by K J Dover
12. Cf. GPM 151f.
13. He does not suggest that he would have been less vulnerable to criticism if the object of his desire had been female; cf. p. 63.
14. Cf. GPM 279-83.
15. Cf. GPM 54f., 110f., 147. In a wider context, hubris is over-confident violation of universal or divine laws, and so characteristic of successful kings and conquerors. The word can also be used indulgently, as in Pl. Euthd. 273a (Ktesippos is hubristēs ‘because he is young’), or jocularly, as when Agathon calls Socrates hubristēs in Pl. Smp. 175e (‘Why, you old so-and-so!’). Xen. Cyr. vii 5.62 uses hubristēs of an unmanageable horse.
16. Cf. GPM 110, 116, 119-23.
17. Cf. Harrison i 19 n. 2, 34.
18. I do not countenance the strange notion that women ‘realty want’ to be raped, but I am acquainted with a case in which, according to her own private testimony, a woman violently resisting rape became aware that her immediate desire for sexual intercourse had suddenly become much more powerful than her hatred of her attacker. The Greeks, given their presuppositions about female sexuality (cf. GPM 101f.), may have thought that such an occurrence was common; they did not expect the passive partner in a homosexual relationship (cf. p. 52) to derive physical pleasure from it.
19. Cf. Denniston 267.
20. Cf. GPM 53-6.
21. Maniā and its cognates, like the equivalent terms for insanity in English and other modern languages, could be used to express ‘craze’, ‘just crazy about...’, etc.
22. Montuori 12f. in fact concludes from the Timarkhos speech that anyone who had prostituted a male slave could be indicted for hubris. This conclusion is not compatible with Section 3 above.
23. Cf. GPM 146-50, 156-60, 292-5.
24. It cannot have been difficult, in a community such as ancient Athens, to pick up gossip about an intended line of defence, and even in the absence of gossip it is possible for an intelligent and experienced prosecutor to foresee likely defences. In addition, the written version of a forensic speech was put into circulation after the hearing and modified to take account of what had been said, while preserving formal appearances to the contrary; cf. Dover (1968) 167-70.
25. On ‘sophist’ cf. p. 25 n.7.
26. An Athenian general was not a professional, but a citizen elected, on an annual basis, to high military command.
27. The wrestling-school (on which see also Section 4 below) was a characteristic feature of upper-class education; cf. Ar. Frogs 729, ‘brought up in wrestling-schools and choral dancing and music’, characterising citizens of good old families. Diatribai, which I have translated ‘educated society’, most commonly denotes ways of spending one’s time, whether in study or the arts or chit-chat, which are a matter of choice and not of economic compulsion.
28. It may have been a very long time since anyone was prosecuted for the offence committed by Timarkhos (cf. p. 141), and in that case it may have been believed that no one had ever been so prosecuted.
29. ‘Formidable’ (or ‘extraordinary’) ‘lack of education (apaideusiā)’; Aiskhines’ reference to Homer’s ‘educated hearers’ (§142, cited on p. 53) is an indirect rebuttal of this slur.
30. It might seem irrational to argue simultaneously that (i) Aiskhines does not understand the homosexual eros of cultured society, and (ii) Aiskhines himself is incorrigibly erōtikos; but if that really was the argument (cf. n. 1 above), its point will have been that Aiskhines judges true eros by the standard of his own debased version of it.
31. Philonīkiā, ‘desire to win’, is a derogatory word after the earlier part of the fourth century B.C.; cf. GPM 233f.
32. Eros is not a reciprocal relationship; cf. p. 52.
33. Cf. Greifenhagen (1957), especially the illustrations (28-31) of R667.
34. When Socrates makes a speech in Phaedrus on the same premisses as the speech which Phaidros has recited, he treats eros as desire which induces hubris and is in conflict with reason (Phdr. 237cd, 238bc); his own exposition of eros approaches the problem from a different angle altogether. Hyland 33f., in basing a distinction between erān and epithūmein on (e.g.) Pl. Lys. 221b, seems to me not to take sufficient account of Plato’s readiness to say ‘x and y’ instead of ‘x’ or ‘y’ whenever he is preparing the ground for a ‘proof’ of something about either x or y (cf. ‘happiness’ and ‘success’ in Euthd. 280b-d and ‘knowledge’, ‘intelligence’ and ‘wisdom’ ibid. 281a-d). Moreover, since Plato’s concept of eros differed from everyone else’s, no evidence relating to his use of erān and epithūmein tells us anything about Greek usage in general.
