by K J Dover
I reckon my old age is superior to the ringlets of a lot of young men, and the way they hold themselves,70 and their euruprōktiā.
The man in the street consoles himself with the thought that those who run his life politically and order him about are in fact his inferiors, no better than prostitutes, homosexually subordinate. When Kleon in Knights 877 claims, apparently with reference to a successful prosecution of the same nature as Aiskhines’ prosecution of Timarkhos,
I put a stop to those who were being fucked, by crossing Gryttos off (sc. the citizen-list)
the Sausage-seller retorts (878-80):
Well, that was a bit much, arse-watching and putting a stop to them that were being fucked. It must have been jealousy that made you do it; you didn’t want them to turn into politicians.
Plato Comicus fr. 186.5 expresses the same attitude to politicians, and ‘Aristophanes’ is made to enunciate with deadpan delivery in Pl. Smp. 191e-192a:
While they are boys ... they (sc. the products of an original ‘double male’; cf. p. 62) love men and like lying beside men and being embraced by them; and these are the best of the boys and youths. ... The evidence for that is that it’s only such boys who, when they grow up, turn into real men71 in politics.
An anonymous verse (Com. Adesp. fr. 12), ‘everyone long-haired is pollinated’ is an expression of class antagonism, since long hair (cf. p. 78) was regarded as characteristic of wealthy and leisured young men.
The word katapūgōn, used in the old man’s vilification of Agathon in Thesm. 200, is cognate with pūgē, ‘buttocks’, and in at least one other passage of comedy unmistakably connotes a passive homosexual role: Knights 639, where the Sausage-seller takes the fart of a katapūgōn as an omen. The anatomy of the anus is altered by habitual buggery,72 and there are modern jokes which imply (rightly or wrongly) that the sound of farts is affected by these changes. Whether katapūgōn ever connoted an active role in homosexual copulation is doubtful. In Ach. 77-9, when the envoy back from Persia has explained that ‘the Persians only respect those who can eat and drink the most’, Dikaiopolis comments ‘And we (sc. only respect) laikastai and katapūgones’. Laikazein is ‘fuck’,73 laikastria ‘whore’, and -tēs is a common agent-noun suffix; laikastēs should therefore denote a man who penetrates others, and there would be a certain symmetry in Ach. 79 if the two words meant respectively ‘fornicators’ and ‘buggers’. Moreover, the graffiti exhibit a feminine katapūgaina (cf. p. 113), and comedy affords several instances of katapūgōn and its cognates used as very general words of abuse and contempt. In Clouds 529 Aristophanes refers to the moral and the immoral youth who contended in his early play Banqueters as ‘the sōphrōn and the katapūgōn’, almost ‘the well behaved and the badly behaved’. Right calls Wrong ‘shameless and katapūgōn’ in Clouds 909, and when the women to whom Lysistrata puts forward her plan for a sex-strike turn pale at the thought of such deprivation, she exclaims (Lys. 137) ‘What a miserable bloody lot (pankatapūgon) we women are!’ Ar. fr. 130 calls vegetable dishes and light food katapūgosunē (‘a load of rubbish’) compared with a good joint of meat. Similarly in Clouds 1327-1330, when Strepsiades has been beaten up by his son in a quarrel over the merits of Euripides as a dramatist, he calls his son ‘burglar’ and lakkoprōktos, ‘tank-arse’, as well as ‘parricide’. Compare Kephisodoros fr. 3.4, a character abused by another as lakkoprōktos because he wants a special scent for his feet, and Eupolis fr. 351.4, where drinking too early in the day is characterised as lakkoprōktiā.
It must be emphasised that when a comic poet uses words such as euruprōktos, lakkoprōktos and katapūgōn of a named person (e.g. Clouds 1023, Wasps 687), we do not as a rule know whether it is important to him that the audience should interpret the word as a charge of passive homosexuality rather than as a charge of worthlessness, inferiority or shamelessness in general.74 Wasps 84 (Philoxenos katapūgōn) is unusual in that the same man is stigmatised as ‘not male’ in Clouds 686f. and as ‘female’ in Eupolis fr. 235. Even when we can be sure what the specific charge is, we cannot know whether it is true,75 any more than we know in the case of the people named in graffiti. Linguistic usage in this area is a reflex of the contempt felt by the dominant for the subordinate. There is a suggestion of homosexual penetration as an act of aggression in the first scene of Thesmophoriazusae, where the old man, after hearing the pompous proclamation of Agathon’s slave, describes himself (59-62) as one who is ‘ready to channel his cock into your foundations and your precious poet’s’, or where he says to Agathon (157f.) ‘When you’re writing a satyr-play send for me, so that I can collaborate standing (estūkōs, ‘with an erection’) right behind you’.
