The subject of same-sex eros or “Greek Love” has a long history in Greek literature, reaching back to the archaic age, perhaps even to the epics of Homer.1 Homoerotic love in its conventional ancient form of pederasty, whereby an older male loves a younger one, runs through various literary genres from the time of Theognis to that of Strato. The phenomenon also has important connections to the philosophical speculation of the classical period, most notably the dialogues of Plato. Centuries later, the subject remained an object of concern to the Greek writers of the imperial age, who have passed on to us some provocative texts on the subject of human sexuality in society, particularly the place of homosexual love and its valance alongside heterosexual. Both Plutarch’s Amatorius and the Lucianic Erotes are indications that the Greek world of the Second Sophistic took a strong interest in the subject of sexual preference and continued to debate the merits of same-sex love long after its idealization in archaic, classical, and Hellenistic times. In fact, it has been posited, notably by Foucault (1986, 189–232), that Plutarch’s dialogue, in a significant departure from the dualism of Plato, represents a new erotics, marked by the idealization and philosophical validation of the love between a man and woman as symmetrical and reciprocal. This phenomenon finds perhaps its clearest expression in the writers of the extant Greek novels, all of which highlight the centrality of the romantic relationship of hero and heroine and to varying degrees exalt the institution of marriage (the most important and influential study of the new erotics is Konstan 1994a).
What then of the tradition of same-sex eros? In this new erotic world, according to Foucault (1986, 189), the love of boys “lost some of its intensity, its seriousness, its vitality, if not its topicality” and so ceased to be a focus of primary concern. Granted that no author makes same-sex love his primary concern, but is it really the case that such eros had become “marginal and episodic”? After all, Xenophon of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius, and Longus do, in fact, weave into their narratives homosexually inclined characters, some minor ones, but also some major ones who not only narrate their in-set tales of boy-love but also assume important roles in the advancement of the love of the principals (Effe 1987 attributes the diminution of homoerotic themes in the novels to considerations of genre, specifically to the epics of Homer). The in-set stories, like the one of Hippothous in Xenophon or that of Menelaus in Achilles Tatius, can hardly be said to lack intensity, nor can boy-loving characters such as Cleinias who aids and abets the romance of the hero and heroine in Achilles Tatius be dismissed as marginal or tangential to the larger narrative. Furthermore, in spite of Foucault’s assertion that boy-love had, by the time of the novelists, become “de-problematized,” in other words, that it was no longer the issue that it had been for earlier thinkers on erotics, it is important to note that the question whether a man should love boys or women still remained a subject of controversy, as indicated by the debate that Achilles Tatius inserts into his novel on this very topic. (Hubbard 2009, 249, sees the problem not so much as one of “deproblematization” as “a polarization of pederasty and heterosexuality into mutually exclusive lifestyles, each of which problematized the other.”)
The Ephesiaca of Xenophon and Leucippe and Clitophon of Achilles Tatius between them have three episodes of same-sex love, all of which basically follow the conventional pattern of Greek pederasty. According to the paradigm, the older male, the erastes, partners with a younger man, the eromenos or paidika, in a relationship marked by asymmetry in that the erastes, being more mature, is something of a mentor to the younger and serves as masculine role model and teacher of civic and military virtue—a role memorably idealized by the speech of Phaedrus in Plato’s Symposium. The chief hallmark of the eromenos is the physical beauty of youth along with the desire for the edification that association with the erastes will bring. The relationship, whatever its level of intensity, is meant to be an impermanent one because the expectation is for the arrangement to terminate upon the maturation of the younger man when the time comes for him to enter into marriage and perhaps later himself to become an erastes to a youth. This is the pattern that, with some variation, informs the story of Hippothous in Xenophon and those of Cleinias and Menelaus in Achilles Tatius. The occurrence of stories of same-sex love within the larger narratives of boy–girl romance is noteworthy, as is the role that the same-sex lovers play as heroic helpers in reuniting the hero and heroine.
Xenophon’s Ephesiaca features the complex and multi-faceted Hippothous, whose characterization ranges from aristocrat to brigand and back to aristocrat. In the course of his adventures, he exhibits a bisexual fluidity, as he becomes the lover of not one but two beautiful young men, finds himself at one point married for a brief time, and even expresses a sexual interest in Anthia.2 The author treats Hippothous’ heterosexual side in brief and marginal fashion, focusing more intently and with greater length on his passion for the two male youths. The narratives of Hippothous’ love first for Hyperanthes and later for Cleisthenes form a contrasting frame in the novel as the tragic loss of the first love early on is balanced at the end by the happily-ever-after denouement with the second love, while in between the two frames Hippothous plays out his double role as robber and as heroic helper to Habrocomes and Anthia (see Watanabe 2003 on the multiple sides of Hippothous’ personality, who in his discussion synthesizes the disparate roles of bandit, pederast, married man, and elite male.) When we first meet him, Hippothous is a brigand on the verge of killing Anthia, but in the course of telling his tale to Habrocomes he reveals the nobility of his background as a citizen of Perinthus, and, as typical of a Greek aristocrat, he is an ephebophile, having become the erastes of the beautiful Hyperanthes (see Davidson 2007, 603–605, on the association of aristocracy and pederasty). Although the stereotype of the erastes/eromenos dynamic is generally one of asymmetry and disparity in age, the relationship of Hippothous and Hyperanthes is predictably asymmetrical in some ways, though symmetrical in others. Clearly, Hippothous is the more assertive of the two, being the initiator of the affair as well as the murderer of his rival. There is, however, symmetry on three important points: age, status, and reciprocity of passion. Even though Hippothous refers to Hyperanthes as a lad (meirakion), he also indicates that the two were almost coeval, so much so that the proximity of their ages deflected suspicion that they were lovers.3 Thus, one surmises that Hippothous is aged 18 or 19, and Hyperanthes only a year or so younger. We must also assume that Hyperanthes, since he has access to the palaestra, must belong to the same social class as Hippothous. Although, according to the paradigm, the one partner does the loving and the other receives it, this relationship in an untypical symmetry exhibits a remarkable mutuality, for Hyperanthes does indeed display a reciprocity toward Hippothous’ affections that recalls Plato’s term for the boy’s reciprocal love, anteros (Phaedrus 255D). If we compare the symmetrical love of Habrocomes and Anthia, and in particular the scene of their wedding night (1.9), with Hippothous’ account of his love-making with Hyperanthes, we notice striking verbal and thematic parallels. In both scenes, there are tears, kisses, and caresses, and, in fact, Xenophon’s own words “loving each other for a long time extraordinarily” (en polloi chronoi stergontes allelous diapherontos 3.2.4) make explicit the length and depth of the passion between Hippothous and Hyperanthes. In sum, we have here an erotic mutuality which is as symmetrical and as deeply felt as that of the newly wedded Habrocomes and Anthia.4
Several elements in Hippothous’ tale make connection to the long-standing tradition of Greek love as celebrated by poets, philosophers, and vase-painters, as, for example, the emphasis on Hyperanthes’ beauty as well as the venue of the lovers’ first meeting. Onomastically emblematic of this beauty, Hyperanthes’ name is meant to resonate with the heroine’s own name, the “hyper” signaling a beauty beyond the norm such as to disarm first Hippothous and later his rival Aristomachus (see Hägg 1971, 36, for Xenophon’s onomastics). Here, too, is the connection of the name to earlier homoerotic poetry, where floral imagery regularly symbolizes either the boy himself or his first beard. An example from the Palatine Anthology (12.256) will illustrate:
Love hath wrought for thee Cypris, gathering with his own hands the boy-flowers, as wreath of every blossom to cozen the heart. Into it he wove Diodorus the sweet lily and Asclepiades the scented white violet. Yes, and thereupon he pleated Heraclitus when, like a rose, he grew from the thorns, and Dion when he bloomed like the blossom of the vine. He tied on Theron, too, the golden-tressed saffron, and put in Uliades, a sprig of thyme, and soft-haired Myiscus the ever-green olive shoot, and despoiled for it the lovely boughs of Aretas. Most blessed of islands art thou, holy Tyre, which hast the perfumed grove where the boy-blossoms of Cypris grow.5
Like Hyperanthes’ name, so too the site of love’s beginning is in the tradition of Greek love because the gymnasium, that sacred male space under the tutelage of the god Eros, was a locus of sexual energy that manifested itself in masculine admiration, emulation, flirtation, and seduction—phenomena well supported by evidence in Plato’s Lysis, Charmides, and Symposium (the connection between the palaestra and pederasty has been well analyzed by Calame 2002, 101–115; Scanlon 2002, especially Chapter 8; and Davidson 2007, 603–606). It is here that Hippothous experiences the onset of an overwhelming erotic passion through the sight of the nude Hyperanthes engaged in the act of wrestling, and as Scanlon (2002, 216) says, “Wrestling is, for obvious physiological reasons, the favored metaphor for making love in the literary sources … a natural topic for fiction with erotic themes.”
The tale of Hippothous and Hyperanthes is in some ways parallel and in other ways a counterpoint to the romance of Habrocomes and Anthia. Like the hero and heroine, the male couple experience threats to their relationship in the form of a rival as well as physical separation, though Hippothous is much more of an active agent than Habrocomes, going so far as to kill his rival. The main difference, however, in this love story is that the ending is one of tragedy when Hyperanthes drowns in the shipwreck. Here, we encounter a recurring element in the pattern of same-sex love stories, the premature death of the beloved boy, which sometimes is caused by the lover’s own hand, as in the case of Menelaus in Achilles Tatius’ novel. It has been suggested that the reason behind the motif of premature death of the eromenos lies in the limitations of real life where a permanent relationship between erastes and eromenos was outside the norm, and so in the novel, as so often in myth, death ends the relationship that in life would have been ended by the boy’s maturation.6 Fidelity, however, does not die, and so Hippothous constructs a tomb for the boy, memorialized by a worthy sepulchral inscription (3.2):
Hippothous fashioned this tomb for far-famed Hyperanthes,
A tomb unworthy of the death of a sacred citizen,
The famous flower some evil spirit once snatched from the landing into the deep,
On the ocean he snatched him as a great storm blew.
(translation from Winkler 1989)
The verses, with their placement of the names at either end of the first line and the mention, appropriately enough, of the boy-blossom (anthos) drowned at sea, reveal some poetic talent on the part of Hippothous as a writer of sepulchral epigram. And so, even though Hyperanthes dies, the love between him and his lover is in a sense immortalized in memory both here and at the end of the story when Hippothous constructs a second grand tomb on the island of Lesbos. The story of Hippothous is marked by an elegant pathos down to the detail of him showing to Habrocomes a lock of the boy’s hair, and his own role in it demonstrates his nobility throughout. His subsequent turn into brigandage bespeaks the desperation felt from the loss of his life’s great passion.