35. Cf. Dover (1968) 69-71.
36. In Xen. Cyr. vi 1.31-3 Araspas, ‘seized with eros’ for Pantheia, the wife of Abradatas, threatens to rape her when persuasion has failed, telling her ‘if she wouldn’t do it willingly, she’d do it unwillingly’.
37. Zēlōtēs; the verb zēloun is originally (and often) ‘emulate’, but may also be used of erotic emotion.
38. Ponēros is the most general Greek word for ‘bad’, denoting sometimes incompetence and uselessness, sometimes dishonesty; cf. GPM 52f., 64f.
39. Cf. GPM 201-3.
40. Cf. GPM 140n. 13.
41. Aiskhines here says ‘man’, not ‘boy’, because Timarkhos is a mature man at the time of the prosecution.
42. On the relevance of education and culture to moral discernment cf. GPM 89-93.
43. In Anaxilas fr. 22.24, ‘They (sc. prostitutes) don’t say outright ... that they erān and philein and will enjoy intercourse’, three different aspects of one emotional condition are specified, but the second and third are entailed by the first. Plato handles eros very mistrustfully in Laws 836e-837d, as an inexplicable mixture of the philiā which amounts to need and desire and the philiā between those who are attracted by their affinity; the passage is strikingly unlike those in his earlier works, and a stage more remote from ordinary Greek attitudes to eros and love.
44. Nygren 30, ‘In Eros and Agape we have two conceptions which have originally nothing whatsoever to do with one another’ presumably refers to the concepts denoted by those words in Christian writers. Armstrong 105f. and Rist 79f. criticise Nygren for taking too narrow a view of the ‘egoism’ of Eros as conceived by Plato.
45. Some responsibility is also borne by the further (incorrect) assumption that any male involved in a homosexual relationship is effeminate and that effeminacy entails timidity.
46. Suicide plays a conspicuous role in these stories, e.g. Konon Fl.16 (the eromenos kills himself because the erastes, weary of the exacting tasks imposed on him and never rewarded, publicly shows his preference for another youth). So does murder, e.g. Plu. Dial. 768f. and Love Stories 2, 3.
47. On this wording cf. p.63.
48. Cf. GPM 159f., 240-2, 296-8.
49. Naturally a man hopes that even if a woman does not fully reciprocate his eros she will nevertheless love him; what is said in Xen. Hiero 1.37, 7.6 with a primarily homosexual reference (cf. p. 45) applies equally to heterosexual relations. Cf. p. 50 on agapē.
50. In Plu. Lyc. 18.9 anterān means ‘be a (sc. hostile) rival in eros’.
51. On the vicissitudes of the legend of Achilles and Patroklos, and in particular its treatment by Aiskhylos, cf. p. 197.
52. The non-erastes in Pl. Phdr. 234a implies that an erastes who has had his way with a boy will boast of it afterwards, naming the boy, to his friends. The speaker is however deploying every argument he can think of in order to turn the boy against erastai; on the analogy of heterosexual societies in which even the busiest fornicators refrain from naming women, we may doubt whether boasting was at all common, and we cannot suppose that it met with social approval. When Xenophon (Hell, v 3.20) says that Agesipolis shared with Agesilaos ‘talk which was youthful and to-do-with-hunting and to-do-with-horses and paidikos’ he would probably be taken by his Greek readers to mean ‘... and talk about paidika’ but he may possibly have meant (cf. p. 17 n.31) ‘boyish chat’.
53. The wrest
ling-school was sometimes part of a gymnasium (as implied by Aiskhines’ use [§138] of ‘gymnasia’ in commenting on the words ‘in the wrestling-schools’ in the law quoted), sometimes a separate establishment; cf. Oehler 2009f.
54. Given the context, this must be (as it is sometimes elsewhere) a euphemism for copulation.
55. By ‘the poet’ I mean the persona adopted for the purpose of composition; we do not know which poems, if any, express the feelings of their composers for actual boys at any given time.
56. In Kydias fr. 714, cited by Pl. Chrm. 155d, the handsome boy is the lion and the susceptible adult is the fawn smitten and devoured by desire.
57. Hēniokhos, lit., ‘rein-holder’, denotes a charioteer (horses ‘bear’ [pherein] a chariot and therefore the man in it); epembatēs (Anakreon’s word) can denote either a charioteer or a rider on a horse’s back.
58. ‘You ran aground ... and you took hold ...’ does not make it clear whether taking hold of a rotten rope was a cause or a consequence of shipwreck.
59. Cf. Henderson 119f.
60. Although Anakreon’s word epembatēs; almost certainly means ‘rider’ in his poem; cf. n.34.
61. Cf. Aulus Gellius xix 11.1 on the Agathon couplet: ‘Quite a number of early writers assert that these verses are by Plato.’ Many Greek epigrams have alternative ascriptions, or none at all, or sometimes historically impossible ascriptions.
62. On ‘error’ cf. GPM 152f.
63. The interpolation of words and phrases intended as clarification is not uncommon in the textual tradition of Demosthenes and Aiskhines; it is more conspicuous in some manuscripts than in others.
64. Cf. Dover (1973a) 65. On sexual ‘compulsion’ cf. Schreckenburg 54-61.
65. Cf. Dover (1966) 41-5.
66. ‘Whatever tropos’ means ‘however’, and the insertion of ‘whatever’ was suggested by Baiter and Sauppe in 1840, to give the sense ‘... law-abiding eros, or however one should call it, to be men ...’. This emendation, however, is not required by grammar, style or sense.
67. It is a fair inference from this passage that kissing was not a customary mode of greeting between Greek men in Xenophon’s time, except between fathers and sons, brothers or exceptionally close and affectionate friends.
68. Cf. GPM 178-80, 210f.
69. Kakiā, when predicated of a man, is essentially ‘uselessness’, the main ingredients of which are cowardice, sloth and failure – through selfishness or incapacity – to meet one’s obligations.
70. A scholion on Ar. Clouds 16, possibly (though not necessarily) originating in the earlier Hellenistic period, says: ‘Oneiropolein is used of those who see a dream, but oneirōttein of those who emit semen during the night, as happens to those in a state of desire, when they imagine that they are with their paidika.’
71. A case could be made for the translation ‘flashing desire down from her eye’; in either case, the point is that desire is kindled in the beholder by her glance.
72. The ‘wounding’of mortals by the ‘shafts’or ‘arrows’of Eros is a commonplace motif in Greek poetry.
73. Cf. GPM 98-102 and Hopfner 370-2.
74. Xen. Oec. 10.2 refers to a woman’s wearing high sandals in order to seem taller than she was.
75. In Sisyphos, a play ascribed in antiquity either to Euripides or to Kritias, the theory that religion was an ingenious invention to strengthen law was propounded by the principal character, a legendary king of Corinth (Kritias B25). Sisyphos was in any case impious, and was punished by the gods for his impiety, but the theory put into his mouth is none the less intellectually interesting. Kritias became the moving spirit of the narrow oligarchy which ruled Athens, with Spartan support, after the defeat and surrender of Athens. Having alienated nearly all those whose support he might have had, he was killed in a battle against the returning democrats. Later tradition regarded him as a monster.
76. Cf. Westwood 83-90, DJ. West 74-6.
77. Cf. GPM 69-73.
78. Illustrated together in Langlotz pl. 20.
79. Cf. Delcourt (1966) 54-9 on ‘Eros androgyne’, and (1961) 65 on the homosexual fantasy which rinds expression in the portrayal of hermaphrodites.
80. The two essential attributes of the warrior were physical valour on the battlefield and a good strategic imagination which heartened his comrades; cf. Odysseus’s praise of Neoptolemos to the ghost of Achilles in Od. xi 506-16.
81. On the possible alteration or vitiation of an individual’s nature cf. GPM 90.
82. Xenophanes made this point, forcefully and bitterly, in the late sixth century B.C. (fr. 2).
83. Cf. GPΜ 163f.
84. There are, of course, many representations of adult men, even elderly men, singing to the accompaniment of the lyre, e.g. Napoli 124 with fig. 50 and pl. 2 (and the other side of R336*).
85. At the same time the speaker presents himself as a man unwilling to soil the jurors’ ears with disgusting details.
86. Cf. GPM 30-3.
87. Napoli plates 1 and 6; EG 104f.
88. Cf. Boardman (1973) fig. 39.
89. Cf. CVA Great Britain 13 p. 15 on the use of white for males in Klazomenian vase-painting.
90. In RL14 an apparently livid-white youth is a very special case; he is not only dead; he is also Talos, a creature of metal, drained of its life-blood by Medea.
91. Cf. Delcourt (1961) 24-7. The Dionysos of Euripides’ Bacchae, mocked by Pentheus for his womanish appearance (453-9), accords with his portrayal in late fifth-century art, e.g. RL13, but it must not be forgotten that he is mocked in similar terms in Aiskhylos’s Edonoi (fr. 72) – and Aiskhylos died half a century before Bacchae.
