by K J Dover
‘Surrealist’ elements are very rare in Greek art, but an exception is the ‘phallos-bird’, which has the legs, body and wings of a bird but a neck and head in the form of a curved penis with the foreskin rolled back and an eye on the glans. In R414* a naked woman, uncovering a store of artificial penises, carries a small phallos-bird like a pet in her crooked arm, and in R416 and R1159 a plump little phallos-bird looks up from the ground, the stem of its neck rising from a breast like a scrotum. Much larger members of the species are ridden through the air by women (B386) or satyrs (R442). R259* shows us a horse whose neck turns into a sinuous human penis. A hint of these phallic creatures, discernible in the manner of portraying the neck and head, may be seen in B398 (siren), B570 (siren), B494* (a bird with a very short beak and a staring eye), B658 (a procession of animals), R171 (a hunting-dog with a collar-line), R352 (an eagle on the sceptre of Zeus).56
It may be legitimate (or it may not) to detect the artist’s preoccupation with the penis at work in the configuration of scenes which have no overt sexual content. If the determinant was sometimes subconscious, it is hard to believe it was always so – as, for example, in R1087, where a tree behind a herm has a great curving branch which replaces the expected penis on the herm, and another branch which stands in the same relation to the tree as a herm’s penis to a herm. The following examples have no obvious humorous intention, and may reveal unintentionally the ‘penile fantasies’ of their creators: R177*, Orestes, advancing to kill Aigisthos, holds a broad-bladed, curved, sharp-pointed sword in a position where it covers his genitals and appears to be projecting from him; R837, a spear, carried pointing half downwards, prolongs the line of a youth’s penis, and its blade and blade-socket symbolise the glans and retracted foreskin; R821, a youth holds a long javelin so that it appears to pass through the genitals of another youth; B542, a Scythian with a bow, facing a hoplite, appears at first glance to be holding the hoplite’s penis; B588, Iolaos holds his club so that it looks like his own erect penis, and Herakles, fighting the lion, appears to have his scabbard going up his anus (contrast B589); CW8, the shaft of a spear carried by a man arming, seems to penetrate the anus of a man bending over behind him, and in a scene of Theseus killing the Minotaur Theseus’s sword prolongs the line of his penis; B39, the spear carried by a man on a boar-hunt goes as far as the buttocks of his companion, then reappears so that its blade is like a formidable penis on the companion, threatening the boar; B562, a man fleeing from a snake holds his stick so that he seems to be both erect and penetrated; R525, a dancing youth so placed over a triangular motif that he seems to be lowering his anus on to a sharp point. The precariousness of inferring subconscious preoccupations from configurations of this kind is obvious enough, and not least because most of the configurations are created by perfectly normal ways of carrying spears and swords and wearing scabbards, but further exploration of the topic might be rewarding.57
To say that Greek vase-painting was ‘obsessed’ with the penis would be to misuse a technical term which has already been devalued sufficiently, but the evidence considered in this section justifies the conclusion that Greek art and cult were extremely interested in the penis. It justifies also consideration of the hypothesis that the Greeks felt, however inarticulately, that the penis was a weapon, but a concealed weapon held in reserve.58 That a youth or boy should have a straight, pointed penis symbolised his masculine fitness to become a warrior; that it should be small sharpened the contrast between the immature male and the adult male and assimilated this to the contrast between female and male; a small penis (especially if the existence of the corona glandis is not betrayed by any undulation in the surface of the penis) is an index of modesty and subordination, an abjuration of sexual initiative or sexual rivalry,59 and the painters’ adoption of the ideal youthful penis as the standard for men, heroes and gods is one item in their general tendency to ‘youthen’ everyone.60
Their interest in the female genitals, on the other hand, is minimal, R565 is unusual in deliberately bringing the vulva into view by putting it abnormally high. It is prominent in B51*, R462* and R1151, but played down in (e.g.) R528 and even in R531, a frontal view of a woman urinating, where a contrast with the treatment of the male genitals in R265 is striking. Better justice is done to the female genitals in the abstract motifs favoured by Corinthian vase-painters for small perfume-vessels, e.g. C22, C24, C32*, C40,61 whereas a typical Attic decorative motif such as B242* is sexually ambiguous. It may be a mere coincidence that in the classical period Corinthian prostitutes and hetairai enjoyed an international reputation (Pindar fr. 122, cf. PI. Rep. 404d) and ‘Corinth’ had something of the same connotations for an Athenian as ‘Paris’ for a nineteenth-century Englishman (cf. Ar. Wealth 149-52, fr. 354).