The tragedy of Hyperanthes’ loss receives counterbalance toward the novel’s end when Hippothous discovers Cleisthenes, a young man who enters his life after a brief stint of marriage to a rich old woman, about whom we hear very little except that it left him a wealthy man with all the trimmings of money, luxury, and servants. Restored now to aristocratic status, Hippothous reverts back to the love of male youth in the person of Cleisthenes, another meirakion like Hyperanthes, who is, needless to say, both noble and beautiful (5.9). Although the narrative glosses over the romantic details of this new relationship, Xenophon does indicate the depth of commitment between Hippothous and Cleisthenes in Hippothous’ sharing all of his possessions with the youth. Most remarkable, however, is the course that this relationship takes because, in a striking departure from the narrative pattern of same-sex lovers, this relationship does not end with the death of the eromenos, but rather with the promise of a happy ending. In fact, the conclusion of the novel signals the implication that the relationship of Hippothous and Cleisthenes is a permanent arrangement: Xenophon not once but twice parallels the nature of this male–male relationship with two heterosexual relationships, that not only of the hero and the heroine but also of their former servants, Leucon and Rhode. Thus, at 5.13, on the voyage to Ephesus, when night comes, the sextet of best friends lies down for the night, Leucon with Rhode, Habrocomes with Anthia, and Hippothous with Cleisthenes. Xenophon again stresses this parallelism in the ending of the novel, where Hippothous, after building a second tomb for Hyperanthes, makes an entirely unexpected and unusual disposition when he adopts Cleisthenes as his son. As the cenotaph built for Hyperanthes demonstrates fidelity to his old love even in death, so the act of adoption places a seal on the permanence of the relationship between Hippothous and his new love. The implication of the novel’s final words seem to be that Hippothous and Cleisthenes as a same-sex couple are exact counterparts to, or mirror of, their heterosexual companions, and we come to the conclusion that they, like Leucon and Rhode and like Habrocomes and Anthia, will share indefinitely the bliss of a loving relationship. There is no reason to suspect that their relationship will turn platonic, as some have suggested.7 The closing notes of the story of Hippothous and Cleisthenes with their implication of permanence and mutual fidelity indicate a striking departure from narratives of same-sex eros and thus form a unique and original treatment of Greek love.
Xenophon’s treatment of same-sex eros, which is portrayed as tragic in the case of Hyperanthes and felicitous in that of Cleisthenes, has a comic counterpart in the minor episode of Corymbus and Euxinus, the two pirates who fall in love with their captives, the former with the hero, the latter with the heroine. It is significant, as Konstan (1994b, 37) points out, that the “episode presents a homoerotic and a heteroerotic passion in strictly parallel terms, emphasized by the fact that each lover pleads the case of the other.” For the lovesick pederast to assume the traditionally aristocratic role of a would-be-erastes to the captive Habrocomes is a marvelous piece of incongruity. It is furthermore made melodramatic by Euxinus’ similar arguments for why Habrocomes should yield to his admirer. In addition to promises of material goods and implied threats for non-compliance, the pirate, interestingly, argues that Habrocomes is still too young for a wife, in other words, that he is still eromenos material (he is, we recall, aged 16 years): “What need have you for a wife or domestic ties, and why should a man of your age need to love a woman?” Habrocomes’ reaction to the prospect of submitting to Corymbus fills him with extreme consternation, expressed by his preference for death over submission.
The novel with the most extensive treatment of same-sex erotics is Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon. For not only does the narrative contain two tales of tragic boy-love, that of Cleinias and that of Menelaus, it also gives these two ephebophiles important roles later in the novel as helpers to the hero and heroine. Their stories, told in close proximity, Cleinias’ at 1.7 and Menelaus’ at 2.34, serve to bond the two boy-lovers and also to prelude the famous debate on the subject of what type of love is superior, that of boys or of women (2.35–38). Finally, toward the end of the novel, we encounter Thersander who, though married to Melite and for a while sexually interested in Leucippe, becomes the target of brilliant courtroom invective in the Aristophanic mode directed against his youthful sex life. The charges leveled against him are all concerned with same-sex relations, which, in contrast to the amours of Cleinias and Menelaus, present a very different picture of male-directed sexual desire, and, in fact, represent a misuse and debasement of that desire.
