by K J Dover
115. Cf. Trudgill 56-64, 123-5.
116. Beazley (1947) 213.
117. Lullies and Hirmer 20, 72 and pi. V; Kunze.
118. Cf. Schauenburg (1965) 863-7, Lullies (1957) 378f.
119. Cf. the complaint of Glaukos 1 about boys who put their prices up.
120. Cf. Rodenwaldt 14-21. In R638 the youth making off has not accepted a purseful of money; he is carrying nuts, figs, etc., like the boy in R520*.
121. Vorberg (1932) 463 mistakes the garland for a discus.
122. Some scenes are mythological, e.g. R112 (Peleus and Atalante); R928, in which a youth carrying two spears grasps an apprehensive woman, is mysterious.
123. Cf. Sichtermann (1959) 12-14. Scenes (some patently erotic) in which blows are threatened are listed by Boardman (1976) 286f.
124. Cf. G.Neumann 71-5.
125. Cf. n. 26 above.
126. Cf. Beazley (1947) 199.
127. The great majority belong to the black-figure period; cf. Beazley (1947) 219-23. Decrease in numbers in the red-figure period, however, is not accompanied by increase in reticence; cf. (e.g.) R520*. The configuration is not peculiarly Attic, but appears also on a Klazomenian sarcophagus (Friis Johansen 186).
128. Robinson and Fluck 13 cite without comment Furtwängler’s judgment (iii 21) that the heterosexual scene is comparatively insipid.
129. Cf. J.Gould (1973) 6f.
130. In this picture the penises of the other youths are drawn as horizontal, but certainly not erect; cf. p. 125.
131. I would restrict the term ‘masturbation’ to scenes in which the figure is alone or in which (as in B118 [satyr]) semen is emitted; it is not appropriate to scenes in which a man clutches his erect penis while importuning a potential partner or waiting his turn. It is possible that a boy shown in a crouching position below the handle of B522 is masturbating.
132. In a drawing from the Agora (Lang no. 30) the sex of the person penetrated from behind by a shaggy dog is uncertain.
133. In the Frogs passage the master strikes the slave, presumably, because he has called for a chamber-pot (544) and the slave was inattentive; but we have a certain tendency, impelled by a perverted jealousy or insecurity, to react angrily to the sexual activity of those over whom we have authority.
134. In my note on this passage I drew attention to a ‘common assumption of vulgar humour, that an adult male cannot be in bed alone and awake for long without masturbating’. Henderson 220 n. 45 thinks I derived this assumption from ‘the English public schools’; actually, I first encountered it in a reveille-call used among American GIs in Italy in 1943, and heard it again in the film Kes, where the speaker is a Barnsley miner. I do not, however, disagree with Henderson that Strepsiades’ behaviour is intended to strike the audience as gross and earthy.
135. On B482 cf. p. 78.
136. Kretschmer’s interpretation (89) is slightly, not essentially, different.
137. Cf. Schauenburg (1965) and Beazley (1947) 203, 221f.
138. Corrected by Westwood 129-31.
139. Arkhedikos fr. 4, taken seriously by Timaios F35(b).
140. The giraffe has developed a courtship technique, exploiting the aesthetic potentialities of his long neck, which he uses in homosexual relations but not in heterosexual mating; the technique culminates in erection, mounting and occasionally spontaneous ejaculation or attempts to induce ejaculation by friction, though not (so far) in anal penetration; cf. Innis 258-60, Moss 45f. Observation in recent years has provided similar evidence for other species. I see no reason to refrain from using the term ‘homosexual’ with reference to wild animals if the definition given at the start of I A 1 is satisfied. A Peruvian community mentioned by Tripp 70f. seems to divert almost all its sexually motivated behaviour into homosexual relationships; if so, it invalidates the generalisation of Karlen 476.
141. Correctly observed by Pomeroy 144. Peisistratos fell out with Megakles because, married to Megakles’ daughter, he ‘had intercourse with her not in the normal way’ (Hdt. i 61.1f.), but he had strong reasons for not wishing her to conceive.
142. Devereux (1970) 21 n. 1 regards the urge towards the portrayal of heterosexual anal intercourse as a manifestation of homosexuality (cf. Pomeroy loc. cit.), and we may well suspect a divergence between homosexual copulation in vase-paintings and what an erastes actually hoped to achieve.
143. A lamp in the museum at Herakleion (Marcadé 59) portrays fellation of a supine man by a woman, but her vulva is hoisted well out of reach of his face. Galen xii 249 (Kühn) states as a matter of fact that ‘we are more revolted’ by cunnilinctus than by fellation.
144. A common fantasy in ancient and modern pornography; how practicable, I confess I do not know.
145. Cf. Deubner 65-7; and cf. p. 132 below on phalloi.
146. Cf. Charlotte Fränkel 24f., 74, and for other examples B31 (Dophios, cognate with dephesthai, ‘masturbate’, and Psōlās, derived from psōlos, ‘with foreskin retracted’).
147. Cf. Henderson 124.
148. From the Roman period, we have a striking expression of opinion in Plu. Dial. 768a: ‘Those who enjoy playing the passive role we treat as the lowest of the low, and we have not the slightest degree of respect or affection for them.’
149. Westwood 133f. notes that those homosexuals who practise intercrural copulation or mutual masturbation and reject anal penetration tend to ‘take a spiritual view of homosexuality’. See n. 77 above.
150. Aristotle Rhet. 1378b29f., Dem. xxi 74. The verb which denotes formal deprivation of citizen rights is atīmoun, but the abstract noun atīmiā corresponds both to atīmazein and to atīmoun.
151. Cf. Vanggaard 76-81.
152. Cf. Fehling 18-27, Vanggaard 101-12. Karlen 414 observes that humans, unlike many animal species which have ritualised homosexual ‘submission’, can complete a genital act ‘in expressing a power relationship’. John Boorman’s film Deliverance makes striking use of this theme in depicting the maltreatment of urban ‘trespassers’ by rustic hunters.
153. Cf. Herter (1932) 209-221, Fehling 7-14, 18-20.
154. Cf. Fehling 8-11. I have myself seen this reaction in angry or apprehensive captive apes.
155. Cf. Fehling 7f.
156. Cf. DJ. West 116, Vanggaard 71-5. The eland, however, reverses the usual process; the subordinate male mounts the dominant at. the end of a tussle (Moss 188).
157. E.g. Italian inculalo (~ culo, ‘arse’), ‘defeated’, is applied to a football team.
158. Cf. Schauenburg (1975) 97-122; Fehling 103f.
159. Depicted in R476 ; cf. Ar. Eccl. 12f. and Ussher’s note ad loc.
160. Cf. Devereux (1970) 20, (1973) esp. 181,193.
161. B60 is an exception, but the youth there is about to penetrate a woman, and his genitals are not accessible to the man who touches him. In B258 the youth touching his own buttocks (invitingly, insultingly, or accidentally?) has been rejected in favour of a conventional eromenos. In R189* and R255 we see the crude horseplay of drunken and high-spirited youths; the humorous character of the latter is quite obvious.
162. Plu. Dial. 768f tells a story about a sixth-century tyrant, Periandros of Ambrakia: Periandros asked his eromenos, ‘Aren’t you pregnant yet?’, and paid a heavy penalty for this gaffe, for the eromenos killed him. We do not know where this story came from, nor whether it represented the jocular question as put in private or in front of other people (cf. p. 159 on Xen. Mem i 2. 29ff.), but it implies that the eromenos was prepared to play a female role so long as no one called it female.
163. Kallimakhos 7 and Dioskorides 13 lament the rapacity of their eromenoi.
164. Cf. GPM 144-60,296-8.
165. Cf. GPM 109-12, 114-16.
166. In Ar. Eccl. 432 that element in the assembly which was constituted by the urban poor is called (lit.) ‘the shoemakerish majority’, i.e. ‘all those shoemakers and the like’.
167. Cf. GPM 34-45.
168. Cf. GPM 88-95.
III
; Special Aspects and Developments
A. Publicity
Two passages of Aristophanes introduce us to a phenomenon of Greek life which expressed and sustained the homosexual ethos. In the first (Ach. 142-4) an Athenian envoy who has returned from a visit to Sitalkes, a Thracian king, says:
And he was quite extraordinarily pro-Athenian (philathēnaios), and a true erastes of you (sc. the Athenian people), to such an extent that he actually wrote on the walls, ‘Athēnaioi kaloi’.
In the second passage (Wasps 97-9) a slave from the household of Philokleon describes the old man’s mania for serving on juries:
And if he’s seen Demos anywhere, the son of Pyrilampes, written on a door (sc. as being) kalos (i.e. ‘ ... “Dēmos kalos” written on a door’) he goes and writes beside it ‘kēmos kalos’.
Demos, son of Pyrilampes, was outstandingly good-looking (PL Grg. 481de, where Kallikles is treated as being in love with him), and it would seem from the passage of Wasps that in the late 420s anonymous graffiti acclaimed him for his looks (Philokleon’s kēmos is the funnel of the voting-urn used in a lawcourt). The passage of Acharnians expresses the passion of Sitalkes for the Athenians by imagining the king as playing the part of an erastes who writes on walls the name of his eromenos followed by ‘(sc. is) beautiful’.
Several references to this practice are made in Hellenistic epigrams, notably Aratos 1:
Philokles the Argive is beautiful at Argos, and the stelai1 of Corinth and the tombs of the Megarians cry the same things; and he is written as far as the Baths of Amphiaraos as (sc. being) beautiful.
Anon. HE 27.1-4:
I said, and I said again, ‘Beautiful, beautiful!’ Yes, I will go on saying how beautiful Dositheos is, how lovely to look at. I did not engrave this utterance on oak or pine or wall, but my eros is contained within my heart.
Cf. Meleagros 94.1, ‘No longer is Theron written by me (sc. as being) beautiful’, i.e. ‘No longer do I write “Theron is beautiful” ’. Anon. 27 suggests that a graffito2 of this type is simply the transformation into written form of an admiring exclamation, such as Pindar reproduces in Pythian Odes 2.72, ‘Beautiful is a monkey among children, always beautiful’; we can almost hear them gooing over a furry animal and saying, ‘Aaaah! Isn’t he lovely?’ A clear example in a sexual context is [Theokritos] 8.72f.:
Yesterday a girl with brows that meet saw me from her cave as I drove my heifers past and said that I was beautiful, beautiful; but I did not say a word, not even a push-off ...3
The despairing erastes seems to have used ‘X is beautiful’ as a means of declaring ‘I am in love with X’; cf. Kallimakhos 2.5f.:
Lysanias, you are – yes! – beautiful, beautiful! But before it’s properly out of my mouth, an echo says, ‘He’s someone else’s’.4
Cf. id. 5.3, ‘The boy’s beautiful, marvellously beautiful!’ (addressed, it seems, to the water which the poet is not putting into the wine in which he drinks the boy’s health); Anon. HE 18.1, ‘You mothers of Persians have borne beautiful, beautiful children’.
The earliest of these epigrams is a century and a half later than Aristophanes’ Acharnians and Wasps; there is no better illustration of the continuity of Greek culture than the fact that actual examples of kalos-graffiti take us back to a starting-point a century before Aristophanes and lead us down towards and into his time: IG i2. 925 ‘Lysias is beautiful’ and 926 ‘Beautiful is Arkhias’, both from the Acropolis at Athens; 923 ‘... ]oos is beautiful to look at and delightful to speak to’ (the inscriber was barely literate, to judge from his spelling, but capable of composing a respectable verse); IG xii.2.268 (Mytilene) ‘Phaestas (sic) is beautiful, says Ogesthenes, who wrote (sc. this)’, an interesting indication that the admirer was not always anonymous; IG xii.5.567 (Keos) ‘Boethos the Athenian is beautiful’.
A fragment of Kallimakhos (HE 64) would suffice to show, even if we had no inscribed examples, that the expression of sentiment in graffiti was not always erotic:
Momos (‘Criticism’) himself wrote on walls: ‘Kronos is sophos’(i.e. ‘ ... knows all the answers’).5
Archaic graffiti on rocks on the island of Thera, some of which may well be the best part of four centuries earlier than Kallimakhos, include the following: IG xii. 3.540(I) ‘Lakydidas is good (agathos)’; 545 (1415) ‘Korax (?) is good, the (sc. son) of ]ronos’; 541 (and p. 308) ‘...]x is best (aristos)’; 547 ‘Pykimedes is best of the family of Skamotas’; 1414 ‘Kudros is best’; 540 (III) ‘Krimon is foremost ...’ (the words which follow are not intelligible); 581 (1437) ‘Ainesis is sturdy (thaleros), Meniadas is first’; 540 (II) ‘Eumelos is the best dancer’; 543 (and p. 308) ‘Barbax is a good dancer and [...’; 546 ‘Helekrates is a good [dancer (?)’. It would be surprising if all surviving graffiti were complimentary, and some of them are not, e.g. IG i2. 921 (Athens) ‘Arisemos is beautiful, Polytime is a whore (laikastria)’.6 Favoured derogatory words at Athens are katapūgōn and its feminine katapūgaina; the original denotation of katapūgōn was probably ‘male who submits to anal penetration’, and the feminine was formed on the analogy of such pairs as therapōn/therapaina, ‘servant’ and leōn/leaina, ‘lion’/‘lioness’, but at least by Aristophanes’ time and perhaps by a much earlier date the words had no more specific a denotation than colloquial English ‘bugger’. ‘Louse’ and ‘bitch’ are perhaps the best current equivalents.7 Words incised on some Attic red-figure vases inform us: SEG xiii 32 ‘Anthyle is a bitch’; ibid. ‘Sikela is a bitch’; R994 Tythodoros is beautiful. Alkaios is a louse in the opinion of Melis(?)’; SEG xxi 215 ‘Sosias is a louse, says Euphronios, who wrote (sc. this)’.8 From the island of Tenos comes SEG xv 523 ‘Pyrrhies (sc. son) of Akestor is oipholēs’ (probably ‘sex-mad’),9 ‘Thressa is a louse’.10
It is against this background that we must consider a phenomenon which has naturally played an important part in the study of the Greek homosexual ethos by modern scholars, although (like vase-painting in general) not mentioned by ancient writers: the many hundreds of vase-inscriptions which acclaim the beauty either of a named person or of an unnamed boy. These inscriptions are not graffiti, but were painted on the vessel before firing;11 they were therefore conceived by the painter as an ingredient of his design, and one would suppose prima facie that any given inscription of this genre expressed the sentiment of the artist, or of the customer (who could, of course, commission a painted vase just as easily as a dead man’s family could commission an epitaph),12 or of the public in general at the time when the vessel was made.
When a person is named in the inscription, his name is preceded or followed by kalos, ‘(sc. is) beautiful’, e.g. ‘Nikon is beautiful’, ‘Beautiful is Nikosthenes’. The bare statement may be extended in various ways, e.g.: R78 ‘the boy Leagros is beautiful’; R204 ‘Epidromos is beautiful, yes!’ (cf. R50, R1015); B94 ‘Theognis is beautiful, by Zeus!’; B422 ‘Sostratos is extremely beautiful’; B410 ‘Andrias is most beautiful (sc. of all)’; R299 ‘Khairas (sic) is beautiful, beautiful’ (cf. p. 112).13 More rarely the person praised is a woman, e.g. B222 ‘Sime is beautiful’; since the feminine of kalos is kalē, and there is hardly ever room for doubt whether a proper name in Greek is male or female, acclamations of male beauty can be clearly separated from those of female beauty. The great preponderance of male names accords with the preponderance of male figures, and with the fact that a male of citizen family could go freely about the city and compete in athletic or choral contests, whereas a female of citizen family was not on public view to a comparable extent. Among the individuals named as ‘beautiful’ in these inscriptions are some known to us from other sources, e.g. R997 ‘Euaion (sc. son) of Aiskhylos’; ‘Euaion’, according to a variant reading in the Suda (ai 357), was the name of the second son of Aiskhylos the tragic poet. To deny that many, perhaps the great majority, of these inscriptions express admiration for the beauty of actual persons would be perverse; to assert that each of them declares the desire of the artist or his customer for homosexual relations
with the person named would be extremely difficult to reconcile with the data as a whole, and we may find ourselves compelled to admit that the motivation of identical utterances was extremely variable.
It must first be observed that acclamations of beauty were not the earliest type of vase-inscription, nor were they, at any period, the only type. Before the end of the seventh century B.C. Corinthian and Attic vase-painters elucidated the mythological scenes which they portrayed by adding names, e.g. ‘Herakles’, ‘Nessos’, and sometimes in the sixth century this practice was extended by the naming of objects, e.g. ‘lyre’, ‘lizard’. The filling of the blank spaces between figures by means of rosettes, lozenges, patterned diamonds, and the like had been a general characteristic of Greek vase-painting at an earlier date, and the writing of names took over this decorative function; it continued long after the Greek vase-painters had shaken off their horror vacui (small, neat, well-spaced letters characterise vase-inscriptions of the late sixth and early fifth centuries), but the fact that some inscriptions (e.g. B51*) are senseless sequences of letters reminds us that some vase-painters, at any rate, regarded lettering as an ingredient of composition and not as a means of communication. Potters’ and painters’ ‘signatures’ begin about 575 B.C.; a certain Sophilos provides us with the earliest surviving example, ‘Sophilos painted me’ (B6), and he labels his picture ‘The (sc. funeral-) games of Patroklos’. The vessel itself is, as it were, the speaker (as a tombstone may be inscribed ‘I am the tomb of... ’or a statue‘ ... dedicated me’). Other utterances by vessels are: B109 ‘I belong to Taleides’; B454 ‘Greetings! Buy me!’; R90 ‘Drink me! I am capacious’ (lit., ‘I have my mouth open’); R1039 ‘Invite me, so that you’ll drink’.14 The famous boast of Euthymides (R52), ‘As never Euphronios’, i.e. ‘Euphronios never made one so good!’ could be regarded as a proclamation by the vessel itself. A further category of vase-inscriptions consists of words which we have to imagine as spoken by the characters portrayed, e.g.: R463 ‘Stop it!’ (cf. p. 6); R577* (heterosexual copulation) ‘Keep still!’; R825 (a singer) ‘For you and me ...’15
