suffers. At a critical juncture, however, he forgets himself and thereby precipitates the tragic action. It is hard to attribute his misogynistic harangue to anything other than a dearth of sôphrosynê: no matter what the provocation, a prudent man should not indulge in a frenzied explosion of temper. Hippolytus’ practice of virtue has been so dominated by preserving sexual purity that the wider significance of self-control, as it pertains to mastery of the other passions, momentarily escapes him. For all his aristocratic faith in his innate excellence, he is at last forced to recognize that one can still act contrary to one’s moral nature, however fine it is. Speaking of Phaedra’s suicide, he regretfully admits: “She did a sôphrôn thing, though she could not be sôphrôn; I, being sôphrôn, did not conduct myself well” (1034–5). This belated distinction between character and deed is evidence of a new maturity, but it comes too late to save him. There is, then, a “violent symmetry” between the two characters: each claims to know what sôphrosynê is, finds it wanting in the other, and strikes back even more immoderately – Hippolytus with his burst of spleen, Phaedra by criminally accusing an innocent man before committing suicide (Mitchell 1991: 116–17). Ethical terminology devised to help channel erôs into acceptable social forms is not only misunderstood but abused, as neither party, under stress, proves able to employ it in a coherent and rational manner (Goff 1990: 39–48).
Twice in the course of the drama the women of Trozen invoke Eros and Aphrodite in song. As the Nurse enters the house, ostensibly to bring back her therapeutic charm, they pray: “Eros, Eros, you who distill longing upon the eyes and implant sweet grace into the soul of those on whom you make war, may you never appear to me bringing evil, or come in discord” (525–9). In the interval after the messenger’s speech and before the epiphany of Artemis, the chorus acknowledges once more that sexuality governs all creatures: “Eros bewitches … the nature of mountain-bred and sea-borne cubs, and whatever the earth nurtures and the fiery sun beholds, and mankind; alone over all these, Queen Cypris, you exercise royal sway” (1280–81). Speaking for the polis, they render the goddess the forthright homage Hippolytus refused. These invocations, reminiscent of cult hymns, are counterparts of the Trozenian rituals that enable maidens to cope with the sudden passage from youth to adulthood: making a hair offering, weeping, singing songs that recall Hippolytus’ and Phaedra’s sufferings (1423–30). Choral odes and the inauguration of cult practices re-establish strategies for controlling erôs by celebrating its necessary and constructive workings. Still, memory of the violence consequent upon desire is not easy to blot out.
Although Athenian law was remarkable for its relative lack of statutes explicitly addressing sexual matters (Cohen 1991: 221–7), some wrongdoing was criminalized. Two offenses that were legally actionable were rape and adultery or seduction (moicheia).14 Forcible rape could be punished in one of two ways. Under a statute ascribed to Solon, the kyrios of the victim, woman or minor, could accuse the alleged perpetrator of physical assault. Cases of assault were private, or civil, suits; should the rapist be convicted, he was required to pay monetary damages to the plaintiff (Lys. 1.32, Plut. Sol. 23). If the intent to humiliate could be shown, rape was also actionable under the law of hybris, which was treated as a public offense (Cole 1984: 99). Any citizen, not just the kyrios of the victim, might bring a lawsuit for hybris committed against a free man, woman, child, or even slave. Rape prosecuted under that decree could incur the death penalty (Din. 1.23). Note, however, that this entire set of legal procedures takes no cognizance of marital rape; the concept did not exist. Indeed, female consent to sex, within or outside of marriage, was not recognized in law and did not form the basis for determining a sexual crime; both rape and adultery were offenses against the male guardian (Lape 2011: 22; cf. Eidinow 2011: 89–90).
Stranger rape ordinarily would have taken place outside the oikos. Another much-discussed law cited by Demosthenes (23.53–5) lists instances of justifiable homicide, including the killing of a man “caught having intercourse with one’s wife or mother or sister or daughter or concubine kept for the purpose of producing legitimate children.”15 This provision removes an intruder seized while engaged in moicheia on the premises from the protection of the laws. The Athenian oikos and the women it sheltered formed the core of the private sphere. Unauthorized entry was liable to capital punishment. Thieves, kidnappers, and robbers were categorized as a special group of evildoers (kakourgoi) who, when apprehended in the act and brought before a magistrate, were summarily executed if they confessed ([Arist.] Ath. pol. 52.1). David Cohen explains that these offenses involved the risk of violent confrontation between the intruder and the men responsible for protecting the household (1991: 112–13, 223–4). Investing magistrates with the right to prescribe the death penalty reduced family members’ incentive to take the law into their own hands, which might lead to blood feud.
It is possible, but not certain, that adulterers were included in the category of trespassers liable to immediate judicial execution. Our best-documented case of adultery, however, involves a man named Euphiletus who slew his wife’s lover himself and was then indicted for murder, the prosecution claiming the killing proceeded from unlawful entrapment. His speech in his own defense (Lys. 1, On the Murder of Eratosthenes) gives a detailed glimpse into the domestic arrangements of man and wife in a small household with just one female slave. Because Euphiletus is attempting to persuade the jury that his act was warranted, he tells a vivid, detailed, but not necessarily accurate story, and it is not hard to find places where he stretches the truth or distorts the meaning of the law. One salient example is his assertion (1.32–3) that the Athenian legal code, in supposedly punishing the seducer with death, the rapist merely with a fine, treats the former more harshly because his effect upon the household is more disruptive. The contention itself may or may not be correct (scholars are presently divided) but the brief is full of holes.16 To win his case, however, the speaker will have to keep the account plausible, a consideration that permits us to trust its value as evidence for social history.