92. The fair hair of one eromenos in this scene is very clear in EG 93.
93. On these words in archaic and classical poetry cf. Treu 176-186. In Pl. Phdr. 239c it is argued that an ordinary erastes will wish his eromenos to be unmanly; the underlying assumption seems from the context to be that physical toughness means independence of spirit, and that would be fatal to the erastes. The statement that such an eromenos will be ‘adorned with alien colour and adornment, through lack of his own’ might conceivably refer to cosmetics (to simulate the glow of health?) but more probably refers to dress, as opposed to the ‘natural adornment’ conferred by health and fitness.
94. Pl. Laws 956a treats ‘white colours’ as the most ‘fitting’ for artefacts which are to be dedicated to gods. Gods are naturally associated with light and brightness versus dark and dullness, with purity and cleanliness versus dirt, or with costly materials such as gold, silver and ivory.
95. ‘Yellow’ (khlōros) and ‘pale’ (ōkhros) are the colours of sickness and fear, but khlōros is also sometimes applied to young, flourishing vegetation and may thus have agreeable associations. In Theokritos 10.26 ‘honey-yellow’ is a lover’s word for a woman whom others derogatorily call ‘sunburnt’, and therefore opposed to ‘white’, as ‘honey-skinned’ is in Meleagros 98.
96. This is not surprising; on modern homosexual tastes cf. Westwood 88f., 116, 119, 155-65.
97. Nomos covers not only explicit legal prescription but also custom and usage.
98. Winckelmann deleted the words ‘and at Sparta’ as an interpolation, and Bethe 442 n. 10 regards the deletion as necessary; Robin transposes the words to follow ‘and Boiotia’. I have argued for preservation of the transmitted text (Dover [1964)37) and I am still of that opinion; the Spartan ‘rule’, as described (rightly or wrongly) by Xen. Lac. 1.12-14, is ‘complicated’ and is quite explicitly contrasted by Xenophon with the practice of the Eleans and Boiotians.
99. At the time when Plato wrote the Symposium (not, however, at its ‘dramatic date’) Persian sovereignty over the Greek coastal cities of Asia Minor had been formally recognised.
100. For this motif in poetry cf. Asklepiades 12, Kallimakhos 8, Meleagros 92.
101. An adolescent youth could not actively engage in politics, but all kinds of changes in the balance of power and influence within t
he citizen-body can be covered by the Greek expression “polītikos achievements’, (or ‘... accomplishings’).
102. Cf. Dover (1965) 13f.
103. The artful attempts of an erastes to create a situation from which he may profit, as described in Pl. Smp. 217c, have an exceedingly familiar ring if transposed into modern heterosexual terms.
104. Cf. Hopfner 233-6. Neos, ‘young’, can be applied to an infant, a youngish man, or anything in between, according to context.
105. Asklepiades 24 and Meleagros 80 may be examples. In Xen. Mem. ii 1. 30, ‘using men (andres) as women’, the word ‘men’ as representation of the male sex, rather than ‘youths’, is probably chosen in order to make a disagreeable impression on the reader. The same phenomenon may occur in Theokr. 2.44f. (cf. p. 67), on the lips of a girl discarded by her lover.
106. Cf. Schauenburg (1975) 119.
107. Cf. Schauenburg (1971) 73-5.
108. Vermeule 12 describes the second youth as a woman, but the figure has an unmistakably male torso (comrast the woman’s breasts on a figure to the right); the position of the legs hides the genital region.
109. The scene makes me think of the young men, a hundred and fifty years later, at whose behaviour the speaker of Dem. liv 16f. is so shocked (cf. p. 38). Closer in time is Theopompos Comicus fr. 29, where (lit.) ‘the excessively youths (meirakia)’ – i.e. those who overplay their role as young? – ‘grant favours to their fellows of their own age’ on the slopes of Lykabettos. (I withdraw the interpretation I offered in Dover |1964)41 n7).
110. Cf. von Blanckenhagen, who compares R970*.
111. In prisons the ‘wolf is the active homosexual, and does not reverse roles with his partners (DJ. West 233f.).
112. Cf. Dover (1964) 31; Mead 290f.
113. Cf. Slater 36-8 on the Greek passion for competition and its relation to what he calls Greek ‘narcissism’. I do not think the Greeks were as different from us as he seems to imply, but that is because I define ‘us’ differently; cf. GPM 228-42.
114. Cf. Slater 33f., Devereux (1967) 75, 90.
