by K J Dover
4. A clear introduction to some of the basic issues is provided by A. Lear, ‘The Pederastic Elegies and the Authorship of the Theognidea,’ Classical Quarterly 61 (2011) 378-93.
5. For the configuration and development of Dover’s interests in the Greeks, see my 2011 Hellenic Society memorial lecture, ‘Kenneth Dover and the Greeks’, online at https://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/files/6870022/Dover_and_the_Greeks_web_.pdf, with D.A. Russell and ES. Halliwell, ‘Kenneth James Dover’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy 11 (2012) 153-75 (online at http://www.britac.ac.uk/memoirs/11.cfm). A list of Dover’s publications up to 1989, though with several errors and omissions, can be found in E.M. Craik, ed., ‘Owls to Athens’: Essays on Classical Subjects Presented to Sir Kenneth Dover (Oxford 1990) 401-9.
6. Published in Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 11 (1964) 31-42.
7. The article does not mention at all Pausanias’s double emphasis (Symposium 181d, 183e) on a ‘lifelong’ homosexual ideal; the book alludes to it briefly and in passing (‘stays for life’, 83). In the article cited in my next note, Dover interestingly accepted that Pausanias and Agathon had something like a homosexual ‘marriage’ (72 n. 37), but there and elsewhere the implications of that idea are not pressed.
8. The article appeared in Arethusa 6 (1973) 59-73; note, however, that it predated most of Dover’s researches into the iconographic evidence: hence the important later correction, in Greek Homosexuality, 4 n. 5, to the article’s erroneous claim that depictions of same-sex copulation were rare in vase-painting.
9. For indications of Dover’s (mixed) attitudes to Freudian theory, see Marginal Comment, 3, 7, 106, 123-5.
10. The footnote about Freudian psychodynamics is p. 179 n. 24 (the only mention of Freud’s name in the book), which also contains a strained defence of Devereux against criticism. For the aborted plan to collaborate with Devereux, see Marginal Comment, 123-4.
11. As one can see from ‘Classical Greek Attitudes etc.’ (n. 8 above), p. 66 and n. 35, Dover adapted the term from Devereux’s article ‘Greek Pseudo-Homosexuality and the “Greek Miracle”’, Symbolae Osloenses 42 (1968) 69-92, a piece so riddled with tendentious assumptions as to have no scholarly value. But the Postscript to the 1989 edition of Greek Homosexuality, 206, shows that Dover intended ‘pseudo-sexual’ to make a rather scholastic linguistic point which has no bearing on the main arguments of the book itself.
12. For Dover’s fullest and most sophisticated statement of his views on the initiation theory, see ‘Greek Homosexuality and Initiation’, The Greeks and their Legacy (Oxford 1988) 115-34.
13. See p. 62 on Aristophanes’ famous speech in Plato’s Symposium, together with pertinent passages of Xenophon and Aeschines. For reasons explained in my text above, Pausanias’s speech in Plato’s Symposium should also be included in this category.
14. Note Greek Homosexuality, 88-9, for Dover’s telling treatment of the typical ‘lover’ as a putative ‘twenty-year-old’. But he marginalises the further possibility of an erastês-erômenos relationship between two adolescents, as implied by e.g. Plato, Lysis 204b-c (Hippothales as lover of Lysis), mentioned but played down in Greek Homosexuality, 55, 57.
15. Dover’s treatment of the speech has been largely endorsed by the judicious work of Nick Fisher, Aeschines Against Timarchos (Oxford 2001), who deems Dover’s reading of the speech ‘extremely acute and sensible’ (vii): see pp. 25-67 for Fisher’s excellent overview of the relevant issues, including extensive references to scholarship post-Dover.
16. See Greek Homosexuality, 88, for this significant point; cf. ‘Classical Greek Attitudes etc.’ (n. 8 above), p. 66, for a fuller statement, as well as Dover’s edition of Plato Symposium (Cambridge 1980) 3-4.
17. See esp. Greek Homosexuality, 53.
18. For a number of revised judgements on Dover’s part, see Appendix 4 (coauthored by Dover and Nussbaum), as well as the personal communications cited in many of the footnotes, to M.C. Nussbaum, ‘Platonic Love and Colorado Law: the Relevance of Ancient Greek Norms to Modern Sexual Controversies’, Virginia Law Review 11 (1994) 1515-1651.
