by K J Dover
Whenever the eromenos renders a service (hupourgein) to a private citizen, that is in itself evidence that he is granting the favour (kharizesthai) out of affection, because the citizen can be sure that he (sc. the eromenos) is subordinating himself (hupēretein) without the imposition of any constraint; but a tyrant can never be sure that he is loved.
Cf. ibid. 7.6:
It was clear to us (sc. in our earlier discussion) that services (hupourgiai) rendered by those who do not reciprocate affection are not (sc. true) favours, and that sexual intercourse achieved by constraint is not pleasurable. Similarly services (sc. of any kind) rendered by those (sc. subjects) who are afraid is not an honour (sc. to the tyrant).
Hupourgein too is used in Pausanias’s speech in Plato (Smp. 184d), of the submission of an eromenos to what his erastes wants.
Introducing the subject of the Lysianic composition, Phaidros speaks (227c) of ‘one of the handsome (sc. eromenoi) being attempted’. Peirān, ‘make an attempt on ...’, ‘make trial of...’, i.e. (in a sexual context) ‘find out what ... is good for’ (with the intention of following up any promising development) is used in Xen. Hiero 11.11 with reference to the response which a generous and just tyrant may expect from his subjects (and let us not, here or elsewhere, underrate the Greeks’ sense of humour):
People wouldn’t simply love (philein) you, they’d be in love (erān) with you; and you wouldn’t have to make any attempt (peirān) on the beautiful – you’d have to put up with their attempts on you!
All the words considered in relation to homosexual dealings are equally applicable in heterosexual contexts. Peirān occurs in Lys. i 12, in a wife’s jocular accusation that her husband has been making a pass at a slave-girl (cf. Ar. Wealth 150, of negotiating with hetairai); kharizesthai is used (e.g. Ar. Eccl. 629) of a woman’s yielding to a man (cf. kharis, Plu. Dial. 751c); and Anaxilas fr. 21.2 uses hupourgein of a woman’s compliance ‘as a favour’ with those who ‘want something’ from her.
The application of the same terminology to the feelings and actions which are manifested in heterosexual desire, homosexual eros and homosexual desire divorced from eros sharpens the question posed at the end of Section 1 : what is the distinction between ‘legitimate eros’ and the relationship in which one partner pays the other for the provision of homosexual satisfaction? The term was not novel when Aiskhines used it; two generations earlier, Demokritos (B73) defined ‘legitimate eros’ as ‘aiming, without hubris, at the beautiful’. That eros, as an intense, obsessive desire, should on occasion induce hubris is in no way alien to Greek thought.36 In conjunction with Aiskhines i 136, Demokritos’s definition suggests that
either (a) Legitimate eros is one species of the genus eros, and ‘prostitution’ is another name, or a sub-species, of the species ‘non-legitimate eros’,
or (b) eros and prostitution are two species of a genus and also either (i) legitimate eros is a sub-species of the species eros or (ii) eros is the name of the legitimate species of the genus, prostitution being always and necessarily illegitimate.
If (b) (ii) is correct, the word ‘legitimate’ is pleonastic in the expression ‘legitimate eros’. A passage in a speech of Aiskhines delivered three years after the Timarkhos case (ii 166) favours (b) (ii):
You (sc. Demosthenes) came into a prosperous house, the house of Aristarkhos, son of Moskhos, and ruined it. You received a deposit of three talents from Aristarkhos when he went into exile, in shameless contempt for the story you had put about, to the effect that you were an admirer37 of his youthful beauty. You certainly were not; for in legitimate eros there is no room for dishonesty (ponēriā, ‘badness’)38.
Aiskhines does not say here that Demosthenes, though an erastes of Aristarkhos, was a dishonest one, and that his behaviour manifested ‘non-legitimate eros’; he denies that Demosthenes felt any eros for Aristarkhos at all. It looks as if Aiskhines is willing to apply the term ‘eros’ only to those homosexual relationships from which what is not dikaios is excluded: rape, fraud and intimidation are obviously excluded, and the trend of the whole speech shows that prostitution is also excluded. In ii 166 Demosthenes is denied the status of erastes because he did not behave towards Aristarkhos as we behave towards those whose well-being we sincerely seek to promote – that is to say, towards those whom we love. In i 171, with reference to the same relationship, Aiskhines says ‘he pretended to be his erastes, and having invited the youth into this philanthrōpiā ...’. Philanthrōpos, analysable as ‘affectionate towards human beings’, is invariably a complimentary word in Aiskhines’ time, denoting the person who is kindly, compassionate and unselfish.39 In i 137 Aiskhines enlarges on the subject of eros :
To be in love with those who are beautiful and chaste (sōphrōn) I define as an emotion (pathos) experienced by a soul which is affectionate (philanthrōpos) and sympathetic (eugnōmōn);40 but gross misbehaviour for monetary payment is the act of a hubristēs and uneducated man.41 And in my view it is honourable (kalos) to be the object of eros without being corrupted (adiaphthorōs), but disgraceful to have prostituted oneself through greed for payment.
Eros is treated here as characteristic of the sensitive man – ‘susceptible’, one might say, to use a word which has common erotic connotations in English – and sensitivity is linked, naturally enough, with education and culture,42 both here (in the contrast implied by ‘uneducated’) and in what Aiskhines says (§142) about the ‘educated hearers’ of Homer. A generalisation by Simon’s adversary (Lys. iii 44) is also relevant; defending himself against the allegation that his charge is false, he says:
A man in love is not, in my opinion, the sort of man who brings false charges. Those who are inclined to be euēthēs fall in love, but the most panourgos bring false charges.
Euēthēs, analysable as ‘having a good character’, denotes a person who is easily deceived or imposed upon because he does not or cannot apply enough intelligence to understanding the motives of people who are not as nice as he is; hence it may be complimentary (‘ingenuous’ in Pl. Euthd. 279c; euēthikos is ‘impressionable’ in Pl. Chrm. 175c), but it tends to be derogatory, ‘foolish’, ‘simple’. Panourgos, sometimes coupled with words for ‘clever’, describes an immoral and shameless trickster. The speaker, like Aiskhines, needs to win the jurors’ sympathy as a mortal smitten by homosexual Eros, though his admitted contract with a male prostitute is more concrete, and less easily elevated to the plane of romantic sentiment, than Aiskhines’ reputation as an erōtikos who expressed his emotions in poetry.
The question to which a modern reader may wish to get an answer is: does eros, as Aiskhines conceives it, entail or preclude bodily acts? Does the ‘uncorrupted’ eromenos resist all seduction and persuasion, of whatever kind, and withhold all ‘favours’, or does he only refuse gifts and promises which might lead to insinuations that he had prostituted himself? Diaphtheirein, with which adiaphthorōs is cognate, is ‘spoil’, ‘destroy’; it is used, when it has a personal object, of causing people to behave, feel or think in ways which impair their performance of their roles in the community, and so of seducing a married woman (e.g. Lys. i 16), bribing a judge or official, or (in the famous case of Socrates) making young men heedless of tradition and authority. Aiskhines may wish to suggest that the good eromenos is never seduced; his second antithesis, between ‘being the uncorrupted object of eros’ and ‘prostituting oneself’, might even imply a refusal to use the term ‘eros’ of a relationship in which there is ‘corruption’, i.e. bodily contact, on any pretext. Yet the importation of the word ‘payment’ into both antitheses, coupled with the financial associations of adiaphthorōs (‘uncorrupted’ by promises and prospects of gain, in Dem. xviii 298), throws into prominence his silence about submission for reasons other than gain, and his abstention from an evaluation of the erastes, who naturally seeks accomplishment of his desires, is also significant. His problem was to adopt, in creating hostility to Timarkhos, the most austere standards compatible with the way in which he
himself was known to have behaved as an erastes.
The composer of the erotic speech attributed to Demosthenes (‘Dem. lxi’) says (§1) that a dikaios erastes ‘will neither do nor demand anything shameful’; but this leaves unresolved the problem of what makes an act shameful (cf. p.91 on Pl. Smp. 185b).
Quoting from a law which debarred slaves from the use of gymnasia and from ‘being in love with a boy of free status, or following him’, (§§138f.), Aiskhines argues that the legislator, by implication, positively encouraged citizens towards the good things which were forbidden to slaves. The form of the argument is: (i) slaves are forbidden x; (ii) slaves are also forbidden y; and (iii) we all know that the law encourages x; therefore (iv) the law encourages y.
He did not say that the free man must not be in love (sc. with boys) and follow (sc. them), and he regarded such an occurrence not as harm to the boy but as affording evidence of (sc. the boy’s) chastity.
– that is to say, as putting the boy’s chastity to the test; it is assumed that the boy passes the test.
But since the boy is not responsible and not yet able to distinguish between the man of genuine good will and the contrary, he (sc. the legislator) chastens the man who is in love and postpones talk of philiā to the age at which the boy has a more mature intelligence; that an erastes should follow a boy and keep an eye on him he (sc. the legislator) regarded as the greatest guard and protection of (sc. the boy’s) chastity.
Here the speaker’s prescription is exact: to follow a boy because one is in love with him is permissible, but to express one’s emotions overtly in any other way is not permissible until the boy is old enough to judge one’s character. How old is that, and who decides in each case when the boy is old enough? And what relationship is denoted by ‘talk of philiā’?
3. Eros and Love
Philiā is ‘love’ in general; the verb is philein, the adjective philos is ‘dear (to ...)’, shading into ‘own’, ‘close (to ...)’, and when philos is used as a noun it is ‘friend’ (anything on a scale from casual but agreeable acquaintance to intimacy of long standing) or ‘relative’, one of the ‘loved ones’ or ‘nearest and dearest’ with whom one is regarded as having a nexus of exceptional obligations and claims. This group of words is applied to love between parents and children, e.g. Ar. Clouds 79-83:
STREPSIADES: Now, I wonder how can I wake him up in the nicest way? (Nervously) Pheidippides! Pheidippi-deeees! PHE1DIPPIDES (waking): What is it, father? STREPSIADES (solemnly): Kiss me and give me your hand. PHEIDIPPIDES (complying): There! What is it? STREPSIADES: Tell me, do you love (philein) me? PHEIDIPPIDES: I swear I do!
The same question can be put in a sexual context, as in Xen. Smp. 9.6, where a pair of dancers, performing at a private party, are enacting the legend of Dionysos and Ariadne:
They heard Dionysos ask her if she loved (philein) him, and (sc. heard) her swear (sc. that she did), so that ... everyone there swore too that the boy and girl really did love (philein) each other. They were not like (sc. dancers) who had been taught their movements, but like people given the chance to do what they had long been desiring. In the end the guests saw them embracing each other and going off as if to bed ...
The question ‘Do you love me?’ can indeed be asked in circumstances in which ‘Are you sexually aroused by me?’ would be as otiose as it is stilted, but its significance varies according to whether it is put by the male to the female or by the female to the male. Strong sexual desire reinforces love, normally generates love, and is sometimes generated by love; cf. Pl. Lys. 221b, and the philoi of a boy in Pl. Euthd. 282b are treated as including ‘those who say that they are his erastai’. It is not to be expected that Greek should always distinguish explicitly between eros and love;43 Homer in fact uses the noun philotēs (philiā is a post-Homeric word) in seemly expressions for sexual intercourse, ‘philotēs and bed’ and ‘be joined in philotēs’, as well as to denote friendly or affectionate relations between states, families and individuals. Homosexual poems, archaic and Hellenistic alike, profess love in abundance; since the noun paiderastēs and the verb paiderastein will not fit into the elegiac metre which was almost invariably favoured for this genre of poetry, the poets replace it by paidophilēs and paidophilein (e.g. Theognis 1345, 1357, Glaukos 1, Meleagros 80.2). Agapān, ‘be content (with ...)’ and aspazesthai, ‘welcome’, ‘be glad of ...’, are often linked with philein (e.g. Pl. Lys. 215d, 217b, 220d); agapē, the abstract noun corresponding to agapān, was later appropriated by Christian writers for love from which sexuality is absent,44 but in R20 a half-naked woman on a bed bears the name ‘Agape’, and in the classical language there is no word for ‘love’ which precludes sexuality in cases where a sexual element in a relationship is socially acceptable. In [Dem.] lxi agapān denotes the attitude of erastes to eromenos (§6) and of deities to Ganymede and Adonis (§30).
A heterosexual love-affair, in romantic literature or in real life, may begin with a momentary glimpse of a graceful movement and culminate in the manifestation of that love than which there is no greater. The long-standing Western European assumption that homosexual eros is essentially diabolical may be responsible for a certain reluctance, even on the part of those who would immediately reject moral condemnation of homosexuality per se, to recognise that homosexual eros can inspire as much unselfish devotion as heterosexual.45 It was certainly exploited for military purposes, and to good military effect, the erastes and eromenos displaying to each other their readiness to endure pain and death (cf. p. 192), and in late antiquity we encounter stories of grand gestures (e.g. Plutarch Dial. 761c: a certain Theron chopped off his own thumb and challenged a rival erastes to do the same).46 The most remarkable anecdote of this kind, however, comes from the early fourth century B.C.; Xen. Anab. vii 4.7 tells of a man willing to die for a youth about whom he knew no more than the visual stimulus of bodily beauty could tell him:
A certain Olynthian, Episthenes, a paiderastēs, saw a handsome boy just in the first years of maturity ... about to be executed. He ran to Xenophon and begged him to intervene in defence of a handsome boy. Xenophon approached Seuthes and asked him not to execute the boy, explaining Episthenes’ inclination (tropos47) and adding that when on one occasion he had put together a company with an eye solely to the beauty of its members Episthenes had been a brave fighter at their side. Seuthes asked ‘Episthenes, would you be willing to die on behalf of this boy?’ Episthenes stretched out his neck and said, ‘Strike, if the boy says so and if he is going to be grateful’. Seuthes asked the boy if he should strike Episthenes instead of him. The boy would have none of it, but begged him not to slaughter either of them. Then Episthenes put his arm round the boy and said, ‘Now, Seuthes, you’ve got to fight me for him, because I won’t let him go!’ Seuthes laughed and pursued the matter no further.
Episthenes’ appeal to Xenophon was founded not on the boy’s desert as a moral agent, but upon the awfulness of destroying a beautiful object, in this case human and alive. It is a way of thinking often conducive to ruthlessness, insensitivity and manipulation,48 but Episthenes, expecting only gratitude after his death, can hardly be accused of offering payment for homosexual favours, unless perhaps he gambled on the realisation of a boyish fantasy of his own: beautiful princess is threatened with death, dreamer bravely offers own throat to cruel king, king’s heart is touched, no one dies, beautiful princess sinks into dreamer’s arms, bound to him by eternal gratitude – only in this case the princess was male.
If a man is in love with a woman and she reciprocates his eros, she is said to anterān (Xen. Smp. 8.3, with reference to a young husband and wife), and the eros which she feels generates love;49 cf. the argument in Pl. Smp. 179b that Alkestis so surpassed the parents of her husband Admetos ‘in love because of her eros’ that she, unlike them, was willing to die in his place. In a homosexual relationship, however, the eromenos is not expected to reciprocate the eros of the erastes; the word anterastēs means ‘rival erastes’, not one who returns eros for
eros, and it is noteworthy that in Pl. Smp. 192b the predominantly homosexual male, when not paiderastēs, is philerastēs (i.e. ‘fond of his erastes’). The distinction may on occasion break down in late Greek (e.g. Suda μ 497, where an erastes commits suicide in despair and his hard-hearted eromenos, at last ‘reciprocating his eros’ [anterastheis], follows his example), but the classical usage is illustrated by Pl. Phdr. 255d, where the nature of eros is being explained in metaphysical terms:
He (sc. the eromenos) is in love; but with what, he is at a loss to know ... He possesses an anterōs50 which is a replica of (sc. the erastes’) eros; but he calls it, and believes it to be, not eros but love (philiā).
The difference between the emotions of the two partners is emphasised by Xen. Smp. 8.21 :
