by K J Dover
No argument which purports to show that homosexuality in general is natural or unnatural, healthy or morbid, legal or illegal, in conformity with God’s will or contrary to it, tells me whether any particular homosexual act is morally right or morally wrong. I am fortunate in not experiencing moral shock or disgust at any genital act whatsoever, provided that it is welcome and agreeable to all the participants (whether they number one, two or more than two). Any act may be – to me, or to any other individual – aesthetically attractive or aesthetically repulsive. Any act may be committed in furtherance of a morally good or morally bad intention. Any act may have good or bad consequences. No act is sanctified, and none is debased, simply by having a genital dimension.
Some readers, especially if they are familiar with previous treatment of the subject, may be surprised by the distribution of emphasis in this book; I have dealt comparatively briefly with some famous people and places (Sappho, Socrates, Sparta) and more fully than is usual with such topics as graffiti, legal terminology and the details of bodily stimulus and response. The reason is that the question which I have tried to answer is not a question about the famous but about Greek society in general. Readers may also be surprised that I do not say very much explicitly about relations between men and women. I ask these readers to remember first, that the book is about a single element in Greek sexual life, and secondly, that my primary object is to describe what is most easily and clearly observed, offering such explanations as are prompted by everyday experience (in which what actually matters to people is often quite different from what ‘ought’ to matter) and attempting (not with uniform success) to restrain myself from speculation at more theoretical levels.
Originally it was intended that Professor George Devereux and I should write this book in collaboration. Pressure of other commitments made it impossible for Professor Devereux to contribute to the book, but I have invariably profited from discussing with him many of the problems which have arisen in writing it; I have not attempted to do myself what his great experience and learning in anthropology and psychoanalysis qualify him to do. Many classicists, at home and abroad, have given me helpful comment, criticism, advice and information; all errors are mine.
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
K.J. Dover
Abbreviations
1.Ancient authors and works:
Ar(istophanes) Ach(arnians), Eccl(esiazusae), Lys(istrata), Thesm(ophoriazusae)
Dem(osthenes)
Eur(ipides)
H(ero)d(o)t(os)
Hom(er) Il(iad), Od(yssey)
Lys(ias)
Pl(ato) Ch(a)rm(ides), Euth(y)d(emus), G(o)rg(ias), Lys(is), Ph(ae)dr(us), Pr(o)t(agoras), Rep(ublic), S(y)mp(osium)
Plu(tarch) Dial(ogue on Love), Lyc(urgus)
Thuc(ydides)
Xen(ophon) Anab(asis), Cyr(opaedia), Hell(enica), (Constitution of the) Lac(edaemonians), Mem(orabilia), S(y)mp(osium)
2.Corpora of texts, inscriptions and vases:
CA
=
Collectanea Alexandrina, ed. Powell, J.U. (Oxford 1925)
CAF
=
Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta, ed. Kock, Theodor (Leipzig 1880-8)
CGF
=
Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, ed. Austin, Colin, i (Berlin 1973)
CVA
=
Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum
DK
=
Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. Diels, H., sixth edition, revised by Kranz, W. (Berlin 1951-2)
FGrHist
=
Fragmenta Graecorum Historicorum, ed. Jacoby, F. (Berlin, 1923-30, Leiden 1943–
HE
=
The Greek Anthology, ed. Gow, A.S.F., and Page, Denys, i: Hellenistic Epigrams (Cambridge, 1965)
IEG
=
Iambi et Elegi Graeci, ed. West, M.L. (Oxford 1971-2)
IG
=
Inscriptiones Graecae
PLF
=
Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, ed. Lobel, E., and Page, Denys (Oxford, 1955)
PMG
=
Poetae Melici Graeci, ed. Page, Denys (Oxford 1962)
SEG
=
Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum
SLG
=
Supplementum Lyricis Graecis, ed. Page, Denys (Oxford 1974)
TGF
=
Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, ed. Nauck, A. (Leipzig 1889, repr. Hildesheim 1964)
Wehrli
=
Die Schule des Aristoteles, ed. Wehrli, F. (Basel 1944-59)
3.Modern books:
LSJ
=
Liddell, H.G., and Scott, R., Greek-English Lexicon, revised by Stuart Jones, Sir Henry, and McKenzie, R., with Supplement (Oxford 1968)
RE
=
Real-Enzyklopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft
Details of the following are given in the bibliography:
ABV
=
Beazley (1956)
AC
=
Dover (1972)
ARV
=
Beazley (1963)
EG
=
Boardman and La Rocca
GPM
=
Dover (1975)
IGD
=
Trendall and Webster (1971)
LCS
=
Trendall (1967b)
Par
=
Beazley (1972)
PhV
=
Trendall (1967a)
RCA
=
Metzger (1951)
4.Periodicals:
AA
=
Archäologischer Anzeiger
ABSA
=
Annual of the British School at Athens
AJA
=
American Journal of Archaeology
AJP
=
American Journal of Philology
AK
=
Antike Kunst
BICS
=
Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies
CP
=
Classical Philology
CQ
=
Classical Quarterty
CR
=
Classical Review
HSCP
=
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology
JHS
=
Journal of Hellenic Studies
MDAI
=
Mitteilungen des deutschen archäologischen Instituts
QUCC
=
Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica
RM
=
Rheinisches Museum
TAPA
=
Transactions of the American Philological Association
ZPE
=
Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik
Note: any vase illustrated in this book is starred thus: R295*
I
Problems, Sources and Methods
1. Scale
For the purpose of this enquiry, homosexuality is defined as the disposition to seek sensory pleasure through bodily contact with persons of one’s own sex in preference to contact with the other sex. There may well be other purposes for which this definition would be superficial and inadequate; but Greek culture differed from ours in its readiness to recognise the alternation of homosexual and heterosexual preferences in the same individual, its implicit denial that such alternation or coexistence created peculiar problems for the individual or for society,1 its sympathetic response to the open expression of homosexual desire in words and behaviour, and its taste for the uninhibited treatment of homosexual subjects in literature and the visual arts. It therefore present
s us with a mass of undisguised2 phenomena, and we have little occasion, in considering the work of any Greek writer, artist or philosopher, to construct arguments in favour of a diagnosis of latent or repressed homosexuality.