According to Euphiletus, he and his wife had been sleeping apart, he upstairs, she downstairs so that she could care for their infant son during the night. He first learned of the affair – which had been going on for some time without his suspicion – when an old woman, sent by a resentful former mistress of Eratosthenes, tipped him off (1.15–16). There we can watch the Athenian gossip machine in operation. Euphiletus interrogates his wife’s serving-maid, who confirms the report, and orders her to help him catch Eratosthenes in the act. A few days later, the girl wakens him with the information that his wife’s lover is in the house. He sneaks out, leaving her to watch the door, and rounds up several friends:
Getting torches from the closest shop nearby, we went in through the outer door, which had been left open for us by the maid. We thrust open the bedroom door, and the first to enter saw him still lying beside my wife, the rest standing naked on the bed. I gave him a blow that knocked him down, gentlemen, and, pulling his hands behind his back and binding them, I asked him why he was committing the outrage [hybrizei] of entering my house. He confessed his guilt, and then entreated and begged me not to kill him but to exact a monetary penalty instead. And I said, “It is not I who am about to kill you but the law of the state, which you violated and thought of less importance than your pleasures, and chose rather to commit such an offense against my wife and my children than to obey the laws and be an orderly citizen.” (1.24–6)
Dramatic testimony, to be sure, but a district attorney could raise some telling points in closing argument. Granted that the law exempts from punishment the kyrios who kills the adulterer, it seems likely that it envisions a situation in which a struggle takes place. Eratosthenes is naked, trussed up, and surrounded; he pleads for his life and offers remuneration; Euphiletus executes him in cold blood. For an aggrieved husband, other courses of action were available: a compensatory payment, privately arranged, but also detainment and public prosecution for moicheia ([Arist.] Ath. pol. 59.3). The law even protected the accused moichos, for he could take legal action against the householder for detaining him illegally. If he proved his innocence, he was set free; if shown to have committed adultery, however, he was handed over to the man who caught him and who, in front of the jurymen, could do with him as he pleased – short of using a knife ([Dem.] 59.66). Finally, if the adulterer was in fact included in the class of kakourgoi who could be summarily executed by magistrates, the law might also have restricted the behavior of the husband by prescribing that the trespasser should be turned over to the appropriate officials (Cohen 1991: 115–20). We do not know that this was the case, though.
What would have happened to Euphiletus’ wife? Athenian law barred a woman taken in adultery from entering the public temples or attending rituals, and also from wearing any kind of jewelry (Aeschin. 1.183; [Dem.] 59.85–6). If she defied those prohibitions, she might be beaten by anyone with impunity, although she could not be killed. In addition, her husband was compelled to divorce her; if he did not, he lost his civic rights. The latter stipulation was intended to protect the bloodline, as a woman proved unfaithful once could not be trusted in future. But the severity of the sanction implies that some men might be disposed to forgive an errant wife, perhaps because they loved her – perhaps, too, because they would have had to return the dowry upon divorcing her, which could be a financial hardship, or they strongly wanted to avoid the scandal of publicity. Consequently, despite the fact that Aristophanes’ comedies paint women as habitual adulteresses, we do not know how frequently the opportunity for sexual adventure presented itself. Certainly moicheia was deemed a very grave offense (Carey 1995: 417).
The verdict in this trial has not been preserved. Judging only by his own testimony, Euphiletus appears to have gone much too far, at least in the view of many modern scholars. But it is not easy for products of what Jack Winkler once called “the rather cool culture of NATO Classicists” (1990a: 13) to empathize with the burning heat of outraged male honor. His Athenian peers may well have thought differently.
No doubt there were solid and mutually satisfying Athenian marriages, but we don’t often hear of them. Human happiness seldom makes it into the historical record. Legal testimony gives anecdotal evidence of marital affection (philia): a childless woman is reluctant to leave her husband after being urged to take a new mate in hopes of having children (Isae. 2.8–9); a husband does not bring court proceedings because he fears losing his wife (Isae. 10.19). Inscribed gravestones express the grief felt for deceased spouses, but those sentiments, even if presumed to be sincere, are conventionally worded. White-ground lekythoi, vases created expressly as offerings for the dead, show poignant vignettes of mourning, but again furnish no information about how people behaved in life. Very few red-figure images are identifiable as interior family scenes because gender conventions prescribed that men spend their time outside the home (Lewis 2002: 177). Conjugal exchanges in Old Comedy are farcical, so Myrrhine’s tormenting of her husband Cinesias (Lys. 845–958) or Praxagora’s hoodwinking of Blepyrus (Eccl. 520–70) are hardly examples of the way in which couples regularly conversed. When we speak of normal dealings between man and wife, then, we have to fall back on idealizing fictions in literary texts. Such materials will be tactfully reticent on the subject of marital sexuality, but we can use their overt depictions of gender relations to extrapolate further.
Two of Euripides’ tragic heroines, Alcestis and Helen, were mentioned above as epitomes of the perfect wife. Alcestis gives the ultimate proof of female virtue by dying in the place of her husband Admetus. He willingly promises her on her deathbed never to replace her with another woman, but is too obtuse to grasp the long-term consequences of accepting her sacrifice. Only belatedly does he realize that in doing so he has shown himself a coward and thus condemned himself to an ignominious and lonely existence (Eur. Alc. 954–7). Luckily, the hero Heracles turns up at the palace. In a quirky act of hospitality, Admetus welcomes him but keeps Alcestis’ death a secret. When he finally learns the truth, Heracles tracks Death down, snatches Alcestis away, and restores her to his host – but only after tricking Admetus into breaking his promise by forcing her, disguised as a veiled slave girl, upon him as a gift. The wry overtones of this reunion are intensified because Alcestis, still under obligation to the infernal powers, must stand silent, bound not to speak for three days. Speeding Heracles on his way, Admetus rejoices, “Now we shall dispose our lives differently, better than before. For I won’t deny I’ve been fortunate” (1157–8). One hopes his optimism is justified. Despite its apparent happy ending, the play strikes many of today’s readers as a rather sour comment on male egotism.
