by K J Dover
There can be no doubt of the woman’s enjoyment of intercourse in (e.g.) B49 and R506, and when a frontal position is adopted the two partners look at each other affectionately; this contrasts with the eromenos who stares ahead while the face of the erastes is hidden from him. It is not therefore surprising that women are shown by the painters as satisfying their sexual cravings artificially by means of olisboi: R132 and R212 both show a woman with two olisboi, the second one for her anus in R132 and her mouth in R212; in R152 an olisbos hangs up in the background while women wash; R227, a woman brandishing an olisbos while penetrated by a satyr; R1163, women lowering themselves on to fixed olisboi; R114, a woman lowering herself on to the pointed base of a jar; R593, a woman drinking from a vessel with a penis-shaped spout; cf. R414*, R1071*, a potful of olisboi (but their significance may be religious).145 Comedy refers to women’s use of olisboi (as it does, often, to their greed and drunkenness), notably in Ar. Lys. 107-9 (which indicates that an olisbos was made of leather) and CGF 62.16-28 (‘as like the real thing ... as the moon is like the sun’). In the Hellenistic period Herodas 6 and 7 are concerned with the purchase of an olisbos from a discreet and skilful shoemaker recommended by one woman to another. Like women, but unlike the upstanding eromenoi of the vase-painters’ world, a satyr positively enjoys having his anus penetrated; in BB24* a wild and hairy satyr rams a stick up his own anus while masturbating, and in CW12 a satyr lowers himself on to a fixed olisbos. The vase-painters sometimes amuse themselves by giving satyrs names in which elements denoting ‘penis’, ‘glans’, ‘erection’ and the like play a prominent part,146 and a satyr in R44 is called Phlebodokos, lit., ‘vein-accepter’; phleps, ‘vein’, is known as a jocular term for the penis.147
If an honourable eromenos does not seek or expect sensual pleasure from contact with an erastes,148 begrudges any contact until the erastes has proved himself worthy of concession, never permits penetration of any orifice in his body,149 and never assimilates himself to a woman by playing a subordinate role in a position of contact, and if at the same time the erastes would like him to break rules (iii) and (iv), observe a certain elasticity in his obedience to rule (ii), and even perhaps bend rule (i) a little on occasion, in what circumstances does a male in fact submit to anal penetration by another male, and how does society regard his submission? There seems little doubt that in Greek eyes the male who breaks the ‘rules’ of legitimate eros detaches himself from the ranks of male citizenry and classifies himself with women and foreigners; the prostitute is assumed to have broken the rules simply because his economic dependence on clients forces him to do what they want him to do; and conversely, any male believed to have done whatever his senior homosexual partner(s) wanted him to do is assumed to have prostituted himself. Timaios (F124b), according to Polybios xii 15.1f., alleged that :
Agathokles, in his first youth, was a common prostitute (pornos) available to the most dissolute (lit., ‘the most lacking in self-control’), a jackdaw, a buzzard, putting his rear parts in front of anyone who wanted.
The jackdaw here probably symbolises impudence and shamelessness; the buzzard, in Greek triorkhēs, ‘having three testicles’, presumably symbolises insatiable lust, which is assumed to characterise the true pornos.
It is not only by assimilating himself to a woman in the sexual act that the submissive male rejects his role as a male citizen, but also by deliberately choosing to be the victim of what would be, if the victim were unwilling, hubris. The point of the fierce sanctions imposed by Attic law on hubris was that the perpetrator ‘dishonoured’ (atīmazein) his victim,150 depriving him of his standing as a citizen under the law, and standing could be recovered only by indictment which in effect called upon the community to reverse the situation and put down the perpetrator. To choose to be treated as an object at the disposal of another citizen was to resign one’s own standing as a citizen. If it is not yet sufficiently obvious why the male prostitute’s choice was regarded in this way, it should become so when we recall circumstances in which homosexual anal penetration is treated neither as an expression of love nor as a response to the stimulus of beauty, but as an aggressive act demonstrating the superiority of the active to the passive partner. In Theokritos 5, where Lakon the shepherd and Komatas the goatherd are engaged in a contest of song, a contest in which brutality and mockery play a considerable part, we hear in 39-43:
LAKON: When can I remember learning or hearing anything good from you ...? KOMATAS: When I went up your arse (pūgizein), and it hurt you; and the she-goats bleated away, and the billy-goat tupped them. LAKON: I hope your grave’s no deeper than you got up my arse!
That herdsmen should console their loneliness by making do with animals or with one another is a commonplace enough joke; but here Komatas is triumphing over Lakon by recalling an occasion on which he played the part of a male animal and Lakon the part of a female. That the act hurt Lakon, who nevertheless put up with it, is part of Komatas’s triumph, and Lakon’s riposte is a malevolent slur on the virility of Komatas. A similar note is struck ibid. 116-9:
KOMATAS: Don’t you remember when I got stuck into you and you grinned and moved your tail to and fro very nicely and held on to that oak-tree? LAKON: No, I don’t remember – but I know very well about the time when Eumaras tied you up and gave you a dusting!
The insulting element here is that Lakon enjoyed playing the woman’s role (holding on to a tree, like the young wife in Aristophanes); this time, Lakon denies that it ever happened, and the nature of his reply shows the light in which he sees Komatas’s insult. In the old Norse epics the allegation ‘X uses Y as his wife’ is an intolerable insult to Y but casts no adverse reflection on the morals of X.151
Anthropological data indicate that human societies at many times and in many regions have subjected strangers, newcomers and trespassers to homosexual anal violation as a way of reminding them of their subordinate status.152 The Greek god Priapos, as guardian of orchards and gardens, was represented as having a massive penis in a state of readiness to penetrate a thief of either sex.153 In some primate species watchful males react by penile erection to a threatened encroachment on the boundaries of their community;154 and some types of boundary-marker – with which we should include the ithyphallic herm which normally stood at an Athenian front door – suggest that this behavioural trait extends to the human species also.155 Among some animal species, again, rank among the males of a community is regularly expressed by a subordinate’s presentation of his buttocks to a dominant male (whose mounting, however, is perfunctory and formalised).156 Vulgar idiom in many languages uses buggered’ or ‘fucked’ in the sense ‘defeated’, ‘worsted’,157 and one Attic red-figure vase (R1155) is a pictorial treatment of this notion.158 A man in Persian costume, informing us, ‘I am Eurymedon. I stand bent over’, suits his posture to his words, while a Greek, half-erect penis in hand, strides towards him with an arresting gesture. This expresses the exultation of the ‘manly’ Athenians at their victory over the ‘womanish’ Persians at the river Eurymedon in the early 460s; it proclaims, ‘We’ve buggered the Persians!’
The imposition of a woman’s role on a subordinate by a dominant male underlies a curious Athenian treatment of adulterers. An adulterer caught in the act could be killed by the offended husband or guardian of the woman, but as an alternative he could be subjected to painful indignities, his pubic hair being burnt off and a large radish being forced up his anus (Ar. Clouds 1083f.; cf. Lucian Peregrinus 9). Since women commonly reduced their pubic hair by singeing,159 the punishment of an adulterer symbolised his transformation into a woman and subordinated him lastingly, in the eyes of society, to the man whom he had wronged, for whose penis the radish was a substitute.160 A similar notion, transformed into more decorous terms, underlies a Corinthian vase-painting (C62) in which Tydeus has caught his wife Ismene in bed with Periklymenos; he stabs her to death, while Periklymenos flees; in accordance with normal convention, Tydeus is painted black and Ismene white, but in this in
stance Periklymenos, the worsted adulterer running naked from the fierce armed husband, is also painted white.
A long and discursive exploration of the issues raised by Aiskhines’ prosecution of Timarkhos has revealed an antithesis between two groups of motifs: on the one hand, acceptance of payment, readiness – even appetite – for homosexual submission, adoption of a bent or lowered position, reception of another man’s penis in the anus or mouth; on the other hand, refusal of payment, obdurate postponement of any bodily contact until the potential partner has proved his worth, abstention from any sensual enjoyment of such contact, insistence on an upright position, avoidance of meeting the partner’s eye during consummation, denial of true penetration. In Greek eyes (and whether they saw straight or crooked, each of us must decide for himself) this was the antithesis between the abandonment or the maintenance of masculinity; it is not without significance that the erastes, in the importunity of courtship, touches the genitals of the eromenos, not the buttocks or anus.161 Since the role of a prostitute entailed permanent debarment from the exercise of a citizen’s rights, and the role of an eromenos observing the ritual and convention of legitimate homosexual eros entailed no such debarment, one might have expected not only that the difference between these roles would be precisely defined by law but also that any allegation of prostitution should be demonstrable or refutable in a court of law no less clearly than an allegation of embezzlement or fraud. Yet a homosexual relationship between a given pair of males, whatever they did together and however squalidly commercial the basis of the relationship, was protected against hostile allegation by privacy, discretion and reticence,162 while at the same time, however ritualised and restrained and sentimental, it was exceedingly vulnerable to malicious gossip. What, after all, is prostitution? When monetary payment is made and the conditions stipulated, there is no doubt about it; but what about a handsome present which one could not otherwise afford (cf. p. 92),163 or free coaching in throwing the javelin, or a word in the ear of an influential person – or any gift or service which we habitually render to those whom we love, like, admire, pity or wish to encourage, without thought of sexual pleasure? It is not for nothing that Aiskhines attaches such importance, in building up his case against Timarkhos, to the power of rumour and gossip. If an Athenian youth became aware that he was commonly regarded as ‘available’ for payment, prudence would dissuade him from any persistent attempt to exercise the rights for which public opinion considered him ineligible. A very fat youth might equally seek to avoid situations in which he could be publicly ridiculed and vilified as unworthy to address citizens whose bodily condition made them more admirable objects and more efficient defenders of the community on the battlefield. A youth of ‘easy virtue’, ready to live off men who were attracted by his good looks, would have less hesitation over embarking on a political career if he had plenty of friends who laughed off or brushed aside the allegations made by his enemies. Such a youth took a calculated risk; how it turned out depended on the balance of forces on political issues which he could not in his youth foresee, and in the case of Timarkhos it turned out badly.
People turn to prostitution for many reasons, but sometimes they turn to it because otherwise they, or others dependent on them, would starve. An aristocratic boy who yielded coyly to the flattery of an erastes was under no such compulsion. Why then did public opinion deal so harshly with the one and so tolerantly with the other? Partly, perhaps, because public opinion was the opinion of adult males who in their younger days had yielded to erastai and would have been very indignant indeed if anyone had likened them to prostitutes. The principal reason, however, is that the evaluative judgments implicit in Greek law and openly expressed by individual writers and speakers often took little note of the extent to which a morally good disposition or intention is warped or frustrated by circumstances outside one’s own control; they were more concerned with the human being as a good or bad object, an efficient or defective working part of the communal mechanism.164 Conservative sentiment treated a poor man as a bad man because he is prevented by poverty from serving the community as cavalryman or heavy infantryman and from enriching the public festivals (and so conciliating the gods) by lavish expenditure on a chorus’s costumes, handsome dedications in sanctuaries, and the like. Equally, he is prevented from acquiring athletic and musical skills; prevented, that is to say, from being and doing what he, and anyone else, would like to be and do.165 This evaluation, of much the same kind as we apply to horses, dogs, tools or bushes, cannot be affected by any statement whatsoever about the reasons for poverty. Refusal to admit the validity of such evaluation is a cause of infinite confusion in our own moral thinking, and refusal to admit the simultaneous validity of quite different kinds of evaluation was a sorry weakness in the moral thinking of the Greeks. Plato represents Kritias (a man untouched by democratic sentiment) as enlarging on the difference between ergazesthai, ‘make (by working at...)’ and poiein, ‘make’, ‘create’ (Chrm. 163b):
I understood (sc. the difference) from Hesiod, who said that no work (ergon) was (se. a matter for) reproach. Do you imagine that if he meant by ‘works’ the sort of thing you were talking about just now (sc. the work of craftsmen and tradesmen) ... he would have said that there was no reproach in being a shoemaker or selling salt fish or sitting in a room?
‘Sitting in a room’ (oikēma)’ means ‘plying one’s trade as a prostitute in a brothel’, as is clear from Aiskhines i 74, ‘consider those who sit in the oikēmata, openly carrying on this practice’, and from several other passages referring to heterosexual or homosexual prostitutes. No speaker in court, addressing a democratic jury, would have ventured to put shoemakers in the same category as male prostitutes,166 but the embarrassment of a certain Euxitheos (Dem. lvii 31-5) in dealing with the ‘charge’ that he and his mother had been ribbon-sellers is an index of the extent to which the Athenian citizen-body as a whole, accustomed to considering themselves an élite vis-à-vis slaves and resident or visiting foreigners, tended to adopt the values of those whose wealth and leisure were well above the average.167 Compare Anakreon fr. 388.4f. on association with ‘bread-women and people who’re ready to prostitute themselves’, and Theophrastos Characters 6.5, ‘ready to keep an inn, or run a brothel, or collect taxes ... ’.
Exclusion of the once-prostituted male from the full exercise of a citizen’s rights could be rationalised in either of two ways: on the one hand, he had revealed by his actions his true nature, accepting a position of inferiority; and on the other hand, whatever his original nature, his moral capacity and orientation were determined thereafter by his prostitution. On the whole the Greeks attached more importance to the effect of practice and habituation than to genetically determined qualities and dispositions,168 and were not disposed to vacillate in their beliefs about the causal relation between habituation and character in the light of evidence bearing upon the antecedent causes of the habituation itself. Hence, as we have seen (p. 29), an Athenian boy who was forced into prostitution by fraud or abuse of authority on the part of his father was deprived of rights in just the same way as an Athenian youth who had chosen, perhaps in defiance of his father, to submit to another man in return for a stipulated sum.
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1. On this type of argument cf. GPM 41, 298f., 302.
2. But not always; a woman could refer to a female friend of hers as ‘my hetairā’, (e.g. Ar. Lys. 701), just as a man could refer to ‘my hetairos’ without any homosexual connotation. If a woman said ‘my hetairos’, on the other hand (e.g. Ar. Eccl 912), or a man ‘my hetairā’, the connotation would be erotic.
3. Cf. Hauschild 8f.
4. On Greek moral arguments in favour of chastity cf. Dover (1973) 61-5 and GPM 178-80, 208f., 210.
5. E.g. Dem. xxiv 71. It is possible that the difficulty of following Aiskhines’ argument in iii 30-3, 47 and the rebuttal of it in Dem. xviii 120f. arises in part from selective quotation by both sides.
6. Cf. Merkelbach (1975) and Wan
kel 73f.
7. Cf. Dover (1968) 155-8 and GPM 25f.; and on bribery, cf. Dem. xxiv 66.
8. On procedure over testimony in court cf. Harrison ii 139f.
9. Compare the strikingly cautious manner in which Demosthenes criticises Euboulos in xxi 206f.; it suggests that just at that time Demosthenes was anxious not to alienate him. The word used by Aiskhines for ‘enthusiasm’ is that used by Alkibiades in Pl. Smp. 217a for what he imagined, as an adolescent, to be Socrates’ homosexual interest in his beauty.
10. Some speeches undoubtedly contained documents or documentary excerpts from the first, but it was more usual for the written version of a speech to give only a heading (e.g. ‘decree’) indicating the point at which a document was read out in court. At a much later date many of these deficiencies were repaired by fabrication of documents; it is quite common for a fabricated document to contain demonstrable historical errors and late linguistic features.
11. We expect ‘the boy himself’, and it is possible that that is what Aiskhines wrote; but see Kaimakis 35f. and Wankel 72.