How, when and why overt and unrepressed homosexuality became so conspicuous a feature of Greek life is an interesting subject for speculation, but we are sadly short of evidence, for there is no doubt that overt homosexuality was already widespread by the early part of the sixth century B.C. Analogies from other times and places and the identification of factors common to many dissimilar cultures have considerable suggestive value but still leave many alternatives open; a further complication is that biologists, anthropologists and historians differ in their axiomatic beliefs about the vulnerability of sexual behaviour and sexual emotion to initially trivial changes of fashion.3 Why the Athenians of the fourth century B.C. accepted homosexuality so readily and conformed so happily to the homosexual ethos is a question which can be answered instantly at a superficial level: they accepted it because it was acceptable to their fathers and uncles and grandfathers. The interesting and important question in respect of the fourth century is: how did homosexuality really work? How was it integrated with heterosexuality, and how was the moral and aesthetic evaluation of good and bad homosexual behaviour related to the values of classical Greek society in general? The subject is richly documented, though it has one important deficiency: all Greek art, literature and archival material, with the exception of a little poetry surviving only in fragments and citations, was the work of males, and the evidence bearing upon female sexuality of any kind is exiguous by comparison with the superabundant evidence for male homosexuality. ‘Male’ must therefore be understood with the words ‘homosexual’ and ‘homosexuality’ throughout this book, unless ‘female’ is specified.
The evidence covers a long period of time and is of very many kinds; it includes, for example, primitive graffiti on the rocks of Thera, a wall-painting in a tomb at Paestum, scurrilous political jokes and slanders, Plato’s formulation of an ideal philosophical education, and the products of ancient research into the institutions of Crete. Readers who do not know much about the Greeks and approach the subject of Greek homosexuality out of an interest in psychology or sociology – or out of ordinary human curiosity about other people’s sexual behaviour – may wish for brief guidance on the compartments into which it is both customary and useful to divide Greek history and on the salient differences between those compartments. The earliest extant words inscribed in the Greek alphabet are datable to the eighth century B.C.; it is probable that the earliest known Greek work of literature, Homer’s Iliad, took shape in that same century; and the close of the century saw the beginnings of representation (as opposed to decoration) in the visual arts. It is therefore between 800 and 700 B.C. that the Greeks become articulate for us.4 The lower terminus of the ancient Greek world is the sixth century A.D., in which the overt expression of explicitly pagan thought and feeling was extinguished. In this period of one thousand three hundred years there are four critical moments. The first is the decisive defeat of the Persian attempt in 480 B.C. to bring the Greek mainland into the Persian Empire; this is the boundary between the ‘archaic’ and ‘classical’ periods. The second crisis is the latter half of the fourth century B.C., in which the Greek mainland and the Aegean islands became subordinated to the kingdom of Macedon, the Macedonian king Alexander conquered the Persian Empire, and Greek-speakers and Greek culture and institutions were thereby disseminated throughout the Middle East. The third crisis is the second century B.C., when increasing Roman intervention in the Balkans and the Aegean culminated in the incorporation of the Greek mainland into the Roman Empire as a province (146 B.C.). The last crisis was the progressive disintegration of the western half of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., from which the Greek-speaking eastern half, with its capital at Byzantium (Constantinople), emerged as the enduring link between the ancient Greek world and later ages. In the archaic and classical periods the sovereign state was the city, often ludicrously small by modern standards but making its own laws, observing its own institutions and rituals and fighting wars or making treaties with its neighbours. Big cities drew many small cities into ‘alliances’ which were often empires rather than associations of equals; but imperial power of this kind ebbed and flowed, and it is vital to remember, whenever one is tempted to generalise about the Greeks, that in the archaic and classical periods the term ‘the Greeks’ covers hundreds of sovereign city-states, distributed throughout Greece, the Aegean and coastal areas of (mainly) Turkey, the Black Sea, Sicily and South Italy, constituting a linguistic and cultural continuum but nevertheless admitting of striking differences in political structure and social ideals.