In Helen, as noted in Chapter 1, Euripides follows an alternative tradition in which his heroine, wholly innocent of adultery, is spirited off from Sparta by Hermes (as she gathers roses like other abducted virgins, 243–5) and detained in Egypt, leaving Greeks and Trojans to battle over a hollow apparition. Meanwhile, she proves her chastity by resisting the advances of the wicked Egyptian king Theoclymenus. The paradoxical demand made on the Greek wife, to be at once sexual, so as to produce children, and pure, to preserve male honor, is resolved by splitting the Helen-figure into the real, faithful spouse and the deceitful eidôlon (Foley 2001: 317–18). Helen’s exoneration as a virtuous wife, however, is purchased at the cost of her husband Menelaus’ military glory, since the prize he had struggled for so long, and for which so much blood was spilt, turns out to be illusory. When he arrives in Egypt, shipwrecked and in rags, an old female gatekeeper shrugs off his grandiose posturing: “Somewhere, maybe, you were somebody, but not here” (455). His life threatened by Theoclymenus, Menelaus cannot act the warrior, but Helen’s cunning and feminine charm (charis) permit her to trick the king by pretending Menelaus is dead and so effect their escape. Ultimately, Menelaus does engage in pitched battle against a crew of Egyptian sailors, re-enacting history in gory fashion: “The Trojan War is fought again, in miniature. But Helen is now on the right side, cheering on her husband” (Segal 1971: 606). Perhaps, to an Athenian audience, he thus redeems himself, although the stress on carnage (“the ship ran with blood,” 1603) is disturbing after what was said about the squander of lives pursuing a phantom. In any case, Menelaus, like Admetus, has to undergo a symbolic failure of masculinity in order to renew his marriage. Both plays impose the bride’s loss of identity in changing from one social role to another upon the groom, with unsettling repercussions for gender stability (Foley 2001: 329). Since in each case we are dealing with a couple rejoined after separation, Euripides may be implying that the institution of marriage enforces abrupt transformation upon females but over time also makes imperceptible modifications to the male sense of self; we recall Odysseus’ reassumption of his Ithacan identity, likewise confirmed through the marriage bed.
Xenophon’s work On Household Management addresses gender structures within the household from an administrative standpoint. Although the dialogue is set during Socrates’ lifetime, it was written sometime later in the fourth century, well after Athens’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War and in the wake of the social and economic crises that protracted conflict had triggered. In response to the growing impoverishment of small farmers and increasing class bitterness, Xenophon defends ownership and maintenance of large private estates: agriculture on that scale benefits the common good, he affirms, by producing virtuous and orderly citizens (Murnaghan 1988: 10). The education of Ischomachus’ wife is one of Xenophon’s main cases in point. Because her husband is himself knowledgeable about household management, he can mold her into a capable and reliable housekeeper – no easy task, given her youth and inherent female propensity to weakness. With the oikos in good hands, its master can spend his time elsewhere, pursuing public affairs.
When his rich but financially strapped friend Critobulus asks for advice on farming productively, Socrates, citing Ischomachus as an example of “a proper gentleman” (kalos te k’agathos anêr, 6.12), recalls a dialogue with him on that subject. The first topic discussed was the education of a wife.17 Like Critobulos, Ischomachus had wedded a girl, not yet fifteen, who had until then had seen, heard, and even said almost nothing – a blank slate, as it were, on which he could inscribe his mandates. Apart from knowing how to weave a cloak from wool, and having seen how spinning is allotted to servants, she had only been educated in ta amphi gastera, “matters of the belly” (7.6). Taught how to control hunger, she had developed the rudiments of sôphrosynê; for man and wife alike, Ischomachus then confesses to Socrates, that is the most important lesson to be learned. He will repeat this precept to his bride. When she asks in bewilderment how she can assist him, in view of the fact that her mother defined her duty as simply being sôphrôn, he responds, “Yes, and my father said the same thing to me. But for both a man and a woman, being sôphrôn means making sure their goods are in the best condition and adding to them as much as possible, in a fair and just way” (7.15). Through his spokesman Xenophon radically extends the scope of sôphrosynê, associating it, via its connotations of rationality and order, with the science of proper household supervision and assigning it to both sexes as a critical virtue (Pomeroy 1994: 275).
Although his manner in the ensuing discussion may seem condescending, Ischomachus is attempting to educate this immature, sheltered girl half his age to be his colleague in managing the estate. First he needs to explain exactly how he envisions their partnership. Instruction commences “when she was tame [cheiroêthês] and had been domesticated [etetithuseuto] so as to have a conversation,” a tactful reference to the wedding night and the virgin’s initiation into married life (7.10). Unfortunately, the English translation carries unavoidable implications of subduing by force and breaking the will, and both Greek words can indeed be used in contexts where one person strives for mastery over another (for example, Dem. 3.31). Yet the joint conversation anticipated indicates that a different meaning must be intended: the “horse-taming” metaphor instead conveys overtones of soothing a nervous animal and calming its fears.18 Along with the prayers and sacrifices that accompany it, this opening talk, which takes place on the next day, is part of a process aimed at making the bride feel more at home (Scaife 1995: 231–2). Pomeroy (1994: 273) observes its success: as the conversation proceeds, the girl loses her reserve and begins to take a more assertive part in the dialogue.