19. I am grateful to Tom Harrison and Mark Masterson for comments on a draft of this Foreword.
Foreword: The Book and its Influence
Following its much anticipated publication in 1978, Greek Homosexuality was warmly welcomed by reviewers for what it was: the first comprehensive, ‘unvarnished’ account of same-sex relationships in ancient Greece and one which laid out ‘the facts’.1 But its groundbreaking ideas and arguments – which have been both adopted and adapted by scholars ever since – and its full and frank treatment of its subject matter go only part of the way to explaining the enormous influence that the book has exercised. Crucially, Dover’s standing as a classical scholar (as outlined by Stephen Halliwell in ‘The Book and its Author’) helped to validate ancient sexuality as a legitimate area of scholarly interest. Dover did not just open up questions, he opened up a whole area of scholarship.
It is worth contrasting the receptiveness of academic reviewers to Dover’s subject matter with the broader social attitudes at the time of the book’s publication. Glimpses of the contemporary world creep into the text of Greek Homosexuality itself, such as the assertion that texts like Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium were often found in the pornography section of a bookstore and the allusion to the popular stereotype of homosexual men as highly effeminate.2 The conditions under which Dover’s book was produced also serve as a useful reminder of the legal situation regarding obscenity that prevailed in the UK in the 1970s. For fear that sending the photographs to be used in Greek Homosexuality by post might risk prosecution under Section 11 of the Post Office Act 1953 (United Kingdom), the book’s publishers in London sent staff to the British Museum to collect the relevant images, with academic colleagues of Dover occasionally pressed into service to courier them to Oxford.
How does Dover go about tackling his subject? The bulk of Greek Homosexuality is given over to the detailed analysis of Aeschines’ legal speech Against Timarchus – a speech in which Timarchus is accused of prostituting himself in his youth – chosen by Dover in the belief that it helps to expose the views of the common Athenians better than other texts with homosexual themes, such as the dialogues of Plato mentioned above. In the first part of the book, points of interest in the speech are discussed by Dover as and when they arise using data taken from across the ancient Greek world, whereas the latter part of the book is given over to other genres and themes (predilections and fantasies; lesbianism; vase-painting, comedy and philosophy). The picture of same-sex relationships thus emerges in a piecemeal fashion, but the main lines are nonetheless clear. For example, ancient Greeks found it normal for adult men to find handsome youths sexually attractive and the primary form that same-sex relations took in classical Athens was ‘pederasty’, an asymmetrical attachment between an adult lover (erastēs) and a younger partner (the erōmenos or paidika). An important element of this asymmetry is what Dover terms the ‘dominant and subordinate’ sexual roles played by the two partners, the older erastēs being the active partner, the younger erōmenos sexually passive.3 And while pederastic relationships were discussed openly in public and often presented as praiseworthy in classical Athens, not least for their educative value, they could also attract censure if conducted in an inappropriate way. In particular, anxieties and social taboos surrounded the physical aspects of relationships: ideally, an erastēs must be careful to display ‘legitimate eros’ and should be motivated by affection (philia) rather than lust; ideally, too, a boy should aspire to return his erastēs’ affection and gain no bodily pleasure from the attachment.
While Dover did much to establish a working framework for understanding same-sex relationships in ancient Greece, Greek Homosexuality has hardly proven uncontroversial. To take two examples, early reviewers were quick to challenge Dover’s claim that the erōmenos was neither expected nor encouraged to reciprocate his erastēs’
sexual desire – a topic which has remained contentious –4 and some questions were also raised about the social class of the partners in pederastic attachments: for all Dover’s interest in capturing the perspective of ordinary people in the ancient world, was pederasty essentially an aristocratic pursuit?5 Importantly, too, Dover’s discussions in Greek Homosexuality give only limited room to some questions that would later become hot topics in the study of ancient Greek sex and sexuality, such as the precise age of erōmenoi; the historical changes both in the nature of same-sex relationships and social attitudes towards them; and the precise meaning of the term kinaidos.6
Contentious details and underexplored questions are two ways in which Greek Homosexuality has inspired scholarly discussion, but significant, too, is that Dover’s empirical approach to his topic left something of a theoretical gap for other scholars to fill. When it comes to ancient sexual mores, perhaps the most influential theoretical perspective of the last forty years belongs to the French social historian Michel Foucault, the first two volumes of whose History of Sexuality were published in English translation in 1978 and 1985. The central idea of Foucault’s work is that ‘sexuality’ is a product of culture rather than nature; that is to say, human sexual behaviour is primarily shaped not by biology, but rather by the prevailing cultural norms of the society into which a person is born: it is a social construct.7 Inspired by Foucault, classicists working with this ‘(social) constructionist’ approach to ancient sex were quick to explore and develop his ideas. Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990), for example, takes as its starting point the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary dates the first use of ‘homosexuality’ in English to 1892, with ‘heterosexuality’ following a few years later.8 Ancient Greeks also lacked terms covering the same semantic range as ‘homosexuality’ and ‘heterosexuality’ which is, he contends, a symptom of the fact that other considerations were more important to them when it came to sexual ethics than the biological sex of one’s partner. The essays in Before Sexuality (1990), edited by Halperin, Winkler and Zeitlin, also explore the consequences of ‘sexuality’ and ‘sexual orientation’ being foreign to ancient Greeks. In The Constraints of Desire (1990) Winkler remarks on the impossibility of writing a history of homosexuality, ‘since neither it [i.e. homosexuality] nor heterosexuality nor even sexuality are timeless facets of human nature’.9 While the problematisation of the use of the word ‘homosexuality’ (which appears, of course, in the very title of Dover’s book) is a key to the (social) constructionist position, the work of these scholars largely represents an attempt to extend Dover’s work rather than a rejection of it. While the models of Greek sexual mores that emerge in the pages of Foucault, Halperin and Winkler certainly contain elements that are not present in Dover, they nevertheless owe a clear debt to Greek Homosexuality.
If the ancients did not categorise sex acts with reference to ‘sexuality’, then what criteria did interest them? For scholars like Foucault, Halperin and Winkler the answer grows out of Dover’s notion of ‘dominant and subordinate roles’: sexual acts were primarily defined by reference to penetration, i.e. who penetrated whom. According to this view, a sexual act is essentially a zero-sum competition in which the active partner is the winner, the passive partner the loser.10 In terms of heterosexual sex or sex between a citizen and a male slave, penetration simply serves to confirm the active partner’s superior social status. However, sex between two free males is another matter, since one of the partners is by necessity placed in an ‘unnatural’, inferior and feminising role. The power differential at the heart of sexual acts is used to account for the nature of pederastic relationships: the age-inequality between the partners mirrors the inequality inherent in the active and passive sexual roles, and the ‘intercrural’ position adopted by same-sex pairs in vase-paintings (where the erastēs stoops to insert his penis between the erōmenos’ thighs) can be read as avoiding the depiction of more shameful anal sex. An important figure to emerge in constructionist accounts of ancient sexuality is the kinaidos (a term mentioned only in passing by Dover).11 The meaning of this word is disputed, but Winkler understands it to signify an adult man who chooses to be penetrated. For Winkler, the kinaidos is ‘a man socially deviant in his entire being’, whose behaviour ‘flagrantly violated or contravened the dominant social definition of masculinity’.12
This view of Greek sexuality has proven controversial. Thornton, for instance, criticises Halperin’s and Winkler’s narrow understanding of ‘power’ and what he sees as the monolithic application of their ‘rigid’ theory to a society as ‘self-consciously complex’ as that of ancient Athens.13 As Hubbard notes, too, for a culture allegedly so obsessed with penetration, it is noteworthy that the focus of erotic attention in pederastic-themed vase-paintings tends to be on the erōmenos’ penis (which is not infrequently stared at or fondled) rather than the anus: this, he suggests, shows that an interest in the boy is as an ‘active agent with sexual capabilities’ rather than a ‘passive receptacle’.14 The disputes about the extent to which erōmenoi displayed affection or desire are also pertinent to issues of sex and power. DeVries identifies a number of vase-paintings where, he suggests, the younger partner conveys his sexual responsiveness.15
Perhaps the most stinging critiques of the ‘penetration = power’ model have come from Davidson who, in Courtesans and Fishcakes, posits that sex is ‘a subtle and complex relationship, an intricate nexus of exchanged values involving love, gifts, desirability and favours, not a rigid “zero-sum game” that the penetrator always won’.16 He suggests, too, that ‘there is little evidence for the language of sexual aggression and domination in the classical period’:17 it is the modern world in which phrases like ‘you’re screwed’ are used, not in ancient Greece. For Davidson, allegations of ‘womanishness’ are not made against men like Timarchus on the basis of their supposed sexual passivity (at least not per se); the accusation is rather that they are not in control of their (sexual) desires.18 In this vein, Davidson has put forward two alternative views of what the disputed term kinaidos might signify. In Courtesans and Fishcakes, he suggests that the kinaidos is ‘the paradigm of insatiability, of desire-never-to-be-filled ... appetite unbridled’.19 In The Greeks and Greek Love, however, he concludes that for classical Athenians (if not for Greeks living in later periods) a kinaidos signified what he calls a ‘willy-fiddler’: more precisely, a man whose unrestrained sexual appetites reveal themselves in his seduction of other men’s sons.20
The study of same-sex desire in ancient Greece that Dover did so much to establish as a mainstream topic of academic interest has given rise to more than its fair share of debates, only some of which have been highlighted here. But Greek Homosexuality also left generous room both for specialist studies and the systemisation of the broad set of sources from which Dover and other scholars draw their evidence. Two volumes in particular usefully assemble the key textual and pictorial evidence respectively. On the one hand, Hubbard’s Homosexuality in Greece and Rome (2003) is a sourcebook which contains English translations of an impressive range of ancient texts, from the archaic era to later antiquity. On the other, Lear and Cantarella’s Images of Ancient Greek Pederasty (2008) attempts a detailed overview of vase-paintings with pederastic themes, an admirable range of which are reproduced.