Classical Greek literature is predominantly Attic (‘Attica’ was the territory of the city-state of Athens), and in the classical period Attica is also represented by more documentary inscriptions than the whole of the rest of the Greek world. Archaic literature, on the other hand, was almost entirely non-Attic, and this fact makes it difficult to define ways in which (say) Athens in 350 B.C. differed either from the Ionian cities at the same date or from the Athens of two centuries earlier. The cultural dominance which Attica established during the classical period, especially in literature, ensured that the Attic dialect became the basis of standard Greek in the subsequent period and the ancestor of the medieval and modern Greek dialects, but in the ‘Hellenistic’ age, which began at the end of the fourth century B.C., Athens ceased to be politically powerful. As a cultural term, ‘Hellenistic’ can be applied to the Greeks right down to the end of paganism, but it is usual to apply it in a more restricted sense, denoting the last three centuries B.C., and to refer thereafter to the ‘Roman’ or ‘imperial’ period.
The beginnings of Greek cultural nostalgia can be detected as early as the fourth century B.C., at least at Athens, when no tragic poet of genius had appeared as heir to Sophokles and Euripides, and it was undoubtedly in part a product of the Athenians’ regret at the loss of the imperial power which they had exercised over the Aegean for much of the fifth century. Nostalgia was diffused and reinforced by the submergence of the city-states in Macedonian and Greco-Macedonian monarchies, and further reinforced by the absorption of the Greek-speaking world into the Roman Empire. One consequence of this process was a tendency to venerate the literature of the classical period as canonical; by-products were the development of strong antiquarian interests on the part of many educated people and a desire to maintain in literature the conventions, of form and style and social usage, which belonged to the classical past. For this reason writers of late date – particularly of the first two centuries A.D. – contain much which is directly relevant to the classical period; they were, after all, able to read and use a mass of Greek literature which is lost to us, and it often happens that our only access to a writer of the fourth century B.C. is through references, paraphrases and quotations in works composed during the Roman Empire. Since, however, the distinctive features of Greek civilisation were fully developed before the end of the classical period, I have not judged it useful to accumulate evidence which shows only that characteristically Greek attitudes and behaviour survived for a long time as ingredients of a Greco-Roman cultural amalgam, nor have I said anything about characteristically Roman elements in that amalgam.
2. The visual arts
Many hundreds of Greek vase-paintings5 depict older males conversing with younger males, offering them gifts, cajoling or entreating them, titillating or embracing them. A high proportion of these pictures are of such a kind that if a representative sample survived from some alien culture of which we knew little there would be no good grounds for interpreting them as depictions of homosexual relationships. One may, after all, talk to a boy or offer him a present without being motivated by lust; one may embrace one’s own son or nephew, and one may lay restraining hands on a thief or a runaway. In the case of the Greek pictures, however, ev
en if we take into account no evidence other than the totality of the pictures themselves, every point on a scale of intimacy is fully represented. At one end of the scale, apparently relaxed and thoughtful conversation; at the other end, a man thrusting his erect penis between the thighs of a youth; at intermediate points, a boy indignantly refusing the offer of a present, or a man putting out his hand to touch the genitals of a youth. Close analogies with scenes in which one of the participants is a woman are also instructive; we may see in one picture a man offering a gift to a half-naked woman, while in another a man in the same pose may be offering the same gift to a boy, and the boy’s expression and gesture may be the same as the woman’s. Some gestures are ‘culture-bound’, and it is possible to make bad mistakes in interpreting them; others make sense when treated as common to us and the Greeks, as when (R52) a youth is arming for departure on military service and his father wags a forefinger in offering advice. Facial expressions which manifest anger, grief or pleasure are normally what we would expect them to be if we put ourselves in the place of the people depicted. The same is true of stance, though alternatives are more often open; thus in R841 a youth standing in a pose of embarrassment and indecision while his companion converses with a woman may be either jealous of the claims of the other sex on his bosom-friend or wishing that he had taken the initiative himself, and the man in R344 who looks pensively at a youth and a boy in conversation may either be a rival of the youth in courting the boy or a relative of the boy disquieted by the turn the conversation is taking. The boy in R381 is almost certainly under homosexual siege from three youths, but the man in R684*, thoughtfully stroking his beard while talking to a boy, may be a teacher to whom the boy has put a difficult question.6 Even pointing and display may be ambiguous; we could hardly misinterpret R647, where a woman in conversation with a man lifts her skirt slightly with one hand and points to her breasts with the other, but it is hard to know whether the youth in B258, who turns round towards a man following him and points to his own buttocks, is issuing a serious invitation or making a gesture of insolent mockery, and there is a possibility that the resemblance of the position of his arm and hand to a pointing gesture is accidental.