The concept of marriage as a full partnership with separate but equal functions that Ischomachus outlines is, to be sure, an essentialist arrangement. For Greek society in general, reproduction was the primary objective of marriage. But Xenophon’s spokesman defines its main purpose as twofold: raising children, should the god provide them, and managing the oikos in common (7.12–13). Male and female perform tasks determined by their natures and attributes – men, more hardy and courageous, laboring outside; women, less strong, more fearful, and fonder of infants, caring for the children, the slaves, and the household stores within. Yet, Ischomachus adds, God gave intellectual endowments, memory and attention, to man and woman in equal measure, since both sexes must use them; and they likewise were given an equal ability to practice self-control. Where one sex falls short, the other makes up for it, and the bond (zeugos, “yoke”) is more beneficial to each because each has capacities the other lacks (23–8). He then compares his wife to a queen bee presiding over a hive and sending out workers and gives her an account of the duties she will perform – some onerous, like nursing the sick, others, such as managing the staff, giving opportunity for creative fulfillment. Finally, he holds out the possibility that, by showing herself better than him, she can make him her own “second-in-command” (therapôn) in the household, earning more and more honor as years go by (41–3). Thinly disguised patriarchy, perhaps, but it is still drastically different, as we will see, from Aristotle’s model of permanent male hegemony over wife, children, and slaves.
Ischomachus goes on to recall two occasions where further mentoring was required. In the first, his wife cannot find something he has asked for. Instead of rebuking her, he takes the blame for not showing her where it was to be put, then collaborates with her in a complete inventory of their possessions, reorganization of the storage space, and delegation of responsibilities to a meticulous housekeeper (8.1–9.18). The second incident casts light on the texture of their intimate relations (10.2–13). One day Ischomachus finds his wife wearing cosmetics, white facial powder and rouge, and high heels. He proceeds to give her a sermon on natural beauty. Starting from the principle that lying to her about the amount of his property, which he shares with her, would be wrong, he draws a parallel with their bodies, which they share in intercourse (tôn sômatôn koinônêsontes allêlois, 5). If he came to bed wearing bronzer to enhance his tan, along with eye makeup, would she find him more deserving of her love? The argument is effective. When she afterward inquires how she might improve her looks through natural means, Ischomachus advises her to exercise regularly by doing housework, which will increase her appetite, health, and complexion. He then indulges in a parenthetic observation to Socrates, man to man:
Relative to that of a slave, the appearance of a wife who is cleaner and more suitably attired becomes arousing, especially when she is also willing to gratify (charizesthai) you instead of being forced to render service. But women who are always arrogantly sitting around leave themselves vulnerable to being compared with painted and deceiving females. (12–13)
Sexual pleasure is a prime component of the marital relationship, at least for the man; for the wife’s part in the act, Ischomachus uses the same euphemism, charizesthai or “do a favor,” that is commonly applied to the erômenos’s role in sex. By assimilating her to the boy who obliges his lover out of respect and philia, he emphasizes her willingness to please in contrast to the slave’s reluctance. Yet, given the collective cultural insistence that the junior partner in pederasty does not experience arousal, is he also imputing to her an absence of sexual desire?19 I confess I find this incidental remark rather troubling.
Interestingly enough, the narrative of events in The Murder of Eratosthenes has certain points in common with Ischomachus’ account of his wife’s education. When Euphiletus first brought his wife home, he says, he kept a careful eye on her, but after their son was born, he began to trust her and gave his property into her custody (Lys. 1.6). On one occasion after she moves downstairs, the baby begins to fret while the couple are upstairs together; when Euphiletus asks her to go down and see to the child, she accuses him of designs on the maidservant, whom he had molested once before when drunk (12). He understands this as a joke and laughs in response, but the jury would have taken it for granted that the girl was at her master’s disposal and heard a note of irritation in the wife’s remark. What he did not know at the time, Euphiletus explains, was that Eratosthenes was in the house and the maid was making the baby cry to give his wife a reason to go downstairs. The next morning, he observes that his wife has put on makeup, though her brother had died recently, but he treats this as her own business and says nothing to her (13). Although wife and maid are accomplices, and the latter, when first interrogated, attempts to deny the adultery, she caves in, confesses, and readily assists Euphiletus once he reveals what he knows (19–20). Thus the slave, only interested in saving her own skin, shows no real loyalty to her mistress.
In On Household Management, the wife does not have to establish her credentials by bearing an heir; she is accepted as a partner from the outset. Instead of sleeping in separate quarters, husband and wife share a bedroom: they see each other when getting out of bed, before making their morning toilet, which is why cosmetics can fool only strangers (10.8). Euphiletus is fatuously pleased by his wife’s resentment of his interest in the slave girl. Ischomachus, for his part, recognizes the owner’s right to consort with his slaves, but thinks compulsory sex with someone of mean status not as rewarding as mutual lovemaking, even if his companion does not get the same pleasure he does. He adds that wives who call attention to their privileged place in the oikos by having servants wait on them hand and foot are in appearance and demeanor more like hetairai than spouses. Exercising full authority over the staff, his wife is empowered to honor those who perform well and to discipline those who do not (9.15), and feels no need to assert her status symbolically through indolence. In Euphiletus’ household, a wife he regards as his inferior, to whom he freely gives orders, is represented as dismissive of the maid in turn.
The effect of Ischomachus’ program of instruction is to make his wife into his own alter ego (Murnaghan 1988: 12–13). Thanks to his training, he can proudly proclaim that she reasons clearly, reverences order, weighs her actions ethically and disdains certain characteristically feminine behaviors, such as embellishing her physical appearance artificially. Socrates at one point exclaims “By Hera, Ischomachus, you’re showing me your wife’s truly masculine mind!” (10.1). For progressive thinkers of the period, that was high praise. In Book 5 of the Republic, Plato outlines a utopian system of government in which the most gifted boys and girls are given the same program of education and trained to be “Guardians,” magistrates and defenders of the community (451c–461e). Far from advocating the liberation of women, however, he sees them as “a huge untapped pool of resources” whose labor could be utilized for the state instead of being squandered on trivial household tasks (Annas 1981: 181–5). Equality for this select group of females is therefore purchased at the cost of domestic life: the nuclear family is abolished, and women Guardians do not even tend their own infants – that job is delegated to nurses (Resp. 460d.2–5). Whether functional assimilation to a man, with the consequent eradication of differences gendered as feminine, is too steep a price to pay for access to some, not all, male privileges is a question feminists are still debating.