The two pederastic episodes in Achilles Tatius follow the same pattern as that of Hippothous in Ephesiaca. Although the stories of Cleinias and of Menelaus are told with a very different tone and effect, both of them center on the familiar motif of the premature death of an eromenos caused directly or indirectly by the erastes. Menelaus’ story of accidently killing his beloved is told with considerable pathos, while Cleinias’ narrative has a decidedly unserious tone with its touches of misogynist humor as well as bombastic rhetoric, not to mention Cleinias’ characterization as an addict of sexual pleasure (1.7.1). One remarkable element in the narrative of Cleinias and Charicles is the tension between homoerotic love and the exigencies of marriage imposed by family and society. No sooner do we learn that the lover and beloved are in state of bliss than this idyllic relationship is shattered by the news of a marriage arranged for the boy by his father. For Charicles, the prospect of marriage is a double disaster, in that the intended partner is not only a female but an ugly female. The shock of losing his beloved to a woman elicits from Cleinias a misogynistic diatribe on the entire female sex, against which he marshals an array of mythological and literary exempla of ladies whose marriages brought ruination to men, going far as to denigrate the very archetype of female virtue, Penelope (Morales 2004, 152, calls Cleinias “a raving paederastic misogynist”). Furthermore, in an ironic inversion of the “Bride of Death” motif familiar from mythology and literature where marriage is a metaphorical death for the bride, Cleinias reverses it to make marriage spell death for the bridegroom, whose youth and beauty will be destroyed by an unworthy wife (1.8.9—Bartsch 1989, 138, points out Achilles Tatius’ play with paradox in juxtaposing Cleinias’ reversal of the Bride of Death motif followed shortly by Charicles’ application of the same motif to the literal death of his son): “Please, Charicles, do not wither on the vine; don’t let any ugly gardener pluck your lovely rose.” After the boy dies in a dramatic riding accident on the horse given him by his lover, Cleinias breaks into an almost laughable lament as he remonstrates with the horse which, in a strained rhetorical paradox, he refers to both as gift to and murderer of his beloved (Anderson 1982, 28, sees Charicles’ death as Cleinias’ punishment for his attack on marriage, “a sort of erotic rough justice”). There is heavy irony in the author’s handling of this pederastic episode, which Morales (2004, 152) sees as a “cautionary tale against Cleinias’ way of loving,” made even more ironic in Cleinias’ assumption of mentor in love or erotodidaskalos to his cousin Clitophon. In the course of the plot’s unfolding, however, he provides crucial assistance to the hero and heroine, despite being a lover of boys and an unmitigated misogynist.
The subject of Greek love has a long-standing connection to Greek philosophy, particularly to the erotics of Plato as enunciated in Phaedrus and Symposium. The latter dialogue’s opposition between male-directed and female-directed eros exerted considerable influence up to the time of the Second Sophistic, as indicated by Plutarch’s Amatorius and the Lucianic Erotes.8 Thus, Achilles Tatius, who makes frequent allusion to Plato’s erotic philosophy, inserts into the novel his own dialogue on the merits of boys versus women as lovers. The debate comes after Clitophon has heard Cleinias and Menelaus tell their respective stories of boy-love gone bad, and with a comment on the contemporary vogue for boy-love, in the manner of Symposium’s Phaedrus, he suggests to his ephebophile companions a rhetorical diversion, an erotic psychagogia. The debate or synkrisis begins with Menelaus’ proposition that the love of males is superior to that of women because boys are simpler (haplousteroi) and possess a beauty that affords sharper stimulus to pleasure. To the mind of this pederast, the simplicity of boys is far preferable to the female artifice, on which Menelaus expatiates toward the end of the debate, citing feminine make-up, hair-dye, and perfume as proof of women’s faked beauty; far more desirable to him is an athletic young man engaged in wrestling, which activity Menelaus here describes overtly in erotic terms (38.2).
Throughout the back-and-forth between speakers, the focus of the arguments for both is pleasure (hedone)—the pleasure of pure physical sensuality, being that of boys for Menelaus and that of women for Clitophon. In contrast to, say, Plato’s Symposium, this dialogue has no propaedeutic purpose, showing little concern for the moral edification of either lovers or beloveds or for the meaning of love relationships, much less eros as an avenue to the higher good. Thus, for Clitophon as for Menelaus, the chief criterion for judging between the sexes is also pleasure, and so, to his opponent’s opening volley on the beauty of boys, Clitophon counters with the objection that their pleasure is short lived. The mention of the transience of the beauty of youth, a standard motif in pederastic poetry, elicits from Menelaus a defense of evanescent beauty in things such as the rose. With the allusion to heavenly and vulgar beauty at 2.36, Menelaus appears to be taking a philosophical turn, but instead he slides into a misogynistic speech, which denigrates females such as Alcmena, Danae, and Hebe, while extolling the relationship of Zeus and Ganymede. In reply to this bit of sophistic manipulation of mythology, Clitophon answers in kind with his own spin on Menelaus’ exempla, and the debate soon swings back to the subject of pleasure, culminating with Clitophon’s graphic description of woman’s corporeal pleasures. The synkrisis ends with Menelaus having the final word on the nectar-like kisses of boys, and so it returns to the theme of boys’ simplicity with which he began the debate. Underlying Menelaus’ argument about the naturalness of boys’ kisses is the physis/nomos dichotomy of fifth-century sophists, which posited the opposition between nature and culture. Thus, the speaker claims that women’s kisses are the product of craft (techne), while those of boys are of nature (physis). The debate ends abruptly without the designation of a winner, perhaps a signal of the author’s neutrality on the question of loving women or boys. (In contrast to the debate in Achilles Tatius, Plutarch’s Amatorius comes down on the side of marriage between a man and woman, while the Lucianic Erotes makes the opposite judgment.) (For discussions of the three debates as a reflection of the “new erotics” posited by Foucault, see Goldhill 1995 and Klabunde 2001.)
Same-sex eros, exemplified by Cleinias and Menelaus early in the novel, comes in for Aristophanic invective in Book 8.9 in the person of Thersander, the apparently bisexual husband of Melite. Characterized from the start as a bully with lust for Leucippe, he is given to scurrilous name-calling and is ready to impugn the morals of others. Thersander receives condign recompense for his licentious tongue in the courtroom when the priest Nicostratus, who has taken the hero and heroine under his own and Artemis’ protection, makes his rebuttal. Cast in the Aristophanic mode, the speech is a brilliant piece of comic invective directed against Thersander’s shameful and scandalous impropriety as a young man in his relations with the male sex (Hubbard 2003, 8–9, notes how the charge of pederasty against a citizen, whether active or passive, was often used to influence juries even when it was irrelevant to the case). It is arguable whether we are to read the charges as mere fictive invective or as a factual account of Thersander’s past, although Nicostratus’ positive characterization by the author suggests his credibility as a witness. Whether fact or fiction, however, the charges in the speech paint a picture not only of Thersander’s utter perversion of male-directed sexuality, but also of the cultural institution of the palaestra. The priest’s speech, which recalls both Aristophanes’ jibes against self-prostituting politicians and also Aeschines’ attack on Timarchus, paints a picture of the youthful Thersander as attracted to the male sex but in a way that violates every code of ethics governing same-sex relations. So, in the palaestra, the hypocritical Thersander pretended to submit himself to the rigors for paideia, but, in fact, he abused the physicality of athletics for the gratification of his own lust, in other words, for porneia, as the speaker terms it. The speech highlights the sexual connotations of wrestling in the palaestra where Thersander—in an allusion to Aristophanes’ speech in Symposium 192A—sought out hyper-masculine males for the sake of lustful physical contact (8.9.4). In a rhetorical display marked by brilliant word plays and sexual double-entendres (kupto, paraklino, glottan mesten hubreos), Nicostratus reduces Thersander to the level of a kinaidos or pathic who took pleasure in both oral and passive anal sex, later turning his stoma ou katharon (what the Romans called os impurum) to slander.9 This charge of unmanliness against Thersander, whose name ironically means “manly courage,” is a most serious one, being meant to compromise Thersander’s standing in the civic community and to undermine his credibility in the courtroom.
