Greek Homosexuality

by K J Dover

  When Kharmides appears, Khairephon asks Socrates ‘What do you think of the neāniskos?’ (154d). In Plato’s Euthydemos Kleinias is repeatedly called neāniskos (271a, 275a) or meirakion (273ab, 275a, 275de), but when Ktesippos, one of his erastai, shifts position he does so in order to ‘get a better view of his paidika’ (274c), and in Lys. 205bc pais and neāniskos have the same reference, the adolescent Lysis. Meleagros 117 describes a blissful erotic dream in which he embraced an ‘eighteen-year-old pais’, and the young man whose beauty so moved the paiderastēs Episthenes in Xen. Anab. vii 4.7 is described by Xenophon as ‘a pais who had just reached maturity’. Once the beard was grown, a young male was supposed to be passing out of the eromenos stage; that is why Socrates’ friend says to him in Pl. Prt. 309a:

  I thought he (sc. Alkibiades) was a handsome man – but a man, Socrates, between ourselves, and getting quite a beard by now.

  Cf. the witticism of Bion, recorded in Plu. Dial. 770bc: the beard, appearing on the eromenos, ‘liberates the erastes from the tyranny of eros’. The sordidness of the Sausage-seller’s way of life in Ar. Knights 1242 lies not merely in his having been ‘fucked a bit’, but in his earning money that way when he was grown-up.

  The very numerous painted inscriptions on vases which comment on the beauty of a young male always, when they do not name the individual instead, speak of pais, never using a word for ‘youth’. The same word, with the feminine definite article hē, is used in the comparatively small number of vase-inscriptions which refer to female beauty; similarly in Ar. Peace 869f., where preparations are being made for the wedding of Trygaios with the supernatural being Opora, we are told ‘the pais’ – i.e. the bride – ‘has had a bath’.

  Ktesippos, like his paidika Kleinias, is neāniskos (Euthd. 273a), and some, at least, of the erastai of Kharmides are neāniskoi (Chrm. 154a). This suggests the possibility of homosexual relationships between coevals,105 perhaps conventionally disguised by the acceptance, on the part of one partner, of the designation pais; but the vase-paintings do not make much use of such a relationship.106 Instances known to me are: B696, two youths wrapped in one cloak; R200*, one youth caressing another, who reclines beside him, and swinging a leg over him, much as in the heterosexual scene R82*. Other instances are each in some way peripheral, special or ambiguous: C74, abandoned behaviour on the part of comasts (cf. p. 7); CW16, where it is hard to be sure that both participants are male, and even harder to decide on their age107; R223*, in which a squatting youth, becoming impatient while some of his friends are engaged in heterosexual activity, tries to pull another youth down on to his erect penis;108 R243*, an unusual scene of ‘group activity’, in which two youths, bending over, have backed towards each other while a third prepares to thrust his penis between their buttocks;109 R954*, in which a boy with a small but no doubt imperious erection lolls seductively on a chair while another boy mounts the chair to oblige him (perhaps they will change places afterwards);110 R1127*, satyrs; R1167, a boy or youth holding a ladle under the half-erect penis of another youth. It was shocking if an erastes was younger than his eromenos; Xen. Anab. ii 6.28, in the course of portraying Menon as a man almost too bad to be credible, alleges that he treated as his paidika Tharypas, whose beard was well advanced, though Menon was still beardless. The boys in Pl. Chrm. 154c are enchanted by Kharmides’ beauty, but hero-worship of that kind is nothing out of the ordinary. One could be erastes and eromenos at the same stage of one’s life, but not both in relation to the same person; cf. Xen. Smp. 8.2 on Kritoboulos.

  Aiskhines i 195 refers to ‘hunters of such young men as are easily caught’, and hunting is not an uncommon metaphor of homosexual pursuit; cf. Pl. Prt. 309a, Socrates ‘out with the hounds’ after Alkibiades’ beauty; Pl. Phdr. 241d, comparing the fondness of an erastes for his eromenos to the fondness of wolves for lambs;111 Pl. Lys. 206a, a simile from hunting, Meleagros 116, ‘boy-hounds’; Rhianos 5.1, ‘I caught a fawn and lost it’. This usage and the very frequent use of words for pursuit, flight and capture sustain the notion that the eromenos is the quarry or victim of the erastes. Hunting is a sport, and one of the favourite sports of the Greeks; although the object of pursuit is capture, a quarry which sits waiting to be picked up spoils the fun of the chase, and conversely a quarry which gives the huntsmen a good run for their money earns their respect and affection (the more difficult the chase, the greater the happiness at completing it successfully). If the quarry is human and the object copulation, the difficulty of the chase enhances the value of the object, and eventual capture, after fierce competition with rival hunters, is incalculably reassuring to the hunter himself. No great knowledge of the world is needed to perceive the analogy between homosexual pursuit in classical Athens and heterosexual pursuit in (say) British society in the nineteen-thirties. So long as there were female slaves who had no say in how they were used and female prostitutes who needed to earn money for themselves or for their owners, a young Athenian male, especially if he was well-off, was not short of sexual outlets. Purchased sex, however, could never give him what he needed emotionally, the experience of being valued and welcomed for his own sake. Since girls of citizen family were protected by their families against contact with men, the seducer was necessarily directed towards his own sex. In a heterosexual society a young man is not merely excused by his peers and elders if he pursues women with intent to seduce; if it is believed that he has been successful, he is envied by most of his peers and elders and openly admired by many; he may even be treated with ridicule, contempt or mistrust if he shows no inclination for the pursuit. The women whom he seduces, on the other hand, win no respect or sympathy for their co-operation in his attainment of an apparently praiseworthy end, but very much the reverse; pursuit is the role prescribed for the male, flight for the female, and both are judged and valued in accordance with their success in carrying out their respective roles.112 Parents are therefore apt to issue different commands (explicit or implicit) to their sons and to their daughters. Social competition is among the factors affecting what we say to our children; there can be no winners without losers or losers without winners, and it matters to us very much that we should be the winners and others the losers.113 If my son seduces my neighbours’ daughters, but their sons do not succeed in seducing my daughter, I have demonstrated both that I am a more conscientious and efficient guardian of what I am supposed to guard and also that the member of my family of whom enterprise and virility are expected possesses it in greater measure. An Athenian father, similarly, who sternly told his fourteen-year-old son never to speak to strange men on the way home from the gymnasium, yet betrayed by a glint in the eye and a curl of the lip that he was not wholly displeased by a rumour that his twenty-year-old son had ‘caught’ the fourteen-year-old boy next door, was acting as humans act.

  The prescription of heterosexual roles today (or rather, until recently) and the prescription of homosexual roles in ancient Athens differ in two important respects which have the effect of cancelling each other out. On the one hand, the Athenian father of a handsome boy did not have to worry about the financial and organisational problems which are created by the birth of an illegitimate baby, and to that extent we might have expected him to take a less repressive attitude towards the boy’s homosexual affairs. On the other hand, whereas a woman insulated from contact with men throughout her youth and encouraged to treat all men alike with mistrust may find it hard to make the transition from the approved role of virgin daughter to the approved roles of bride, housewife and mother, a boy who rejects the advances of erastai will nevertheless turn into an adult male citizen, and his performance of that role will not be impaired by his past chastity. From that point of view it is not easy to see any reason why a boy (or his father) should have tolerated erastai at all, no matter how decorously they behaved.

  Yet some reasons emerge on reflection. Anyone would rather be good-looking than ugly; the attentions of an erastes, assuring a boy that he is not ugly, are welcome to him for that r
eason alone (the young Alkibiades felt ‘dishonoured’ [Pl. Smp. 219d] when Socrates did not try to seduce him),114 and the boy’s glory is reflected on the father. A generous erastes earns gratitude, and generosity has many forms, from a giving that can be crudely assessed in monetary terms to an unobtrusive sacrifice of one’s time, convenience or advantage. A patient erastes can earn his reward by working upon a boy’s sense of justice (we tend to think that patience deserves reward); an unhappy and desperate erastes earns compassion; an erastes who has demonstrated military, athletic or artistic prowess earns a boy’s admiration and is taken by him as a model; and a lovable erastes earns love. One can see in all such cases how, if the boy is at all inclined to yield, his father’s opposition may weaken too, especially if the erastes belongs to a powerful and influential family or is in truth an excellent model for the boy to imitate. Of course, if homosexual desire were in itself regarded as a moral defect, so that one might hear ‘I thought X was a real friend’ (or ‘I thought X was a good influence on my son’) ‘but it turned out that he wanted ...’, none of the ways in which an erastes might hope to earn consummation of his desire would avail him much; but as we have seen, neither an Athenian boy nor his father is in the least likely to have regarded the existence of the desire in the erastes as a defect, and criticism could only take the form ‘... but he only wanted ...’.

  The analogy between an ancient homosexual and a modern heterosexual society can be pursued further if we extend the category ‘modern’ to include the presentation of respectable British society in the literature of the nineteenth century. The good woman, in this literature, does not desire or seek sexual intercourse.115 She does not even desire marriage; but if a man of good character and ability asks her to marry him, obtains her father’s consent, displays patience, tact and modesty in all his dealings with her, and participates with her in a prolonged and complicated ritual of which the essential element is the utterance of formulae and responses in a church, thereafter she has sexual intercourse with him whenever he wishes. He has not at any time alluded directly to this aspect of marriage. She does not enjoy it or take the initiative in it; she accepts it because she loves him and because it is her duty. She does not speak to her friends of what she and her husband do in bed; nor does he, if he is a gentleman, speak of it to his. A woman who seeks sexual intercourse outside the sequence of courtship and marriage as just described, whether because she likes it or because she needs to earn money, is excluded from association with those who have obeyed the rules, and it is difficult for her ever to resume association once she has demonstrated, however briefly, her possession of a disposition and moral character which has made deviation from the rules possible. Elements of this moral schema persist to this day, varying from country to country and from class to class. The analogy with Greek homosexual eros is not complete – heterosexual relationships, after all, produce and rear children, and the utterance of the crucial words of the marriage ceremony, whether in church or in registry, is an event distinct in kind from the partners’ enunciation of their wishes and society’s acceptance of their relationship – but the common ingredients are not negligible.

  Just as a great deal can be said about marriage, and indeed has been said, without any direct reference to sexual intercourse, and at the same time without going so far as to suggest that respectable married people abstain from intercourse, so Aiskhines finds it possible to omit all mention of favours granted by an eromenos to a good erastes, without ever committing himself to the opinion that it is wrong in all circumstances to grant such favours. Clearly, in his view, the eromenos must be exceedingly modest and circumspect if he is to escape censure, and if the deep emotions of the erastes find expression in poetry it must be poetry which admits of ‘innocent’ interpretation; whatever reward the erastes receives in the end, it must be the reward of long restraint. With these provisos, however, what eventually happens is shielded from comment or description by conventional reticence. Plato’s Pausanias is a little less reticent. The eros of which he approves is a protracted relationship, in which the resistance of the eromenos makes great demands on the erastes, but there are circumstances in which resistance should cease. Pausanias makes the point (Smp. 184c) that total subordination of oneself to the wishes and commands of another is exempt, in the eyes of Athenian society, from blame and dishonour if its purpose is self-improvement in skill, knowledge or any other form of excellence; no doubt he has in mind apprentices, trainees, pupils and disciples. If this principle is applied to homosexual eros, then (184de):

  When erastes and eromenos meet, each observing a rule, the erastes (sc. the rule) that it would be right for him to subordinate himself in any way to an eromenos who has granted him favours, and the eromenos (sc. the rule) that it would be right for him to perform any service for one who improves him in mind and character (lit., ‘who makes him sophos and agathos’). ... then ... in these circumstances alone, and in no others, it is creditable for an eromenos to grant favours to an erastes.

  In short (185b):

  It is creditable to grant any favour in any circumstances for the sake of becoming a better person (lit., ‘for the sake of goodness’).

  To translate from euphemism into plain English: acceptance of the teacher’s thrusting penis between his thighs or in his anus is the fee which the pupil pays for good teaching, or alternatively, a gift from a younger person to an older person whom he has come to love and admire. In any individual case, each of these alternatives may contribute half of the truth; if one is nearer the truth than the other, it is not easy for anyone but the eromenos himself to know which. That the eromenos should initiate a homosexual act for its own sake is not a possibility admitted by Pausanias or by any other Greek enthusiast or apologist for homosexual eros.

  5. Courtship and copulation

  As references to the erastes’ ‘requests’ in literature would have led us to expect, the erastes in vase-painting is sometimes depicted as expostulating with the eromenos or imploring him: B142; B146; R196*; R789; R791* (a man with a gift, the boy heavily swathed); R851*; R853 (the youth is naked, the boy clothed). In R867* men and youths expostulate in the same way with women. B266, with which Beazley116 compares the man and boy of B622, shows an unhappy man sagging at the knees and looking up piteously into a woman’s face. The eromenos is sometimes apprehensive (R529), sometimes plainly angry; in R322 a boy, speaking to a youth, holds finger and thumb together in an argumentative gesture (cf. the man and woman of R589) which is clearly not accommodating, for the corners of his mouth are drawn down, scowling in the same way as a woman in R361 when a man seated on the ground, with penis erect, lifts her skirt and peers under it. In R547* a boy hastening away from a youth indignantly thrusts his hand downwards and outwards in a gesture of denial; the outstretched arm and outspread fingers of the youth in R638, as he turns away, reject a gift offered by a man. In R863 a boy seems to be closing his eyes shyly when a seated youth steals a glance at him.

  Certain gifts are conventional, notably a cockerel (e.g. B76*, B190, B254, B262, B267, B614, B622, R348*, R405, R758*, R791*, R833*; cf. a terracotta from Olympia117 depicting Zeus carrying off Ganymede), a hare (e.g. R418, R502*, R637*, R638) and a fox (e.g. B107);118 a stag, not easy to carry, appears as a gift in B250* and B262. Ar. Birds 707 names quail, coot, goose and cockerel as gifts to paidika, Wealth 157 horses and dogs (cf. Pl. Lys. 211e, ‘a good friend is bettet than quail, cock, horse or dog’); in B16* a kneeling youth affectionately embraced by a man holds a bird of uncertain species. A dog accompanying the erastes in some paintings may or may not be intended as a gift: B76* (where it sniffs at the genitals of the eromenos), B262, B592. In R720 a lyre and a ball are offered to a boy, and in R875 (as it seems) a strigil.119 Women are more often offered money;120 as in R589, R627, R632, R728, R817, though a cockerel is not unknown (B84) as a gift to a woman. Since copulation is naturally associated with festivity and the brighter side of life, both partners in a sexual approach or embrace may be shown holding
garlands: B250*, youths vis-à-vis men; B254, a boy holding a garland and a man holding a cockerel; B450, women holding garlands during copulation; B502*, a man bringing a garland and a dog to a youth; B610, a naked woman holding a garland and a flower while she converses with a youth; CE34*, two women in an affectionate relationship (cf. p. 173); CW16, a male(?) holding a garland121, and penetrated anally by another male; R627, a seated woman holding out a garland to a youth whose hand gropes towards her vulva.

  Whereas men and youths are often depicted as mauling and hauling women (e.g. B299, B334, R144, R519, R843) – not, of course, women of citizen status122 – the protection afforded to freeborn boys by the law on hubris is reflected in the rarity of homosexual assault in the visual arts. Rarity, that is, when the aggressor is human, for gods could not be indicted for hubris. Zeus in B186 and R348* commands Ganymede in a manner that will not accept refusal (so too Poseidon in pursuit of Pelops, who looks back apprehensively on the point of flight [R406*]), and in R405, R829*, R833* he simply grasps Ganymede, who struggles violently; in the Olympia terracotta he has tucked Ganymede (no longer struggling) under his arm and is striding off to Olympos. Eros in R770 simply launches himself on a boy; Pan, penis erect, runs full-tilt after a young herdsman (R693; cf. his onslaught on a woman in RL60). Zephyros seizes Hyakinthos by the arm (R847) and wafts him through the air (R574). Dawn, a female deity, rushes at Tithonos, who tries to beat her off with his lyre (R912; cf. R391, R801). Such treatment of eromenoi by human erastai, when it occurs in art, is perhaps wishful thinking, playing god;123 indeed, one such scene is on the other side of B186. Cf. B194 (a man and a youth); R663 (a man and a boy); R1095 (a man, penis swollen, and a – slave? – boy); a man’s seizure of a youth by the wrist (R279) should perhaps be classed as an arresting gesture rather than as an assault.