C. Comic Exploitation
Euboulos, a comic poet of the fourth century, said of the Greeks who spent ten long years in capturing Troy (fr. 120):
No one ever set eyes on a single hetaira; they wanked themselves for ten years. It was a poor sort of campaign: for the capture of one city, they went home with arses much wider than (sc. the gates of) the city that they took.
The implication that the male anus serves, faute de mieux, like masturbation, when men are kept together without women for a long time is a humorous motif common to most cultures. A sixth-century vase (B53*) makes good use of it in showing three men busy with three women while a fourth man, having no woman, fruitlessly importunes an unfriendly youth. Much more positive attitudes, tolerant of the active homosexual partner and intolerant of the passive, are to be found in Aristophanes and other comic dramatists. A good starting-point is provided by the song with which Dikaiopolis in Ach. 263-279 addresses the deity in whose honour a phallos is being carried in procession:
Phales, companion of Dionysos, fellow-reveller, roaming abroad by night, adulterer, paiderastēs, after five years I salute you, happy to return to my village, for IVe made a truce for myself and I’m rid of troubles and battles and Lamakhos and all that!
It’s far nicer – O Phales, Phales! – to catch the pretty Thracian slave of (sc. my neighbour) Strymodoros collecting wood and stealing it from the slopes, and seize her round the waist and throw her down and stone her fruit – O Phales, Phales!
Paiderastiā is treated here as one appetite of the roguish, insatiable god who personifies the penis, together with adultery (illegal, but nice if one can get away with it) and a pounce on a pretty slave-girl caught in a lonely place; and all these ways of behaving belong with drunkenness, revelry and the delights of peace which the war years have restricted. A similar absence of distinction between homosexual and other pleasures is apparent in the words of Wrong, Clouds 1071-4:
Just consider, my young friend, everything that’s involved in being ‘good’ (sōphronein), and all the pleasures you’re going to miss: boys, women, kottabos-games, good food, drinks, laughs. But what’s the point of living, if you’re done out of all that?
Wrong is an immoralist, and he goes on (1075-82) to describe in more detail how a man with the gift of the gab can outface even a husband who has caught him in adultery; the difference between him and Dikaiopolis lies not in any significant disagreement on the constituents of the agreeable side of life, but in the fact that he is in opposition to the austere Right over the upbringing of the young, whereas Dikaiopolis is a mature citizen who robustly voices the wish of the audience to forget for a while the valour and toil which confer fame and to have some fun instead. Euelpides and Peisetairos, the two elderly Athenians who in Birds have left Athens to seek a more agreeable life elsewhere, think the same. Euelpides, asked by the Hoopoe in what kind of city he would like to live, replies (128-34):
Where I’d have no bigger troubles than this: a friend coming to my door first thing in the morning and saying, ‘I beg you, you and your children have a bath early and come to my house, because I’m holding a wedding-feast. And you must accept; otherwise, don’t you come round when things are going hard for me!’62
; Peisetairos caps this (137-42):
Where the father of a good-looking boy will meet me and go on at me as if I’d done him a wrong: ‘That was a nice way to treat my son, Stilbonides!63 You met him when he’d had a bath, leaving the gymnasium, and you didn’t kiss him, you didn’t say a word to him, you didn’t pull him close to you, you didn’t tickle his balls – and you an old friend of the family!’
Philokleon’s pleasure in looking at boys’ genitals (Wasps 578) is one aspect of his uninhibited pursuit of his own comfort and advantage, not (by Greek standards) incompatible with his designs on a slave-girl (1342-81) or his enjoyment when his daughter fishes his jury-pay out of his mouth with her tongue (608f.). At the end of Knights, where Demos (the personification of the Athenian people) appears in all his majesty, thanks to the defeat of his ‘Paphlagonian slave’ (Kleon) by the Sausage-seller, we find (1384-91):
SAUSAGE-SELLER: Now that that’s settled, here’s a folding-stool for you, and a boy (he’s no eunuch) who’ll carry it for you. And if you feel like it sometimes, make a folding-stool of him! DEMOS: Oh, joy! Back to the good old days! SAUSAGE-SELLER: You’ll certainly say so when I hand over the Articles of a Thirty-year Peace64 to you. Come on, now, Articles! (Enter a group of pretty girls). DEMOS; My God, they’re lovely! I say – can I slip them a good long armistice?
These passages are not reconcilable with the supposition that Aristophanes rejected the general Greek response to youthful male beauty as a morbid or eccentric response deserving censure and ridicule. They are entirely reconcilable, in the light of the fundamental contradiction within the Greek homosexual ethos (pp. 82f.), with the comic poets’ invariably unfriendly treatment of males who submit to the homosexual desires of others. There is no passage of comedy which demonstrably ridicules or criticises any man or any category of men for aiming at homosexual copulation with beautiful young males or for preferring them to women.65 Passages which have been regarded as critical are:
(a) Clouds 348-350, on the shapes assumed by clouds:
If they see a long-haired, wild man, one of the shaggy ones, like the son of Xenophantos, they make fun of his craziness and turn themselves into the shape of centaurs.
This has been discussed (p. 37) in connection with the ‘wild men’ of Aiskhines i 52, and it was argued that the point of ‘wild’, longhaired’, ‘shaggy’ and ‘centaur’ was not preference for males but headstrong pursuit of any attractive sex-object, male or female.
(b) Wasps 1023-8, where the poet boasts of his success and fame:
And he claims that when he’d got a great name and was honoured among you more than any (sc. poet) had ever been, he didn’t end up over-confident or get too big for his boots, or go round the wrestling-schools in a party, trying to seduce (sc. boys); and if an erastes, on bad terms with his own paidika, came to him (sc. the poet) and urged that the boy should be pilloried in a comedy, he’s never yet done what he was asked by anyone (sc. like that); he kept his integrity, so as not to turn into procuresses the Muses with whom he deals.
Peace 762f. repeats the boast ‘or go round ... seduce’ in very similar words. The point here is not that trying to seduce boys is to be condemned as morally wrong, or that there should be no such people as erastai and their paidika, but that the poet was not so conceited as to think that his enhanced standing in the community would bring him sexual success nor so corrupted as to compromise artistic integrity by helping a friend, as a favour, to blackmail a boy. Substitute ‘dancing-schools’ for ‘wrestling-schools’ and ‘girl’ for ‘paidika’, and the point would remain entirely unaffected.
(c) Comic references to Misgolas’s enthusiasm for musicians have been considered on p. 73. They no more entail general criticism of men for responding to male beauty than ridicule of an individual for a passion for claret would entail general criticism of human liking for drink.
Furthermore, there is no passage in comedy which demonstrably attributes an active homosexual role to anyone who is ridiculed for taking a passive role.66 The only passage which can be seriously considered as an exception to this generalisation is Clouds 675f., where it is said of Kleonymos, ridiculed for womanishness (because he was a coward; cf. p. 144 below), that ‘he had no kneading-trough, but kneaded up (sc. his bread) in a round mortar’. Bearing in mind Hdt. v 92.η.2, where Melissa’s ghost tells Periandros that he ‘put his loaves into the oven when it was cold’ (i.e. had intercourse with her corpse), we might interpret Clouds 67 5f. as meaning that Kleonymos penetrated someone else’s anus because a ‘kneading-trough’ (i.e. a vagina?) was not available to him. Since, however, dephesthai, the ordinary word for ‘masturbate’, is cognate with depsein, ‘mould or soften by kneading’, it makes better sense to suppose that the joke is that Kleonymos is rejected by women and reduced to masturbation (gesture with the comic phallos by the actor speaking the lines would remove any possibility of misunderstanding).67
Sexual opportunism and uninhibited arousal are characteristic of the comic stage. Dikaiopolis, who relishes the thought of his neighbour’s slave-girl,, ends the play gloriously drunk and propped up by two girls whose mouths and breasts excite him to erection (Ach. 1198-1221); he has a wife (132, 245, 262), but no one remembers her. Demos in Knights 1390f. immediately reacts to the attractive Articles of Peace by asking if he can have intercourse with them; Trygaios in Peace 71 Of., presented with the supernatural Opora in marriage, asks straight away ‘Do you think it’ll do me any harm, after so long, to stick it into her?’ When the Nightingale appears to Peisetairos and Euelpides in Birds 667-9 Peisetairos says ‘You know what? I’d like to do her between the legs!’ He threatens the goddess Iris in similar terms (1253-6):
And if you give me any trouble, I’ll start off by sticking the legs of Zeus’s messenger (i.e. you) in the air and doing Iris herself between the legs, so that you’ll be surprised how an old man like me can raise a cockstand like a battering-ram.
Enthusiastic acceptance of the provision of brothels for travellers (Frogs 113) and of prostitutes and persuadable female musicians and dancers at dinner-parties (Ach. 1091, Frogs 513-20) did nothing to make brothel-keepers respectable or to turn words such as pornē and laikastria into terms of respect and endearment; equally, a liking for dalliance with a handsome adolescent boy did nothing to diminish the seducer’s contempt for the seduced. Euruprōktos, literally, ‘having a wide arse’, is a common abusive term in comedy, and, as we have seen from Euboulos fr. 120, its literal meaning was kept in view. Ar. Clouds 1085-1104, where Wrong compels Right to admit that euruprōktoi are in a majority at Athens among speakers in the courts, poets, politicians and the audience at large, grows out of 1083f., in which Right points out that if a young man is caught in adultery he will become euruprōktos because (cf. p. 106) a radish will be forced up his anus by the offended husband. The passage ends with Right’s despairing cry to the audience, ō kīnoumenoi, ‘you who are stirred’; kīnein, ‘stir’, ‘move’, is a slang equivalent of bīnein, ‘fuck’, used in the active voice or in the passive according to whether the subject is the sexually active or the (male or female) sexually passive partner.
In the opening scene of Thesmophoriazusae, when the old man has declared that he does not know who Agathon is, Euripides says (35) ‘Well, you’ve fucked him, but perhaps you don’t know him’, implying that the effeminate Agathon has functioned as a male prostitute in the dark. When Agathon has declined to help Euripides, intoning a rhyming distich (198f.),
It is right not by inventiveness to withstand misfortune, but by submissiveness,68
the angry old man cries (200f.):
And you, you katapūgōn, are wide-arsed – not just in words, but in submissiveness!
A moment later, when Agathon explains that he cannot go in disguise (as Euripides wants him to) to the meeting of the women, for it will be suspected that he is seeking to make love with them by stealth, the old man pours scorn on him (206):
What, ‘make love by stealth’? Trying to get fucked, more likely!
> Similarly (ibid. 50), when Agathon’s servant has said ‘For the poetic genius of our overlord Agathon is going to ...’, the old man puts in ‘Going to what? Why, is he going to get fucked?’ The sausage-seller in Knights, portrayed as brought up in the gutter, illiterate and shameless, sums up his way of life (1242): ‘I sold sausages and I was fucked69 a bit’. The standpoint of Aristophanic comedy, adopted by its principal characters and choruses, is normally that of middle-aged, even elderly, citizens, resentful of the bright, energetic, disrespectful young men who seem to them (increasingly, of course, as one gets older) to dominate the assembly and to be elected to military and administrative offices. They express this resentment by speaking of the young as ‘fucked’ (Eupolis fr. 100.2, indignant at such creatures in office) or ‘wide-arsed’, as in Ar. Wasps 1068-70:
