Greek Homosexuality

by K J Dover

  But when every allowance is made for the extension of the term ‘hubris’ beyond simple physical assault. Aiskhines’ use of the term and its cognates is intended not to make a serious legal point but to implant in the jurors an attitude of mind helpful to the prosecution. He applies the word to the acts to which Timarkhos submitted: ‘such misdeeds and acts of hubris upon the body of Timarkhos’ (§55), and ‘he thought nothing of the hubris committed upon his own body’ (§116). Since, however, Timarkhos prostituted himself voluntarily – as Aiskhines elsewhere emphasises, in order to paint the man’s character as depraved (§87, ‘if an Athenian voluntarily earns money for shaming his body’; §188, ‘voluntarily prostituted’; cf. §40, ‘having chosen to sell himself’) – no one who made use of Timarkhos could be regarded as exercising upon him the intimidation, deception or constraint which would justify a charge of hubris. It is one thing to say (§137) that ‘violation of decency by hiring someone for money is the behaviour of a hubristēs who does not know right from wrong’, for, as we have seen, anyone who attached the highest importance to the satisfaction of his own bodily desires could reasonably be called hubristēs; it is quite another matter to speak of a contractual agreement as if it were a hubris-relationship between aggressor and victim. But Aiskhines prepares the way for this argument unobtrusively, though confidently, by the terms in which (§15) he summarises the law on hubris:

  ... in which it is explicitly laid down that if anyone commits hubris against a boy – and hubris is committed, surely, by the man who hires him – or a man, or a woman ...

  ‘Surely’ here represents dēpou, a particle sometimes used to suggest that it would be unreasonable on the part of the hearer to question the observation offered or the conclusion drawn by the speaker; it may be almost an apology for insulting the hearer’s intelligence by drawing his attention to the obvious, and it can therefore be used to deceive him into treating as obvious what is not so.19 We see here the same technique at work as in § 19 (p. 25); Aiskhines has smuggled into his statement of the law an idiosyncratic and illegitimate interpretation of its intention. He does not seem to have felt himself on quite strong enough ground to argue outright for an equation of hire with hubris, as (for example) Dem. xxxv 26 argues that failure to repay a loan can fairly be called sūlē, ‘plunder’, since it entails depriving others of their money biāi, a word which sometimes means ‘by physical force’ and at other times ‘against the will of...’.20

  The ‘wild men’ to whom Aiskhines refers in §52 are presumably the same kind of people as ‘the son of Xenophantos’ (i.e. Hieronymos) in Ar. Clouds 347-9, who is ‘long-haired’, ‘wild’ (agrios) and ‘shaggy’, and is compared to a centaur because of his ‘craziness’ (maniā).21 Centaurs (with the honourable exception of the wise Khiron) were regarded, like satyrs, as creatures of ungovernable lust, given to pouncing on anyone, of either sex, whose beauty aroused them. Hieronymos seems to have had a thick head of hair, and hairiness, being suggestive of animality, was popularly regarded as an indication of lack of control over the appetites; the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata discusses (iv 31) the question: ‘Why are birds and hairy men lecherous?’ Long hair has very varied associations; cf. p. 78. The particular ‘craze’ of Hieronymos may have been the shameless pursuit of boys, and this interpretation was followed by the ancient commentators on Aristophanes; it is reflected also in the scholion on Aiskhines i 52 and in part of the entry under ‘céntaur’ in the lexicographer Hesykhios (κ 2223-7): ‘crude’, ‘wild’, ‘brigand’, ‘pederast’ and ‘arse’. The other part of the entry is not to be discounted, and in Ar. Frogs 38 kentaurikōs, ‘like a centaur’ (with reference to knocking on a door) means ‘loudly’, ‘violently’. There was no law against ‘wildness’, and in Aiskhines i 52 we are concerned with social opprobrium directed against hybristic behaviour. Similarly the gangs or clubs of randy and combative young men to whom a certain Ariston, the speaker of Dem. liv, refers with distaste and indignation were proud to earn such names (§§14, 39) as ‘Triballoi’ (a Thracian tribe, proverbially uncivilised; the scholion on Aiskhines i 52 gives this too as a name for the ‘wild men’) or ithuphalloi (‘with phallos erect’).

  Aiskhines’ purpose in confusing the issue in respect of hubris is not to secure the punishment of any of Timarkhos’s clients but to represent Timarkhos as himself guilty of hubris, and this he tries to suggest by means of a sophistic distinction between the legal personality and the body. There are two degrees of this argument: the first is that Timarkhos was ultimately responsible for the (so-called) hubris committed by the clients (§29, ‘vendor of his own body for hubris’; §188, ‘vendor of the hubris of his body’), and the second treats Timarkhos as the actual agent (§108, ‘he who is hubristēs not only against others but also against his own body’; §185, ‘he who has committed hubris against himself’). It is possible that a passage in §17 is intended to prepare the way for this argument. Aiskhines there draws attention to the fact that even hubris against slaves is punishable, and explains that it was the legislator’s intention to discourage ‘the man who is hubristēs against anyone whomsoever’; but since the same point is made by Demosthenes xxi 46 in quite a different connection, we should perhaps reserve judgment on the function of §17 in Aiskhines’design.

  If anyone doubts whether Aiskhines can really have expected to persuade a jury (and subsequent readers of the speech) that Timarkhos was ‘really’ guilty of hubris, and that its victim was the agent’s own body, he should reflect on the data discussed in Section 2 above, and in particular on Aiskhines’ misrepresentation of the law in §§72, 87.22 It must also be remembered that the Greeks did not take kindly to the idea that a man of bad character should be acquitted on a technicality or through a deficiency in explicit testimony; on the contrary, they were quite willing to try and to sentence people whose offence was to behave in ways which aroused resentment but could not easily be subsumed under precise legal prohibitions. The question to which our own courts address themselves is ‘Has the defendant done what he is alleged to have done, or has he not?’ and ‘If he has done it, is it forbidden by law?’ An Athenian court seems rather to have asked itself ‘Given this situation, what treatment of the persons involved in it is most likely to have beneficial consequences for the community?’ Both plaintiffs and defendants show, by the techniques of persuasion and criteria of relevance adopted in the speeches which are extant, that they are well aware of the question in the jurors’ minds.23

  B. Manifestations of Eros

  1. Defences against a charge of prostitution

  All we know for sure about Timarkhos’s defence is that it was unsuccessful and that Demosthenes spoke on his behalf. If Aiskhines is even half right about the gossip occasioned by Timarkhos’s association with Misgolas, and if any truth underlies the anecdotes which he tells about allusions and laughter in the assembly (§§80-4, 110) and the audience’s interpretation of a reference in comedy to ‘grown-up pornoi like Timarkhos’ (§157), we can infer that Timarkhos would not have been on strong ground if he had tried to prove popular belief to be false. Refutation of rumour and gossip is hard enough at the best of times, and refutation of statements about the existence of rumour and gossip is virtually impossible. A juror, assured that ‘everyone knows’ something of which he himself has never heard a word, is more likely to acquiesce, a little ashamed of his own unworldly ignorance, than to reject the statement in the confidence that he knows it to be unjustified. Timarkhos’s hopes must have lain in asserting that his relationship with Misgolas and other men was not commercial but emotional, and in challenging his adversaries to produce any evidence that he had received payment in return for participation in homosexual acts.

  When Aiskhines turns to examine possible lines of defence, with the intention of denigrating them in advance,24 we find that he deals with two of them by enlarging on presuppositions which are important to the prosecution throughout; the third line of defence, however, turns out to be a counter-attack which involves Ai
skhines in a defence of his own reputation and way of life.

  (a) (§§119-24) Demosthenes will suggest that Timarkhos cannot have prostituted himself, since his name is not recorded among those from whom the tax on prostitutes (male or female) is levied. Aiskhines retorts: a decent citizen should be in a position to appeal to the community’s knowledge of his life and conduct, and should not find himself compelled to rest his defence on a squalid quibble (§§121ff.).

  (b) (§§125-31) ‘I gather,’ says Aiskhines, ‘that another argument composed by that same sophist (sc. Demosthenes)25 will be offered’, to the effect that rumour is notoriously unjust and unreliable. Aiskhines meets this argument in part by citing what poets have said about Rumour (a contemptible evasion, since the integrity of Rumour, not her power, is the point at issue), in part by allegations about Demosthenes’ boyhood (which, of course, could be testimony in favour of Rumour only if independently known to be true).

  (c) The third argument is introduced as follows (§§132f.):

  I hear that one of the generals26 will get up and speak in defence of Timarkhos, with languid air, conscious of the impression he is making, as being thoroughly conversant with wrestling-schools and educated society.27 He will try to make out that it is ridiculous that this case should ever have been brought at all, claiming that I have not so much instituted a new kind of proceedings28 (lit., ‘invented a judgment’) as opened the way to an objectionable philistinism.29 He will put before you first of all the example of your benefactors, Harmodios and Aristogeiton ... and ... sing the praises of the love (philiā; see Section 3) of Patroklos and Achilles which is said to have come into being through erōs ...

  Harmodios and Aristogeiton killed Hipparkhos, the brother of the tyrant Hippias, in 514 B.C., and were regarded in popular tradition as having freed Athens from tyranny, though Hippias was not in fact expelled until 510. Both Harmodios and Aristogeiton perished in consequence of their act; Harmodios was the eromenos of Aristogeiton, and Hipparkhos’s unsuccessful attempt to seduce him was the start of the quarrel which had such a spectacular political outcome (Thuc. vi 54-9). The peculiar features of Achilles’ devotion to Patroklos, as portrayed in the Iliad, were not only the insane extravagance of his grief at Patroklos’s death but his decision to stay on at Troy and avenge Patroklos even though he knew that by so doing he doomed himself to an early death when he could have gone home and lived to a peaceful old age. The defence envisaged by Aiskhines as likely to be offered on Timarkhos’s behalf by the unnamed general amounts to this: a homosexual relationship can engender the most heroic self-sacrifice (cf. p. 191); Athens benefitted by the resolve of Harmodios and Aristogeiton to risk death in slaying the tyrant; Timarkhos’s relations with his lovers were similar in kind to the great homosexual loves of history and legend; and if men involved in such relations are going to be attacked as prostitutes by mean and ignoble upstarts who do not know what they are talking about,30 the spirit of Athens will be impaired.

  Moreover, says Aiskhines (§135), this general will ask

  if I am not ashamed, when I too make myself a nuisance in the gymnasia (sc. by hanging around handsome boys) and have been erastes of many ... and he says he will read out all the erōtikos poems which I have addressed to some (sc. eromenoi), and that he will produce evidence of some hard words and blows in which I have been involved, arising out of this activity.

  Aiskhines’ reply (§136) to these allegations may come as a surprise to a modern reader:

  For my part, I do not criticise dikaios erōs, nor do I assert that those of exceptional good looks have (sc. necessarily) prostituted themselves, nor do I deny that I myself have been erōtikos and remain so to this day; I do not deny that I have been involved in the contentions31 and fights which arise from this activity. On the poems which they say I have composed, I admit to the poems, but I deny that they have the character with which my opponents will, by distortion, invest them.

  So far from denying that decent boys, however good-looking, are ever involved in a homosexual relationship, Aiskhines implies that if a boy is good-looking he will necessarily have erastai;32 [Dem.] lxi 1 indicates that encomia recited by an erastes might be more productive of embarrassment (aiskhūnē, ‘shame’) than of honour to such a boy. He distinguishes (unlike the comic poets;cf.pp.146f.) between prostitution and another kind of erotic relationship in which he declares that he himself is a participant. §133, two-thirds of the way through the speech, is the first moment at which we hear the word erōs; hitherto everything has been treated in terms of prostitution, with one mention (§57) of ‘desire’. We now have to consider what Aiskhines means by attaching dikaios (‘legitimate’, ‘honest’, ‘law-abiding’) to erōs, and what exactly he is admitting when he accepts erōtikos as a characterisation of himself.

  2. Eros and desire

  From now on ‘eros’ will be printed as an English word, on a par with ‘erastes’ and ‘eromenos’. The earliest words of the eros-group which we encounter in Greek are:

  (a) eros (with a short o), which in Homer means ‘desire’ for a woman (Il. xiv 315), for food and drink (Il. i 469 and elsewhere, in the formula ‘when they had expelled [i.e. satisfied] their eros of food and drink’) and for other things for which one may feel a desire capable of satisfaction (e.g. Il. xxiv 227, ‘when I have expelled my eros of lamentation’), and in Hesiod is personified as one of the first divine beings to come into existence (Theogony 120-2, ‘most beautiful among the immortals’).

  (b) The adjectives erannos, erateinos, eratos, eroeis, ‘lovely’, ‘attractive’, applied to people, places, objects and activities.

  (c) The seventh century B.C. adds the verb erān (also erasthai), ‘desire (to ...)’, ‘be in love (with ...)’, of which the aorist aspect is erasthēnai, ‘conceive a desire (for ...)’, ‘fall in love (with ...)’· Throughout the classical and Hellenistic periods the connotation of this group of words is so regularly sexual that other uses of it can fairly be regarded as sexual metaphor. The god Eros, depicted in the visual arts as a young winged male,33 is the personification of the force which makes us fall in love willy-nilly with another person.

  Prodikos in the late fifth century defined eros as ‘desire doubled’, using for ‘desire’ the very general word epithūmiā (of which the verb is epithūmein) and adding that ‘eros doubled is insanity’ (B7). So too Xen. Mem. iii 9.7:

  (And he said) that those whose aberrations are slight are not regarded by most people as insane, but just as one calls strong desire ‘eros’, so one calls substantial distortion of a person’s thinking ‘insanity’.

  Frequently eros and erān are treated as synonymous with epithūmiā and epithūmein;34 so in Xen. Smp. 8.2, 8.8 the changes are rung on epithūmiā and words of the eros-group, with homosexual reference, and ibid. 4.62-4, in a jocular figurative passage on ‘procuring’ enthusiastic pupils and teachers for their mutual intellectual benefit. Simon’s opponent (Lys. iii 39) says, ‘when other people fall in love and are deprived of the object of their desire ...’,

  Plato’s Phaedrus contains a remarkable passage (230e-234c) which purports to be composed by Lysias, addressed to an imaginary boy and urging him to ‘grant his favours’ to someone who is not in love with him rather than to someone who is. In those respects which have so far been analysed the style of the passage is Lysias’s, not Plato’s, but Plato was a skilful parodist (as we can see from Smp.) and perfectly able to imitate Lysias at a superficial level; the question of authorship must therefore remain open.35 We find in the passage no explicit anatomical or physiological word, but rather such expressions as kharizesthai, ‘grant a favour (to ...)’, ‘do what one is asked to do’, ‘do what ... want(s)’ (233de, 234b; cf. Phaidros’s summary in 227c), the same word as is used (231c) of generous and accommodating behaviour on the part of the man towards the boy; we find also ‘succeeded in doing what they wanted’ (232d) and ‘fail to get what I want’ (231a), a circumspectness of language which helps us to understand why Aiskhines professed such re
luctance (§52) to utter such a word as peporneumenos in public. In the context, where the man makes it plain that he is not in love with the boy, there is no room for doubt about the nature of the ‘favour’ which he wants. No linguistic distinction is drawn here between the desire of the non-erastes for bodily satisfaction divorced from eros and the obsessive, more complex desires of the erastes. It is assumed that the erastes is initially aroused by the sight of the boy’s beauty, even if he knows nothing of the boy’s character (232e). The erastes ‘follows’ (akolouthein, 232a) the boy conspicuously and ‘begs’ from him (implied in 233e, by the analogy of a beggar at the door; cf. Xen. Mem. i 2.29), but will one day ‘cease from his desire’ (234a). The word kharizesthai is used frequently in the speech of Pausanias in Pl. Smp. (e.g. 182a) to denote a boy’s surrender to’ or ‘gratification of’ an erastes (cf. Smp. 217a, 218d); this surrender can also be denoted by hupourgein, ‘render a service (to ...)’ and hupēretein, ‘serve ... as a subordinate’ (used elsewhere of a ship’s crew, staff officers, and a wide range of other services). So in Xen. Hiero 1.37: