Greek Homosexuality

by K J Dover

  When they were sitting in the trainer’s, they had to put one thigh forward in order not to show anything cruel (apēnēs) to those outside. Then, when a boy got up again, he had to brush the sand together and take care not to leave an imprint of his youth for his erastai. And no boy in those days would anoint himself with oil below the navel, and so moisture (drosos) and down flowered upon his genitals as upon apples.

  Apēnēs, an adjective predicated of Eros himself in Theognis 1353, means ‘cruel’ or ‘harsh’, and no attempt to translate it as ‘indecorous’ can be justified by evidence; Right’s point is that the sight of the boys’ genitals torments the spectators, just as beautiful women are ‘pain to the eyes’ (Hdt. v 18.4). His next sentence suggests that an erastes might brood longingly over the mark in the sand where the genitals of his eromenos had rested. The implication of the last sentence is disputed,39 but Right’s interest in the appearance of boys’ genitals is not disputable. Old Philokleon in Wasps 578, listing the enjoyable perquisites of jury service, includes ‘looking at the genitals of the boys’ whose attainment of the age necessary for registration as full citizens had been questioned and referred to a lawcourt.

  It would be surprising if the Greeks had no criteria for the aesthetic judgment of male genitals, and the visual arts show us what these criteria were. In vase-painting, the characteristic penis of a young male (human, heroic or divine) is thin (sometimes notably thinner than a finger) and short (as measured from the base to the end of the glans), terminating in a long pointed foreskin, the axis of the penis and foreskin being almost always straight. The small penis is promised by Right in Clouds 1009-14 as one of the desirable results of a good old-fashioned education, together with a good colour, broad shoulders and big buttocks.40 Examples of a short thin penis may be seen in R467 (youth), R716 (youth and boy), R942 (Eros and youth), R978 (youth), R1091 (youths), R1111 (youth), R1115 (young athlete), R1119 (youth arming); it is longer, but very thin, in (e.g.) B28 (Achilles), R164 (youths), R966 (youth). This small penis is combined as a rule with a scrotum of normal size, and the contrast is sometimes striking; the youth in R373* has a normal scrotum but a minute penis, and the youth’s scrotum in R638 is massive. Ganymede in R348* has an unusually small scrotum, but the fact that he is there playing with a hoop suggests that the painter envisages him more as a child than as a youth. The painters do not normally contrast men with immature males by giving larger genitals to men, but persist with the ideal (e.g. R563); even a hero such as Herakles is no exception to this rule; in R328* he has very small genitals, and his large scrotum in RL28 is unlikely, in view of examples given above, to be a deliberate reference to his virility. Even giants (e.g. Antaios [Rl6] and Tityos [R675]), monsters (e.g. Argos [R367]) and legendary villains (e.g. Prokroustes [R315]) are spared the indignity of caricature in respect of their genitals.

  Physical types of homo sapiens differ in penile size, as also in the angle of the penis at rest, and at any given period there are likely to be some correlations between geographical area and predominant physical type. Statistics based on sampling in modern Western Europe indicate an average penile length of 9.51 cm (measured to the end of the glans) and an average diameter of 2.53 cm.41 These dimensions can be expressed as fractions of average stature, thickness of thigh, etc. Several considerations combine to suggest that in reality the Attic penis was not a particularly small fraction of other bodily dimensions. One consideration (by no means cogent physiologically, but artistically interesting) is that the erect penis, as depicted in vase-painting, is of normal size, and if it was exceptionally small when flaccid the extent of enlargement on erection is surprising. When a man or youth is depicted in a squatting position or in movement of such a kind that his genitals are visible below or behind the thigh, the penis is much larger than when a standing or seated figure is depicted; and if the painter adjusted the size of the penis to the position and movement of the person, there is no reason a priori to treat one of the two sizes as realistic rather than the other. In caricature and in the representation of satyrs a penis of great size, even of preposterous size, is very common, and it is a reasonable conclusion (though not, I admit, an inescapable conclusion) that if a big penis goes with a hideous face and a small penis with a handsome face, it is the small penis which was admired. The principal consideration, however, is that comparison of vase-painting with sculpture strongly suggests that in portrayal of many bodily parts the painter conventionalised far more than the sculptor; this is apparent in the length of the toes, the often unnatural flexibility of the finger-joints and (on occasion) the massive development of the thighs. Sculpture does not support the hypothesis that the Attic penis was particularly small. It leaves intact the presumption that exaggeration of any bodily feature of young males in vase-painting was exaggeration of what was admired, just as the impossibly long legs of young women in the drawings of modern dress-designers or their immense breasts in some genres of popular art take to a ‘logical’ conclusion the tendency of men in the twentieth century to admire length of leg and size of breast in women.

  A special feature of Greek art is the artists’ interest in the foreskin, which the vase-painters, at least, often seem to treat as an entity separate from the penis; in R430, R521 and R585 it has clearly been painted with separate strokes.42 Care in its portrayal is sometimes at odds with schematic treatment of the rest of the body, as in R4. Commonly it is so long that the end of the glans is hardly more than halfway from the base of the penis to the tip of the foreskin, e.g. Rl2 (young athlete), R231, R267, R966 (youths), R1067 (running youth). Sometimes it is a tube of constant diameter, sometimes tapered to a fine point (e.g. R1047*), but very often the slight constriction at the tip of the glans is meticulously portrayed; exaggerated, this gives a teatshaped (e.g. R1027*) or funnel-shaped (e.g. R462*) foreskin.43 This interest in the foreskin is not peculiarly Attic; in CP4 a centaur has a stocky penis crowned by a straight tubular foreskin almost as long, and other shapes of foreskin appear on CE28 (a splayed spout) and CP12, CP20 (a long tapering penis, the top lip of the foreskin projecting a little further than the bottom). Even when the penis is shown erect there is not, as a rule, any retraction of the foreskin, e.g. R192, R680 (youths); the foreskin on the erect penis of the youth in R970*, a moment before penetration, is very long and sharply pointed. Exceptions occur in scenes of heterosexual fellation (R156 and R223*) and the group-scene R243*; a foreskin is gaping in R518; in R898 the woman’s fingers on the penis of the youth may be about to push his foreskin back.

  Just as it is possible to infer from the faces of satyrs, ugly old men, barbarian slaves and comic burlesque what was thought beautiful, and what ugly, in respect of hair, eyes, nose and mouth, we can use the same material to distinguish disapproved from approved genitals. The disapproved penis is thick and long, sometimes far exceeding anything to be seen in real life, and tending to a ‘club’ shape, with a comparatively narrow base and a bulging glans. The contrast between the ugly man of R456* and the youth of R458* is instructive.44 The running satyr in B295 has a penis almost as long as his thigh (though by contrast with the club type it tapers gradually from a thick base and ends in a shapeless teat-like foreskin); cf. R446, a satyr whose large club-like penis, with short foreskin, swings as he moves, and R1075, bestial hairy satyrs with very thick penises. In R46 the bulging glans and foreskin of a satyr’s erect penis form an ‘onion dome’. Italiote fourth-century mythological burlesques represent comic actors wearing artificial genitals. In these cases the penis extends almost to the knee, and tends to be clubbed, e.g. RS141 (Hephaistos), RS147 (an old man) RS151 (Herakles and Iolaos), RS175 (a comic actor). A curl or twist on the foreskin seems sometimes to be treated as an ugly or ridiculous feature, e.g.: R422* (Old Age, hideous and bony, with an immense penis which curves downwards, the spout-like foreskin pointing at the ground); R962 (a satyr with a penis of normal size, but a foreskin curling down like a sharp hook); RS30 (a satyr with an upturned foreskin). Among the naked male figures of C10, who are p
robably minor supernatural beings, not ordinary men, one has a very large, thick penis with a short open foreskin; behind him is another with a long, pendulous penis of which the glans is completely exposed.

  Exposure of the glans is common enough in sixth-century vase-painting when a satyr’s penis is erect (a normal condition for satyrs), and almost invariable when he is masturbating; the glans may be painted reddish-purple (e.g. B394), and in frontal view the erect penis may reach as far as the middle of the satyr’s chest. It is not always easy to decide at what stage between flaccidity and complete erection a satyr’s penis is supposed to be. In B80* two of the satyrs engaged in pressing grapes have erections, and in the other three the penis is pendulous, but in all five the glans is exposed; in CP16, a scene which includes copulation and defecation, a fat hairy satyr has a penis hanging to his knees, again with glans exposed; and in B370* the penis of a dancing satyr, swinging forward, ends in a bifurcated exposed glans adorned with an eye. Red-figure vase-painting is more restrained in the depiction of satyrs’ erections, assimilating them to human shapes and sizes,45 but it was not unwilling to use the exposed glans as an element of coarse humour, as in R1141 (an ugly man defecating and holding his nose). The same feature appears sporadically as an element of caricature in Corinthian vase-painting, e.g.: C44, a comast squatting; C52, a slave working in a mine; C66, a branded and fettered slave sitting on the ground. So too in Boiotian black-figure of the classical period: BB16*, a frantic little pot-bellied Zeus, and BB28, grotesque men in frightened poses. In the Corinthian examples the penis is very large, in the Boiotian not so large but distinctly clubbed.

  There seems little doubt that in C52 and C66 the painters’ intention was to portray circumcised slaves. Circumcision, practised throughout Egypt and Phoenicia, was familiar to the Greeks as a feature of visitors or slaves from the south-eastern corner of the Mediterranean, and in R699* it is exploited in a scene depicting Herakles’ killing of the Egyptian king Busiris; the Egyptians have shaven heads and snub-noses, and the painter has taken care to expose their circumcised penises, the glans spotted, while Herakles’ uncircumcised penis is half the width of the Egyptians’ (barely, indeed, the size of his little finger). Herodotos expresses aesthetic disapproval46 of the Egyptian practice (ii 36.3-37.2):

  Other nations leave their genitals as they were at birth, except for those who have learned from Egypt, but the Egyptians circumcise themselves ... And they circumcise their genitals for the sake of cleanliness, choosing to be clean rather than of seemly appearance.47

  In comedy circumcision is denoted not, as in Herodotos, by the term peritemnein (‘cut from off’, used also of cutting off the ears and other forms of punitive mutilation) but by the adjective psōlos or the participle apepsōlēmenos (‘with glans exposed’). Ar. Birds 504-7 puns on the two senses of psōlos in a joke about the Phoenicians, and in another passage (Ach. 155-61), in defiance of ethnological evidence,48 he treats outlandish barbarians from Thrace as if they were circumcised:

  HERALD. Forward the Thracians whom Theoros has brought! DIKAIOPOLIS: Good God, what’s this? THEOROS: An Odomantian host. DIKAIOPOLIS: What do you mean, ‘Odomantians’? What’s all this about? Who’s peeled the Odomantians’ cock? THEOROS: These men, if they’re given two drakhmai (sc. a day) pay, will carry their arms in triumph over the whole of Boiotia. DIKAIOPOLIS. Two drakhmai – for these apepsōlēmenoi?

  The context also points to ‘circumcised’ as the translation of psōlos in Wealth 265-7:

  He’s come back here with an old man who’s filthy, hunchbacked, wretched, wrinkled, bald, toothless, and, by God, I think he’s psōlos too!

  When males are represented in positions in which their genitals would in reality be concealed or partially concealed from an observer placed where the painter is, the genitals are forced on our attention by one device or another. The clothing, for example, may be diaphanous, especially if it is the skirt of a tunic, as in R39 (Achilles) – in R555 the cloak of Neoptolemos is diaphanous – or it may be unrealistically disarrayed, as in R23 (Herakles in combat with Geryon) and R699* (Busiris’s Egyptians); or elements of profile and frontal view may be uncomfortably combined, as in R521 (a man with a girl-musician). In profile the penis is very often shown as projecting horizontally, even when it is small and certainly not erect, e.g. R667 (Eros), R894, R1027* (youths). If the figure is seated or lying back, the penis is shown pointing upwards, even when the legs are not so portrayed as to suggest that they are pressed together, e.g.: B176, reclining youth; B295, kneeling satyr; R48, seated youths; R136, crouching youths; R169, half-kneeling youth; R879, seated satyr; R1031, half-kneeling youth; RL44, RL56, RS8, RS24, RS44, RS48, RS121, seated – sometimes lolling – youthful deities and heroes. In RL56 and RS121 the penis is given a sharp upwards curl. Patroklos in R39, while his wound is being bound up by Achilles, sits on his right heel in such a way that his genitals rest on the upper surface of his foot; it is as if the painter were under a powerful constraint not to conceal the genitals. R216 is in some ways similar, on a humbler plane: a man shown in the act of climbing a wall, at the moment when his genitals are resting prominently on the top of the wall. Alternatively, when a male is seen in profile squatting, crouching, half-kneeling, jumping or in violent movement, the genitals may be partially visible below the thigh. In portraying such positions and movements the painter commonly makes the genitals wholly visible, and he makes them far larger, in proportion to the other dimensions of the body, than when a similar person is standing, sitting, lying down, walking or fighting. This is understandable in caricature or in the portrayal of satyrs – e.g. B226 (crouching), B310 (bending over), R754 (crouching), R1099 (position of scrotum and penis reversed!),49 R1103 (headfirst into a jar). But the convention applies also to men and youths, e.g.: (men) B498 (dancing), R140 (bending over); (youths) B470* (sitting), B474 (bending over), R168 (dancing), R169 (half-kneeling), R498* (loping), R1055 (moving fast). R1047* is a remarkable instance: a youth or boy bends over, and his genitals stream behind him as if they were being torn from their moorings. R462* seems to offer a good contrast between the small penis of a standing figure and the large penis seen below the thigh of a sitting figure, but the issue is complicated by the fact that the former is a sober youth and the latter a vomiting man. In R420 the big blunt penis of Old Age is most unrealistically sticking back between his thighs. There are, of course, some breaches of the convention described: R263, where the genitals of a youth bending over are not visible; R450, youths jumping, with no exaggeration of the size of their genitals; R737, a youth half-kneeling; R770, a boy fleeing from Eros, the swirl of his cloak concealing his genitals; R845, Paris seated, his genitals concealed by clothing.50

  Satyrs were a godsend to artists who felt impelled to give expression to exuberant penile fantasies (B35, in which a satyr’s erect penis is as massive as his arm, is the ultimate exaggeration), and the uninhibited behaviour characteristic of comast-scenes provided other opportunities for celebrating the power of the penis. B678 is a fantasy rooted, I think, in that genre: a musician whose hands are fully occupied with the double pipe has a spontaneous ejaculation, and a bewildered bee dodges the bombardment. Progressive assimilation of satyric to human anatomy in the fifth century reduced the possibilities of fantasy, but left open the depiction of animals copulating (e.g. R871 [donkeys]; cf. B582 [pigs in charge of a woman]), balancing and weight-lifting tricks (e.g. R581, a satyr balancing a cup on his erect penis in a scene of riotous conviviality; cf. R275, a youth in a similar position but with a bowl on his stomach) and scenes of multiple sexual activity such as those to which reference has already been made in other connections. The domain of the penis, however, extended far beyond vase-painting, and provided the painters with themes which contained an element of fantasy even when treated representationally and served as a starting-point for a further stage of fantasy.

  The very large, pendulous artificial penis worn by comic actors went out of use at Athens in the course of the fourth century, but it
was normal wear on the comic stage in Aristophanes’ time and, if the vase-paintings are a reliable guide, in fourth-century Italiote comedy as well. In satyr-plays the penis worn by the members of the chorus was erect, but (to judge from RL13) decorously small by the end of the fifth century. The ‘herrn’ which stood at almost every Athenian front door consisted of a square-section stone pillar surmounted by a head of Hermes and adorned, halfway down, with genitals, the penis erect (the figure of Priapos [cf. p. 105] was a Hellenistic innovation). Some Greek festivals, including the City Dionysia and the Rural Dionysia in Attica, included a procession carrying a phallos (i.e. a model of the erect penis) in honour of Dionysos and related deities,51 one of whom, Phales, was the personification of tireless male sexuality (cf. p. 136). The treatment of fixed stones as phalloi is also attested in various localities.52

  Some vase-paintings can be accepted as illustrations of these phenomena, but with intrusions of the supernatural, e.g.: C4, a phallos-stick wielded by a dancer; CE10, a satyr on the prow of a ship holds a big phallos, while a smaller male figure brandishes two, one projecting forward from his genitals and the other back from his buttocks; C58, a man wears an artificial penis, of great size, erect, strongly curved upwards and ending in a broad rim like a vase; C56, two men either side of a rock which resembles an erect penis, a ridge corresponding to the corona glandis; B370* and R94, phalloi fixed on the ground, the former with two cavorting satyrs and the latter heavily veined in a manner unusual in Greek art (though normal in Japanese erotic prints); B695, giant phalloi supported by a team of men and accompanied by gigantic beings, one certainly a satyr; R607, a fixed phallos, taller than a man, with two women; R695, a naked woman carrying a phallos as long as she is tall. Some of these phalloi (B370*, B695, R695) have a staring eye painted on the glans, and this is sometimes to be seen on an olisbos (R212, R414*); the strong marking of the rolled-back foreskin, in combination with the eye, gives the penis a ‘head’ and a ‘neck’, while in other cases (CE10, B695) exaggeration of the upper part of the corona turns the penis into a goad. The strong curve on the artificial organ is C58 is sometimes a feature of the herm as portrayed in vase-painting (e.g. R729, RL72, RS36); occurring also on satyrs (e.g. R317) and humans (R680),53 it conveys the impression of great tension and has the effect of investing the penis with an impudent, aggressive personality of its own.54 Hairy centaurs in BB40 create a heraldic pattern with the curving, interlocked erect penises. Whether the vessel with a penis-like spout depicted in R593 (a woman – almost certainly a woman, not a youth – is drinking from it) was an article in common use is not known; in B219 the foot of the cup is in the form of penis and scrotum; C56 is slightly moulded into the form of a squatting man with penis erect (the dancers portrayed either side of the penis remind us of B370* and R607). In general the potters did not often yield to the temptation to make vessels in the form of genitals.55