While some of the areas discussed by Dover have since received extensive scholarly treatment, reading Greek Homosexuality against the backdrop of the scholarship that post-dates it serves to highlight areas that either have until recently, or still remain, relatively underexplored by students of the ancient Greek world. Concepts of male beauty is one example here,21 lesbianism (outside the poetry of Sappho) another.22 What Dover’s text also usefully emphasises at regular intervals are the non-physical aspects of sexual relationships (aspects from which the ‘penetration’ model of Greek sexual ethics inevitably distract us) which also merit closer scholarly attention. Dover was evidently sensitive to the fact that same-sex relationships i
n classical Athens could involve affection, respect and devotion (as well as quarrels and jealousies) – that is to say, they operated on an emotional and not just a physical level.
As is well-known, the story of Greece and its powerful culture hardly ends when the golden era of Athenian hegemony passes. Alexander the Great’s conquests placed Hellenic culture in a dominating position in the Eastern Mediterranean and elsewhere. Next was Greece’s amalgamation into the Roman Empire as an important component of it. This process of expanding Hellenisation made Greek homosexuality a provocative counter-example and point of thought throughout the imperial centuries and beyond. While sexual desire between elite males in Greece was accorded a position of honour, albeit with the mixed feelings which Dover details, in Rome the situation was different. We are missing the exquisitely balanced ambivalence and idealising obscurity that frequently mark the Greek sources and instead have prohibition, official and informal, and in general a greater degree of ‘Aristophanic’ frankness about same-sex sexual behaviour.
Among the Romans, it was understood that homosexual desire was a reality, but the concept of stuprum, i.e. that sex with freeborn persons other than one’s spouse was forbidden, stood in the way of a particularly Greek mode of satisfying these desires. A citizen could have sex with a slave (including, it seems, persons of very young ages23) but he was not to have sex with freeborn persons of either sex (besides his wife). If he had sex with a freeborn boy (or girl), this was stuprum and actionable as an offence.24 Greek-style pederasty accordingly had no place in this system. In addition, sex between adult men periodically attracted legal sanction over the centuries.25
Scholars also have elaborated an understanding of Roman male sexuality termed, with some variations, the ‘priapic’ model of masculinity.26 This term makes reference to the minor garden god, Priapus, who was popular in Roman times and who sported an outsize phallus. This deity has been suggested as a totem that forcefully asserts the centrality of penetration to Roman manhood. Dover’s work arguably aided in the adoption of this outrageously endowed deity as a unifying symbol. Dover’s bold frankness about sexual matters,27 and his refusal to see them as primarily a moral issue,28 liberated scholars of Rome to approach their more ‘graphic’ society with greater confidence. While the priapic model does not explain all available evidence,29 it nonetheless functions well as a description of much of it. First, the legal situation valorises impenetrability in men. Second, the system of slavery and stuprum makes liability to penetration a marker of social status.30 Lastly, there is even an anti-type to the penetrating priapic Roman man: the cinaedus. When a man was called a cinaedus (and this term is seen much more often than the Greek term to which it is related, kinaidos31), we are to understand him to be passive sexually, effeminate in his gender presentation, and allowing his body to be penetrated as a slave’s would be.32
