Greek Homosexuality
Page 6
(e) A considerable number of ‘epigrams’, i.e. short poems (mostly of two to five elegiac couplets), were composed on homosexual themes from the third century B.C. onwards. They were incorporated in a succession of anthologies, of which the earliest and most important was the Garland of Meleagros, c. 100 B.C.; as one would expect, each anthologist drew heavily on his predecessors, discarded some of their items, and added fresh material. What we call the ‘Greek Anthology’ was compiled by Konstantinos Kephalas in the tenth century A.D.; it survives in the ‘Palatine Anthology’, near to Kephalas in date, in the ‘Planudean Anthology’, compiled by Maximos Planudes in 1301, and in some minor collections of later date.29 Homosexual epigrams, to the number of some three hundred, are collected in book xii of the Greek Anthology, and heterosexual epigrams in book v; some slight carelessness in classification is shown by a scatter of misplaced epigrams. Those epigrams which are later in date than Meleagros tell us little or nothing of importance about Greek sentiment and practice in homosexual relations which we do not already know from earlier material.30 What we find in the Garland, on the other hand, is often of considerable value when taken in conjunction with allusions in comedy or details in vase-paintings, thanks to the numerous constants (cf. p. 112) in the history of Greek culture.
The chapters which follow do not take the evidence in chronological order; they begin not at the beginning, but at the centre of things, where the evidence is most abundant and most detailed. The number of different issues relevant to homosexuality raised by Aiskhines i is considerable, and I propose to explore each of them far enough to make what Aiskhines said to the jurors in 346 B.C. intelligible in terms of the jurors’ attitudes and assumptions. For this reason Chapter II is the mainstay of the book, and it will be followed by an exploration of what I regard as special cases and side-issues.
4. Vocabulary
It will be necessary later (II B. 2-3) to discuss the Greek words for love, sexual desire and various acts and emotions which are related to love, to desire or to both. But three other problems of translation will be with us almost from the first and will stay with us to the end. One of these is constituted by the word kalos, which means ‘beautiful’, ‘handsome’, ‘pretty’, ‘attractive’ or ‘lovely’ when applied to a human being, animal, object or place, and ‘admirable’, ‘creditable’ or ‘honourable’ when applied to actions or institutions. It must be emphasised that the Greeks did not call a person ‘beautiful’ by virtue of that person’s morals, intelligence, ability or temperament, but solely by virtue of shape, colour, texture and movement. The English distinction between ‘handsome’, applied to males, and ‘beautiful’, applied to females, has no corresponding distinction in Greek; only the grammatical form can show whether a given instance of kalos has a masculine, feminine or neuter reference, and translation is sometimes complicated by the use of the masculine plural to mean ‘handsome males and beautiful females’ and the use of the neuter plural to mean ‘beauty in people, attractiveness in things and conspicuous virtue in actions’. In translating passages I have tended to keep ‘beautiful’ even on occasions when it does not sound quite right in English, and when I have used a different word I have indicated in brackets, in cases where misunderstandings might arise, that the original has kalos.
The second problem concerns the ‘active’ (or ‘assertive’, or ‘dominant’) and ‘passive’ (or ‘receptive’, or ‘subordinate’) partners in a homosexual relationship. Since the reciprocal desire of partners belonging to the same age-category is virtually unknown in Greek homosexuality (cf. p. 85), the distinction between the bodily activity of the one who has fallen in love and the bodily passivity of the one with whom he has fallen in love is of the highest importance. In many contexts, and almost invariably in poetry, the passive partner is called pais, ‘boy’ (plural paides), a word also used for ‘child’, ‘girl’, ‘son’, ‘daughter’, and ‘slave’. The pats in a homosexual relationship was often a youth who had attained full height (the vase-paintings leave us in no doubt about that); in order to avoid cumbrousness and at the same time to avoid the imprecision of ‘boy’, I have consistently adopted the Greek term erōmenos, masculine passive participle of erān, ‘be in love with ...’, ‘have a passionate desire for ...’. I have however retained ‘boy’ in translating a Greek passage which says pais, and I use ‘boy’ or ‘youth’ in describing any relationship in which the approximate age of the junior partner is known. For the senior partner I have adopted the Greek noun erastēs, ‘lover’, which is equally applicable to heterosexual and homosexual relations but (being, like erōmenos, derived from erān) is free (cf. II B sections 2-3) from the ambiguities inherent in the English word ‘love’. From now on ‘erastes’ and ‘eromenos’ will be printed as if they were English words. The Greeks often used the word paidika in the sense ‘eromenos’. It is the neuter plural of an adjective paidikos, ‘having to do with paides’, but constantly treated as if it were a masculine singular, e.g. ‘Kleinias was the paidika of Ktesippos’. I shall use this word in discussing passages of Greek which use it, and shall print it in roman.31
The third problem arises from the readiness with which people extend an originally precise term for a specific type of sexual behaviour to all sexual behaviour of which they disapprove and even to non-sexual behaviour which is for any reason unwelcome to them. Porneiā, for example, means ‘prostitution’ in classical Greek (cf. p. 20), but in later Greek (e.g. I Cor. 5.1) it is applied to any sexual behaviour towards which the writer is hostile. We do not normally interpret instances of modern colloquial usage, e.g. ‘wanker’, or ‘motherfucker’, as conveying precise charges of sexual deviation, and we should be no less cautious in the interpretation of comparable Greek words, whether they are to some extent etymologically analysable (e.g. katapūgōn; cf. pp. 142f.) or etymologically mysterious (e.g. kinaidos). Conversely, we must be prepared for the possibility that words which we could not recognise as sexual by inspecting them in isolation (e.g. the compound stem aiskhropoi-, literally ‘do what is ugly/disgraceful/shameful’) had a precise sexual reference (cf. ‘unnatural’ in English).
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1. The Greeks were aware (cf. p. 62) that individuals differ in their sexual preferences, but their language has no nouns corresponding to the English nouns ‘a homosexual and ‘a heterosexual’, since they assumed (cf. pp. 60f.) that (a) virtually everyone responds at different times both to homosexual and to heterosexual stimuli, and (b) virtually no male both penetrates other males and submits to penetration by other males at the same stage of his life (cf. p. 87). Cf. West wood 100-13.
2. That is not to say that nothing was concealed or suppressed (cf. p. 171 n.2), or that nothing was repressed in the individual consciousness.
3. Cf. DJ. West 45-7, 114 on the power of culture and society to determine sexual behaviour, and Devereux (1967) 69-73 on the important distinction between behavioural patterns and fundamental orientations of the personality.
4. In saying this I ignore the Mycenean documents, partly because they are not the sort of material from which we learn much about people’s thoughts and feelings, but mainly because of the cultural discontinuity created by the half-millennium of illiteracy which separated the Mycenean world from the invention of the alphabet.
5. In the course of working on this book I have looked at most of the published photographs of Greek vases. My generalisations may need to be modified in the light of new material or by rectification of errors caused by negligence and inexperience on my part in the interpretation of existing material, but I should be surprised if any of them can actually be replaced by contrary generalisations. I am far from claiming expertise in the interpretation of pictures, but I am fortified by seeing that experts sometimes err, e.g. in describing a typical pair of males engaged in intercrural copulation as ‘wrestlers’ or in taking a scene of homosexual courtship, in which hares are offered as gifts, as a ‘discussion of the day’s hunting’. Such errors may underlie the incorrect statement of
Robinson and Fluck 14 (repeated in GPM 214 and, with a large-scale misprint, in Dover [1973a] 67) about the rarity of scenes of homosexual copulation in vase-paintings.
6. Cf. G. Neumann 109.
7. It is possible that eāson here means not ‘Let me!’ but ‘Leave me alone!’, in which case both eāson and ‘Stop it!’ are uttered by the boy.
8. Cf. Webster 226-43.
9. ‘Silenos’ is the name of the father and leader of the satyrs (on whose characteristic appearance and behaviour cf. pp. 71, 99), but (like ‘Pan’ and ‘Eros’) the name can be applied to a genus.
10. Cf. Greifenhagen (1929) 26, 43f., 47f.
11. Here and elsewhere the reader is asked to note that I do not use ‘negligible’, ‘very little’, etc., as synonyms of ‘no’ and ‘none’; nor do I use ‘seldom’ to mean ‘never’, or ‘essentially’ and ‘fundamentally’ to mean ‘entirely’ or ‘exclusively’.
12. Whether or not the tripod itself is made the focus of the picture, the two figures in the tension of conflict seize our attention, and if they are flanked by the comparatively relaxed figures of Artemis and Athena the scene forms a characteristic and effective upright-cross-upright. On the effect of shape and configuration on the depiction of youths, cf. p.72.
13. Archaeologists distinguish between incised ‘graffiti’ and painted ‘dipinti’, but in ordinary usage the distinction is no longer observed.
14. What is very widely known or aesthetically striking or attractive is not always and necessarily as important for the purpose of the present enquiry as aesthetically unimpressive but unambiguous passages of uninspiring and little-read authors. Hence the absence of some distinguished names from my ‘five most important sources’.
15. Cf. M.L.West (1974) 43-5.
16.Cf. ibid.65-71.
17. Cf. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1128a 22-5; his generalisation is supported by what we can read of late fourth-century and early third-century comedy, but its validity is not as absolute as we might have imagined if we had known nothing at ail of the lost plays of his period.
18. Cf. AC 30-48.
19. Literally, ‘worse than those now’; ‘worse than ...’is normal Greek in the sense ‘not as good as ...’ (so too e.g. ‘uglier than ,...’ =‘not as good-looking as ...’).
20. Cf. Nygren 166 ‘philosophy ... in the sense of a philosophy of life built up partly on a religious basis’.
21. Cf. Pl. Smp. 204e-205a.
22. Cf. however n. 24 below.
23. I use inverted commas since (a) ‘soul’ as a translation of psūkhē (in antithesis to sōma, ‘body’) often has positive religious connotations which are not necessarily present in psūkhē, and (b) I do not use the words ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful’ except with reference to form, colour and sound, so that for me ‘beautiful soul’ is a senseless expression.
24. On the exceptional case of Diotima in the Symposium cf. p. 161 n. 11.
25. The voice of Plato in old age is heard from the anonymous Athenian who is the expositor in Plato’s Laws (not a Socratic dialogue); cf. John Gould 71-130.
26. Many excuses can be made for Plato, and some initial impressions are modified on reflection, but he can still be described as ‘suspicious and censorious’ by contrast with the numerous Greeks whose aesthetic response to art and literature was strong enough to mitigate their anxiety about moral implications.
27. Irrelevance was open to criticism, and procedural rules attempted to restrain it (Harrison ii 163), but to judge from the speeches which we read the restraint was not very effective.
28.Cf. GPM 5-14.
29. Cf. ΗΕ i xiii-xxi, xxxii-xlv.
30. For example: Straton, a Greek poet of Roman imperial times, regards young males of 16-17 as more exciting than those of any other age; if this view was held (as I think it probably was) by the Athenians of the classical period, Straton tells us nothing new, and if it was not held by them, Straton is irrelevant to the subject of this book. Flacelière 55f, in keeping with his general disregard of chronology, gives no hint of Straton’s date.
31. In two quotations from fifth-century comedy, Kratinos fr. 258 and Eupolis fr. 327, paidika refers to a girl, but in both the language may very well be humorous and figurative; at any rate, the word never has a feminine reference thereafter. The adjective is found in the sense ‘boyish’, ‘childish’, and also ‘sportive’, ‘frivolous’, the antonym of ‘serious’, as if it functioned as an adjective of paidiā, ‘fun’, ‘relaxation’. I suspect that paidika = ‘eromenos’ originated as a pun, the assumption being that a man spent his leisure-time in keeping company with a boy whom he hoped to seduce (cf. modern idioms such as ‘He’s got himself a smashing bit of homework’). The word occurs in the obscure title (apparently ‘You’ll scare
II
The Prosecution of Timarkhos
A. The Law
1. Male prostitution
In the early summer of 346 B.C. the city of Athens made a peace-treaty with Philip II of Macedon. Dissatisfaction with the terms of the treaty, and in particular with aggressive action by Philip in the last days before he actually swore to its observance, was such that the envoys whose task it had been to go to Philip’s court and receive his oath were threatened on their return with a prosecution which, if successful, might cost them their lives. This prosecution was instigated by Demosthenes, who had been one of the envoys but dissociated himself from the rest on their return; acting with Demosthenes, and perhaps designated as leading prosecutor, was a certain Timarkhos. The envoys were able to counter this threat by recourse to a law which debarred from addressing the assembly, and from many other civic rights, any citizen who had maltreated his parents, evaded military service, fled in battle, consumed his inheritance, or prostituted his body to another male; this law provided for the denunciation, indictment and trial of anyone who, although disqualified on one or other of these grounds, had attempted to exercise any of the rights forbidden to him. It was believed that Timarkhos, who had certainly been active in the assembly and had held public office, could be shown, at least to the satisfaction of a jury (lacking, as all Athenian juries lacked, the guidance of a professional judge), to have prostituted himself in his youth. This belief was justified, for Aiskhines, one of the threatened envoys, brought Timarkhos to court and won the case. Timarkhos was disenfranchised (Dem. xix 284), and thereby Demosthenes and his political associates suffered a reverse; three years were to pass before Aiskhines was prosecuted for misconduct on the embassy, and then he was acquitted. Since the greater part of our evidence for the events of 346 B.C. comes from highly partisan sources, it is hard to assess the balance of Athenian opinion on issues of foreign policy at any given moment, and it would be unwise to suppose that the revelation of Timarkhos’s squalid past was enough in itself to convince the citizenry that Aiskhines must be right about Philip II and Demosthenes wrong. The demonstration that Timarkhos was attempting to exercise political rights from which he was legally debarred, whatever the reason for the debarment, will have weighed more heavily with the Athenians; and the diminution of his social and political standing by the jurors’ acceptance of Aiskhines’ vilification and ridicule as justified, whatever the quality of the evidence, may have been the most important factor of all in frustrating the political efforts of the group to which Timarkhos belonged.
According to the law which Aiskhines describes in §§ 29-32, with selective verbatim citation, a citizen who was peporneumenos or hētairēkōs was debarred from the exercise of his civic rights:
because the legislator considered that one who had been a vendor of his own body for others to treat as they pleased (lit. ‘for hubris’; cf. Section 4) would have no hesitation in selling the interests of the community as a whole.1