Nicostratus’ picture of Thersander as an example of perverted male desire has an interesting but very different parallel in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe. Unlike the other two novels discussed here, Longus’ pastoral novel contains no in-set stories of same-sex love, although Philetas, the old cowherd and eratodidaskalos to the two lovers, seems susceptible to the charms of both boys and girls (2.4–5). Toward the end of the novel, however, we encounter Gnathon, the city-slicker who intrudes upon the pastoral world and brings with him the sexual mores of the city. Longus explicitly identifies him as “pederast by nature” (physei paiderastes, 4.11), the problem being not his predilection for boys per se, but rather because his practice of same-sex eros is wanton and self-indulgent just like his appetites for food and drink (Winkler 1990, 112–114, contrasts the untutored “natural” state of Daphnis and Chloe with Gnathon’s urban education into wantonness; Goldhill 1995, 46–51, also discusses Gnathon from the perspective of erotic education and relates his sexual inclination to the issue of physis). Drawn from the tradition of New Comedy and from other ethopoetic literature, Gnathon is a parasite and the embodiment of the socially unacceptable type of man given to dissipation, akolasteia, the very opposite of the Greek gentleman’s virtue of sophrosune. Everything about Gnathon is comic and grotesque from his name (“Jaws” or “Big Mouth”), which is indicative of his gluttony and drunkenness, to his over-sexed inclination toward boys, and, of course, the rustic beauty of Daphnis is to him irresistible. The scene of his attempted seduction of Daphnis, in which the city-sophisticate, thinking that the country boy will be an easy conquest, is not only comical but has some interesting philosophical undercurrents. Gnathon frames his proposition to Daphnis for sex with an analogy from the animal kingdom, asking that he might use Daphnis a tergo in the same way that he-goats mount she-goats. Daphnis’ counter-argument that same-sex mating is unheard of in the animal world is, of course, grounded in the sophistic physis/nomos controversy; the interlocutor in Erotes 22 makes with his appeal to physis exactly the same arguments as Daphnis.
Undeterred by Daphnis’ argument from nature, Gnathon persists in his manipulations to acquire his boy-toy and appeals to Astylus, whose putative father is the owner of Daphnis, to give him the boy as a gift. When Astylus ironically questions the propriety of Gnathon loving a socially unacceptable goatherd, Gnathon, appeals to him in a speech marked by a very sophisticated rhetoric (see Zeitlin 1990, 455–457). He waxes eloquent on the subject of Daphnis’ hyacinthine hair, his jewel-like teeth, rosy complexion, and imagined kisses. He also adduces a number of mythological precedents of deities loving country boys, like Apollo in love with Branchus and Zeus in love with Ganymede. Circumstances intervene, and the revelation of Daphnis’ true identity saves him from becoming the love-slave of an odious master. In this pastoral utopia where negative elements never last very long, even Gnathon by novel’s end is redeemed when he rescues Chloe from an attempted rape, and so the lustful parasite of comedy becomes a heroic helper, assuming in a sense the same role as Hippothous and Cleinias, namely, the ephebophile who aids the hero and heroine move toward their ultimate reunion.
A survey of the three novelists who depict homoerotic love in their works shows that they do so with great complexity, variety, and sophistication.10 Through their characterizations of men who love youth, they provide well-drawn examples of same-sex eros, both the noble as represented by Hippothous as well as the base in a character such as Gnathon. Although no novelist makes a male couple the main focus of the narrative, authors such as Xenophon and Achilles Tatius do give homoerotic love an important role to play, treating the subject sometimes with pathos and sometimes with humor, reserving censure and ridicule for desire that is misdirected or abusive. The practitioners of homoerotic love, though differently portrayed from author to author, do regularly assume the role of helper to the hero and heroine, and their loving relationships sometimes serve as parallel to those of principals and at others they stand in counter-point. Indeed, Xenophon’s treatment of Hippothous and Cleisthenes suggests that among the possibilities for a same-sex relationship are permanence and conjugality. If in fact the era of the Second Sophistic gave birth to a “new erotics” and brought to center stage the love of man for woman, Greek love, though perhaps somewhat decentered, still had an important and meaningful role to play in the narratology of love.