After the complex questions posed by Xenophon’s blueprint of an ostensibly egalitarian marriage, it is almost relaxing to turn to old-fashioned Aristotelian male supremacy (Pol. 1259a.37–1260b.20). Here we know where we stand: marriage is a permanently asymmetrical relationship.
The head [of the household] rules over wife and children. Both are free, but the manner of rule is not the same, for the wife is governed in the fashion of a city-state [politikôs], and the children are governed as a king would govern them. For the male is by nature more capable of command than the female … (1259a.39–1259b.2)
Aristotle goes on to explain what he means by women being governed “in the fashion of a city-state.” In most actual poleis, the citizens take turns at ruling and being ruled, as there is a presumption of equality among them. Difference in station is signified by protocols surrounding those in office and corresponding titles bestowed upon them: as an analogy, the Marine Band plays “Hail to the Chief” as the President enters the room, and he is addressed as “Mr. President.” The male’s rule over the female is of this kind, but the inequality is a permanent one, associated with the weighty problem of virtue in the ruled. Aristotle draws a comparison with the soul, in which the rational faculty naturally exercises authority over the irrational part. As the parts of the soul differ, each having its own virtue, so in slave, woman, and child those separate parts are present in different degrees: “for the slave completely lacks a rational faculty; a woman has it, but it is without authority [akuron]; a child has it, but it is immature” (1260a.12–14). No effort is made to deny that a woman can reason – she employs that ability in daily life – but the reasoning part of her soul, Aristotle believes, does not have sufficient discretion and so is inferior to that of an adult male. Hence woman must be placed under man’s supervision. While both sexes also have the capacity for virtue, he then concludes, the quality of that virtue is specific to each sex: “the sôphrosynê of a man and of a woman is not the same, nor is bravery or justice, as Socrates thought; the bravery of the one consists in ruling, the other in obeying, and likewise for the other virtues” (1260a.21–4). In other words, the ability to exert control over oneself is fundamental to the moral nature of human beings. In the Aristotelian scheme of things, woman cannot exert full control over herself, and Greek patriarchy is about control. To be autonomous, or, as a Greek would say, autê hautês kyria, “her own mistress,” women will have to become more like men. We will see that happening in Chapter 5.
The above account of sexuality in classical Athens by no means exhausts the literary evidence, and some very intriguing testimony has not been discussed. We have not dealt, for example, with the fascinating anecdotal data on sexual conduct provided by other forensic speeches.20 In undertaking a survey of this kind, one has to work within a particular framework. I have chosen to emphasize the integration of sexuality and class issues, the role of the democratic polis in articulating sexual norms, and the degree to which it took cognizance of what we regard as strictly personal matters. With the exception of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and, to a lesser extent, Xenophon’s On Household Management, the sexual relations of husband and wife receive little attention in the literary texts, partly out of discretion, partly because they were seen as relatively unproblematic. Discussion centers rather on potentially disruptive sexual attitudes and behavior.
As a custom identified with the aristocracy, pederastic courtship was deeply implicated in class conflicts and might be targeted in anti-oligarchic discourse. The practitioners of pederasty, conversely, felt threatened enough to formulate an ethical justification for the system and mounted a propaganda campaign in its defense. Cronyism allegedly fostered by homoerotic friendships was a pragmatic political issue, but the moral threat posed to the erômenos was of no less concern. Along with egalitarianism, the radical democracy promoted an ethos of restraint and emphasized the importance of stable marital relations for the continuity of the household. However, it also recognized the civic and ethical utility of the training in manliness given to a young man by a praiseworthy erastês. Tragedy meanwhile explored the limit cases of interfamilial violence, much of it provoked by forbidden erôs.
The politics of reputation, the code of honor and shame, and the state’s interest in the preservation of bloodlines all constituted deterrents to rape, seduction, and adultery but also worked at cross-purposes. Since inheritance disputes caused rancor, and ancestral and family cult had to be performed by direct descendants, Athens had legal and religious justification for treating some sexual misconduct as a public crime. On the other hand, fear of disrepute might tempt a family to hush up a scandal, as prosecution of the offense would bring the whole distasteful story to light, providing entertaining gossip even for those who knew none of the parties involved. Finally, domestic relations in stable marriages must have been influenced by the direct dependence of polis upon oikos, especially among the propertied classes. To a degree that makes contemporary observers somewhat uncomfortable, classical Athenian sexuality in all its forms was implicated in its system of radical democracy. Whether it affords a good model, in terms of either parallels or contrasts, for understanding present-day Western sexual ideology should be one of the key discussion topics in a course in ancient sexuality.
1 On the historical circumstances surrounding the prosecution of Timarchus, which was politically motivated, see Dover 1978: 19–20 and Fisher 2001: 2–24.
2 The “Old Oligarch” is the nickname given by scholars to the author of an anonymous pamphlet, preserved among the works of Xenophon, which purports to explain the strengths of the Athenian democracy from the viewpoint of an opponent of the system.
3 In addition to addressing the assembly and the law courts themselves, orators like Demosthenes also wrote speeches for others and earned money doing so. The metic Lysias was a successful professional speechwriter although, as a non-citizen, he was not permitted to speak before the populace. At the opening of his speech (54.1), Ariston carefully distinguishes between the civil suit he is bringing, requiring only payment of monetary damages if the defendant should be convicted, and a public indictment for hybris, which could carry the death penalty. Though Conon is most certainly liable to prosecution for hybris, Ariston assures the jurors, he will follow the advice of friends and kinsman by seeking a guilty verdict on the less serious charge. He is insinuating that his adversary’s wealth and influence make it impossible for him to do more.
4 In a later publication (1993: 101–4), Taplin reverses his position, mainly because there is no textual evidence that the Arguments are priapic and no depiction of cages on the vase. The vase painter, however, might have adapted the scene for artistic reasons.
5 Cleon’s wealth, Aristophanes never ceases to remind us, derived from ownership of a tanning factory.
6 Written agreements to provide personal sexual services may not have been unusual (Cohen 2000), although we have only one attested case (Dem. 22.23, very likely also referred to at Aeschin. 1.165). They would have protected both parties by finalizing terms while also establishing that the sex was consensual or, in the case of a slave, that the master had authorized it.
7 Strictly speaking, a kinaidos was a kind of dancer whose movements, accompanied by the rattle of a tambourine, included suggestive wriggling of the buttocks; an inscription from a temple of Isis (CIG 4926) indicates that such dancing might be performed in honor of Dionysos (Williams 2010: 193 and n. 80). A likely parallel, though female, is Syrisca, the sexy tavern-keeper of the pseudo-Vergilian Copa, who “skillfully sways her hips to the music of castanets” (2).
8 What was so awful about scratching your head? In Latin, the complete phrase is “to scratch the head with one finger” (qui digito scalpunt uno caput, Juv. 9.133). It may allude to the effeminate man’s fussiness about his appearance: by using just one finger, he avoids disturbing the careful arrangement of his hair (Williams 2010: 244). It could also have been a coded signal that the man doing so was sexually available for penetration (Taylor 1997: 339).
9 Alternative causes of effeminacy can be found in the ancient sources. As noted in the Introduction, both this passage in the Problemata and Nichomachean Ethics 1148b.27–9 maintain that desire for anal penetration can be an acquired habit.
10 Collected by Nails (2002: 8–10 and 222); she finds Plato’s representation of Agathon “on the whole positive” (9).
11 Dover (1988: 102–14) points out the close resemblance to Aesopic stories.
12 In her definitive study of sôphrosynê, North (1966: 32–84) demonstrates how closely individual playwrights’ treatments of this concept are related to their notions of what is tragic. Euripides, she finds, uses the word to denote three related but distinct behaviors: self-control in a broad sense, including chastity and modesty; prudence and good judgment; and moderation or observance of limits (1966: 75–8).
13 The tragedian Sophocles also handled the story in his Phaedra. We know little about this play, but we can assume Phaedra was less culpable, since in it Theseus was believed dead. The fragments of the lost Hippolytus Kalyptomenos and the Phaedra are collected, and their relationship to the surviving Hippolytus discussed, in Barrett (1964: 15–45).
14 There is no single term for “rape” in ancient Greek; it is instead expressed by verbs denoting the use of force or violence against another or meaning “to shame or violate.” Cole (1984: 98) gives a list of these expressions. Moicheia is also a controversial word: some scholars (e.g., Cohen 1991: 99–109) restrict it to adultery in the strict sense, but most believe it covers relations with any free woman under the protection of a kyrios. See now the discussion of terminology in Eidinow 2011: 90–2.
15 The pallakê is included in the class of protected women because this statute, ascribed to the legendary seventh-century lawgiver Draco, antedates legislation circumscribing the inheritance rights of her children.
16 Harris (1990) contends that adultery and rape carried equally harsh penalties, while Carey (1995) thinks adultery was punished more severely. Whatever the facts, Euphiletus cites the Draconian law that merely exempts the killer of the moichos from punishment and draws no distinction between rape and seduction as proof that the householder is legally commanded (hoi nomoi … kekeleukotes [eisi], 1.34) to kill the seducer – but not the rapist. He can make this specious argument because there was no judge in an Athenian court to interpret the law impartially to jurors, and because his peers would have been more concerned about the long-term consequences of adultery, which might cast doubt on the paternity of all the offspring in the oikos (Harris 1990: 375; Ogden 1996: 147–8).
17 In accordance with Athenian etiquette, her name is never mentioned, but some scholars (Harvey 1984; Pomeroy 1994: 261–4) identify her with Chrysilla, the real-life wife of a historical figure named Ischomachus (there were several), who, as a widow, became illicitly involved with Callias, her own son-in-law (Andoc. 1.124–7).
18 In his manual On Horsemanship (2.3), Xenophon advises that a young horse sent to the trainer should already be “gentle, tractable (cheiroêthês), and fond of people,” having learned to associate food, water, and relief from pain with its groom; colts so raised, he says, not only like but long for human company. He is not an advocate of bronco-busting.
19 The same hint may be present in the simile of the queen bee at Oec. 7.32–9, since bees were an emblem of sexlessness. In Semonides’ satire on women, the bee-wife who takes no interest in sexual conversations is the only good one (7.83–93 West2). In Xenophon’s Symposium, on the other hand, Socrates mentions a pair of newlyweds, Niceratus and his wife, who are infatuated with each other: ho Nikêratos … erôn tês gunaikos anteratai (8.3). There is no implication that the bride’s sexual attraction to her husband is inappropriate.
20 Some are quite bizarre. In Isaeus 6.20, an old man deserts wife and family to move in with his employee, an ex-prostitute who runs his combination rooming-house and wine shop in the Athenian red-light district. Antiphon 1 involves a son who charges his stepmother with poisoning his father, claiming that she had suborned the slave concubine of her husband’s friend. About to be packed off to a brothel, the slave administered the poison to both men in the belief that it was a love potion. Of course, these cases feature extremes of behavior; that is why they came before juries.
Annas, J. 1981. An Introduction to Plato’s “Republic”. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Auerbach, N. 1995. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Barrett, W. S. (ed.). 1964. Euripides’ Hippolytos. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Belfiore, E. S. 2000. Murder among Friends: Violation of Philia in Greek Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Boswell, J. 1990. “Concepts, Experience, and Sexuality.” differences 2: 67–87.
Brandes, S. 1987. “Reflections on Honor and Shame in the Mediterranean.” In D. D. Gilmore (ed.), Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association. 121–34.
Cairns, D. L. 1993. Aidôs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Cantarella, E. 1992. Bisexuality in the Ancient World. Trans. C. Ó Cuilleanáin. [Orig. pub. as Secondo natura, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1988.] New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Carey, C. 1995. “Rape and Adultery in Athenian Law.” Classical Quarterly 45: 407–17.
Carnes, J. S. 1998. “This Myth Which Is Not One: Construction of Discourse in Plato’s Symposium.” In D. H. J. Larmour, P. A. Miller, and C. Platter (eds.), Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 104–21.
Cohen, D. 1991. Law, Sexuality, and Society: The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cohen, E. E. 2000. “Whoring under Contract: The Legal Context of Prostitution in Fourth-Century Athens.” In V. Hunter and J. Edmondson (eds.), Law and Social Status in Classical Athens. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 113–48.
Cole, S. G. 1984. “Greek Sanctions against Sexual Assault.” Classical Philology 79: 97–113.
Craft, C. 1984. “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Representations 8: 107–33.
Craik, E. M. 1998. “Language of Sexuality and Sexual Inversion in Euripides’ Hippolytos.” Acta Classica 41: 29–44.
Csapo, E. 1993. “Deep Ambivalence: Notes on a Greek Cockfight.” Part I, Phoenix 47.1: 1–28; Part II, Phoenix 47.2: 115–24.
Davidson, J. N. 1997. Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. New York: HarperPerennial.
—— 2001. “Dover, Foucault and Greek Homosexuality: Penetration and the Truth of Sex.” Past & Present 170: 3–51.
—— 2007. The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Dodds, E. R. 1957. The Greeks and the Irrational. Boston: Beacon Press.
Dover, K. J. 1972. Aristophanic Comedy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
—— 1978. Greek Homosexuality. London: Duckworth.
—— 1988. The Greeks and their Legacy: Collected Papers, Volume II: Prose, Literature, History, Society, Transmission, Influence. Oxford: Blackwell.
Eidinow, E. 2011. “Sex, Religion, and the Law.” In M. Golden and P. Toohey (eds.), A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Classical World. Oxford and New York: Berg. 87–106.
Fantham, E., Foley, H. P., Kampen, N. B., Pomeroy, S. B., and Shapiro, H. A. 1994. Women in the Classical World: Image and Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fisher, N. R. E. 2000. “Symposiasts, Fisheaters, and Flatterers: Social Mobility and Moral Concern.” In F. D. Harvey and J. Wilkins (eds.), The Rivals of Aristophanes: Studies in Athenian Old Comedy. London: Duckworth and the Classical Press of Wales. 355–96.
——, intro. and trans. 2001. Aeschines: Against Timarchos. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Foley, H. P. 2001. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Foucault, M. 1986. The History of Sexuality, vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure. Trans. R. Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. [Orig. pub. as L’Usage des plaisirs. Paris: Gallimard, 1984.]
Garrison, D. H. 2000. Sexual Culture in Ancient Greece. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Geddes, A. G. 1987. “Rags and Riches: The Costume of Athenian Men in the Fifth Century.” Classical Quarterly 37: 307–31.
Gilmore, D. D. 1987. “Introduction: The Shame of Dishonor.” In Gilmore (ed.), Honor and Shame. 2–21.
Goff, B. E. 1990. The Noose of Words: Readings of Desire, Violence and Language in Euripides’ “Hippolytos”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goldhill, S. 1986. Reading Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—— 1990. “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology.” In J. J. Winkler and F. I. Zeitlin (eds.), Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 97–129.
Halperin, D. M. 1990. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge.
—— 2002. How to Do the History of Homosexuality. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Harris, E. M. 1990. “Did the Athenians Regard Seduction as a Worse Crime than Rape?” Classical Quarterly 40: 370–7.
Harvey, F. D. 1984. “The Wicked Wife of Ischomachos.” Échos du Monde Classique/Classical Views 28 n.s. 3: 68–70.
Henderson, J. 1975. The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
—— 1990. “The Demos and the Comic Competition.” In Winkler and Zeitlin (eds.), Nothing to Do with Dionysos? 271–313.
Herzfeld, M. 1980. “Honour and Shame: Problems in the Comparative Analysis of Moral Systems.” Man 15: 339–51.
Hubbard, T. K. 1998. “Popular Perceptions of Elite Homosexuality in Classical Athens.” Arion 6: 48–78.
—— 2000. “Pederasty and Democracy: The Marginalization of a Social Practice.” In T. K. Hubbard (ed.), Greek Love Reconsidered. New York: William Hamilton Press. 1–11.
—— 2002. “Pindar, Theoxenus, and the Homoerotic Eye.” Arethusa 35: 255–96.
Hunter, V. J. 1994. Policing Athens: Social Control in the Attic Lawsuits, 420–320 BC. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kurke, L. 1999. Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lape, S. 2002–3. “Solon and the Institution of the ‘Democratic’ Family Form.” Classical Journal 98.2: 117–39.
—— 2006. “The Psychology of Prostitution in Aeschines’ Speech against Timarchus.” In C. A. Faraone and L. K. McClure (eds.), Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 139–60.
—— 2011. “Heterosexuality.” In Golden and Toohey (eds.), A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Classical World. 17–36.
Leitao, D. D. 2002. “The Legend of the Sacred Band.” In M. C. Nussbaum and J. Sihvola (eds.), The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 143–69.
Lewis, S. 2002. The Athenian Woman: An Iconographic Handbook. London: Routledge.
Linforth, I. M. 1941. The Arts of Orpheus. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Loraux, N. 1993. The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division between the Sexes. Trans. C. Levine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ludwig, P. W. 2002. “Eros” and “Polis”: Desire and Community in Greek Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Miller, M. C. 1992. “The Parasol: An Oriental Status-symbol in Late Archaic and Classical Athens.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 112: 91–105.
Mitchell, R. N. 1991. “Miasma, Mimesis, and Scapegoating in Euripides’ Hippolytus.” Classical Antiquity 10: 97–122.
Morris, I. 2000. Archaeology as Cultural History: Words and Things in Iron Age Greece. Oxford: Blackwell.
Murnaghan, S. 1988. “How a Woman Can Be More like a Man: The Dialogue between Ischomachus and his Wife in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus.” Helios 15.1: 9–22.
Nails, D. 2002. The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
North, H. 1966. Sophrosyne: Self-knowledge and Self-restraint in Greek Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Nussbaum, M. C. 1979. “The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium.” Philosophy and Literature 3: 131–72.
Ober, J. 1989. Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ogden, D. 1996. Greek Bastardy in the Classical and Hellenistic Periods. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ormand, K. 2009. Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. Westport, CT, and London: Praeger.
Pellizer, E. 1990. “Outlines of a Morphology of Sympotic Entertainment.” In O. Murray (ed.). “Sympotica”: A Symposium on the “Symposion”. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 177–84.
Penwill, J. L. 1978. “Men in Love: Aspects of Plato’s Symposium.” Ramus 7: 143–75.
Peristiany, J. G. (ed.). 1965. Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Pitt-Rivers, J. A. 1961. The People of the Sierra. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pomeroy, S. B. 1975. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. New York: Schocken.
—— 1994. Xenophon, “Oeconomicus”: A Social and Historical Commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Scaife, R. 1995. “Ritual and Persuasion in the House of Ischomachus.” Classical Journal 90.3: 225–32.
Scanlon, T. F. 2002. Eros and Greek Athletics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sedgwick, E. K. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Segal, C. P. 1971. “The Two Worlds of Euripides’ Helen.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 102: 553–614.
—— 1978. “Pentheus on the Couch and on the Grid: Psychological and Structuralist Readings of Greek Tragedy.” Classical World 72.3: 129–48.
—— 1982. Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides’ “Bacchae”. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Steiner, A. 2002. “Private and Public: Links Between Symposion and Syssition in Fifth-century Athens.” Classical Antiquity 21.2: 347–79.
Taplin, O. 1987. “Phallology, Phylakes, Iconography and Aristophanes.” Publications of the Cambridge Philological Society 213 n.s. 30: 92–104.
—— 1993. Comic Angels and Other Approaches to Greek Drama through Vase-paintings. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Taylor, R. 1997. “Two Pathic Subcultures in Ancient Rome.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7: 319–71.
Thorp, J. 1992. “The Social Construction of Homosexuality.” Phoenix 46: 54–61.
West, M. L. 1983. The Orphic Poems. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Wilkins, J. 2000. The Boastful Chef: The Discourse of Food in Ancient Greek Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williams, C. A. 2010. Roman Homosexuality. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Winkler, J. J. 1990a. The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece. New York: Routledge.
—— 1990b. “The Ephebes’ Song: Tragôidia and Polis.” In Winkler and Zeitlin (eds.), Nothing to Do with Dionysos? 20–62.
Wohl, V. J. 2002. Love among the Ruins: The Erotics of Democracy in Classical Athens. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Zeitlin, F. I. 1996a. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
—— 1996b. “The Power of Aphrodite: Eros and the Boundaries of the Self in Euripides’ Hippolytos.” In Zeitlin, Playing the Other. 219–84.
—— 1996c. “Travesties of Gender and Genre in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousae.” In Zeitlin, Playing the Other. 375–416.
Belfiore, E. S. 2000. Murder among Friends: Violation of Philia in Greek Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crucial study of kin-murder scenarios in Attic tragedy that has implications for the specific threat to familial structures posed by erôs.
Cohen, D. 1991. Law, Sexuality, and Society: The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Important analysis of the interaction between legal strictures and informal social mechanisms, such as gossip, in regulating private and public morality.
Halperin, D. M. 1990. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge. Chapter 5, “The Democratic Body: Prostitution and Citizenship in Classical Athens,” 88–112, is a foundational (though controversial) discussion of the relationship between democratic ideology and sexual practices, especially prostitution.
Hamel, D. 2003. Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan’s Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Accessible and entertaining account of the “back story” behind the trial of the courtesan Neaera, useful for understanding both legal procedures and the social realities of prostitution.
Hubbard, T. K. 1998b. “Popular Perceptions of Elite Homosexuality in Classical Athens.” Arion 6: 48–78. Influential study arguing for widespread class-based disapproval of institutionalized pederasty among ordinary citizens.
Ober, J. 1989. Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Comprehensive treatment of Athenian political institutions and class tensions, focusing on the clash between political equality and social inequality. Chapter 7, “Conclusions: Dialectics and Discourse,” 293–339, is highly provocative.
Nussbaum, M. C. 1979. “The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium.” Philosophy and Literature 3: 131–72. This interpretation of the Symposium focuses on the figure of Alcibiades, an object lesson in the tragic potential of erôs directed toward a unique individual, as described in Aristophanes’ fable.
Pomeroy, S. B. 1994. Xenophon, “Oeconomicus”: A Social and Historical Commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Along with an English translation, Pomeroy provides a full historical and social introduction to Xenophon’s treatise, with particular attention to gender and the prescribed roles of man and wife.
Winkler, J. J. 1990. The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece. New York: Routledge. Chapter 2, “Laying Down the Law: The Oversight of Men’s Sexual Behavior in Classical Athens,” 45–70, supplies additional perspectives on several topics we have discussed, including the construct of the kinaidos and the prosecution of Timarchus.
Wohl, V. J. 2002. Love among the Ruins: The Erotics of Democracy in Classical Athens. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Explores the complexities of the metaphor of pederastic erôs as applied to transactions between the citizen and the democratic city-state.