1 The term “Greek Love” is used here to refer to male same-sex relations, conventionally those between an older man and a younger one. This is in accord with a tradition going back to the Romans who referred to the phenomenon as mos Graecorum (Cic., Tusc. 5.58), and is meant to avoid the commonly used terminology of “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality.” These terms, like the word “gay,” are imprecise and inappropriate for discussions of ancient sexuality because they imply sexual orientation as a definition of identity, which is a concept foreign to the ancients. The literature on Greek homosexuality has grown vast ever since Dover’s groundbreaking Greek Homosexuality. Among the most important studies in addition to Dover’s are: Cantarella 1992, Percy 1996, Hubbard 2003, and, more recently, Davidson 2007.
2 Schmeling 1980, 56, makes the assumption that Habrocomes and Hippothous have a homosexual relationship, with the latter serving as the active partner. There is nothing in the text to support the suggestion, on which point see Effe 1987, 98, and Sanchez 1999, 36; Alvares 1995, 398, sees the relationship of Hippothous and Habrocomes as one of friendship (philia), which eventually awakens the brigand’s noble side.
3 On the question of age in pederastic relationships, see Davidson 2007, especially Chapter 3: “Age-Classes, Love-Rules and Corrupting the Young” (76–115), where he does much to discredit what he calls “pedophile myth” and shows that issue of age disparity is largely unfounded.
4 Schmeling 1980, 52–6, enumerates the parallels between Hippothous and Hyperanthes and Habrocomes and Anthia in a handy columnar scheme. Konstan 1994c, 52–3, discusses both the contrasts and parallels between the relationships of the two couples, and stresses that the comparison is not meant to denigrate the same-sex relationship but to “highlight the equality and reciprocity of the passion that unites Habrocomes and Anthia.”
5 The translation is that of W.R. Patton in the Loeb Classical Library. Further examples of the floral motif are in Strato 12.4, 8, 58, 151, 165, 234, 244, and 256.
6 Watanabe 2003, 13–14. In the area of homoerotic poetics, the theme of boys’ maturation as the end of their sexual desirability has been analyzed by Taran 1985. Instances of eromenoi dying young abound in Greek mythology, for example, Apollo’s Hyacinth and Cyparissus and Heracles’ Hylas.
7 Konstan 1994b, 39; Alvares 1995, 404; and Watanabe 2003, 36; see Hippothous’ adoption of Cleisthenes as the termination of the erotic bond between the two, but as Morales 2008, 48, says, “… it would be strange to assume that the relationship moved from an erotic to a chaste one; there is nothing to suggest that this is the case. ‘Adoption’ is perhaps the closest that the two male lovers could get to a socially recognized legal bond like marriage.”
8 Klabunde 2001, following Foucault, has a comparative analysis of Amatorius, Erotes, and the debate in Achilles Tatius; the texts are also central to Goldhill’s 1995, 46–111, discussion of Achilles Tatius’ erotics; see also Scarcella 1991.
9 The precise meaning of the sexual vocabulary used against Thersander may be found in Henderson 1991; Dover 1978, 52, makes the point that for an eromenos to take pleasure in sex incurs disapproval as a pornos.
10 Chariton, apart from making a passing reference to Chaereas’ erastai before his marriage to Callirhoe (1.3), ignores same-sex eros, though he does highlight the philia between Chaereas and Polycharmus. Morales and Mariscal 2003, however, in an intriguing study, show that Chariton is conscious of the homoerotic reading of Homer’s Achilles and Patroclus, because his references to them in quotations from the Iliad regularly occurs in erotic contexts.
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