Agathon was an exceptionally good-looking man (Pl. Smp. 213c) who in his earlier years had been the paidika of Pausanias (Pl. Prt. 315de) and continued in this relationship well into adult life; he must have been in his thirties at the time of Thesmophoriazusae. Euripides calls him (191f.) ‘good-looking, fair-skinned, shaved, with a woman’s voice’, and the scene is full of jokes against his effeminacy in bodily form (31-3), clothing (136-40) or both (in 98 he reminds the old man, on his first appearance, of the hetaira Kyrene). It is likely enough, given his unusual relation to Pausanias, that Agathon cut his beard close in order to retain the appearance of a young man whose beard is beginning to grow, and extremely unlikely that he went so far as to shave it off (‘shaved’ in 191 can refer to the body rather than the face, and the humour extracted from his possession of a razor [218-20] is founded on the fact that the razor was an article of female toiletry). His unwillingness to grow out of the eromenos stage into sexual dominance will have been sufficient reason for Aristophanes to treat him as ‘fucked’; whether he declined an active heterosexual role, and whether he wore feminine clothing, we do not know.
In the Athens of Aristophanes the supreme effeminacy was cowardice on the battlefield; Eupolis’s comedy Astrateutoi (‘men who have not been on military service’) had the alternative title Androgunoi (‘women-men’). A certain Kleonymos, ridiculed in Ach. 88, 844, Knights 958, 1293 as bulky and greedy, was believed to have discarded his shield in order to run away faster, and for this he was pilloried in comedy over a period of at least ten years, from Knights 1372, via Clouds 353-5, Wasps 15-23 and Peace 446, 670-8, 1295-1301, to Birds 289f., 1470-81. Consequently his name is turned into a feminine ‘Kleonyme’ in the discussion of substantival declension in Clouds 670-80. Kleisthenes has an even longer run (twenty years) as a comic butt. His offence – at least, the only offence with which we have any grounds for charging him – was possession of a face on which a good beard would not grow. The old man in Thesm. 235, looking at himself in a mirror after his beard has been shaved off, exclaims ‘It’s Kleisthenes I’m seeing!’ Kleisthenes is coupled with a certain Straton in early plays; Dikaiopolis in Ach, 119-24 pretends to recognise them in the eunuchs accompanying a Persian noble,76 and they are ‘beardless boys’ in fr. 430 (cf. Knights 1373f.). The womanish appearance of Kleisthenes is the basis of a joke in Clouds 355; in Birds 829-31 it is assumed that he weaves, like a woman, instead of bearing arms; and in Thesm. 574-81 he officiously comes to the women at their festival, as their friend and champion (‘as is clear from my cheeks’) to tell them of Euripides’ scheme. With Lys. 1092 a new note comes in: the Athenian representative, desperate for a peace-treaty and an end to the wives’ strike, declares that otherwise ‘we’ll have to fuck Kleisthenes’. The final stage is reached in Frogs 48 and 57, where the notion of Kleisthenes as ‘mounted’ by Dionysos (who supposedly longs thereafter to have him again) is spun out of a double entendre.
The exploitation of any kind of effeminacy for the purpose of jokes about passive homosexuality accords well with the uniform tendency of Aristophanic comedy to leave no sexual potential unrealised, to express heterosexual relationships in the most direct physiological terms, and to speak of other emotions in concrete imagery; fear, for example, is often described in terms of its effect on the bowels.77 Homosexual eros,
in this ambience, is treated simply as a desire for anal penetration, as when in Thesm. 1115-24 Euripides (to the bewilderment of the Scythian policeman) pretends that he is Perseus and that the old man arrested and fastened to a board is Andromeda:
EURIPIDES. Come, maiden, give me your hand, that I may touch it. O Scythian! There are weaknesses in all men, and I myself am seized with eros for this maiden. POLICEMAN: I don’t envy you. Still, if his arse were twisted round this way, I wouldn’t object to your taking him and buggering him. EURIPIDES: Why do you not allow me to release her, Scythian, and fall with her into the bed of marriage? POLICEMAN: If you’re really keen on buggering the old man, bore a hole in the board and go up his arse from behind.
Fine distinctions between male prostitution and homosexual eros are submerged in Aristophanes’ reduction of both alike to the same bodily act. In Peace 11, where the great dung-beetle brought home by Trygaios is being fattened so that he may bear his owner up to Olympos, one of the slaves in charge of the feeding asks the other for a dung-cake ‘from a hētairēkōs boy; the beetle says he wants one well rubbed’. Later, when Trygaios needs to return to earth from Olympos, his beetle has decided to stay there, and Hermes explains (724) that it will ‘feed on the ambrosia of Ganymede’; ambrosia being the food of the gods, the faeces of the immortal boy will naturally be composed of it, and we are brutally reminded of what Zeus does to Ganymede. A differentiation between prostitution and eros, important to the social and political standing of those involved in homosexual relationships, is denied by a moralising passage, Wealth 153-9:
KARION: Yes, and they say that boys do just the same (sc. present their buttocks), not for the sake of their erastai, but for money. KHREMYLOS. Not the good boys, only the pornoi; it isn’t money that the good ones ask for. KARION: What is it, then? KHREMYLOS: One asks for a good horse, and another for hunting dogs. KARION: Maybe they’re ashamed to ask for money, so they dress up their bad behaviour in a (sc. different) word.
Generalised hostility to boys who play the role of eromenoi appears also in Knights 736-40, where the sausage-seller compares old Demos to ‘those boys who are eromenoi’ (he does not say ‘some boys ...’); rival politicians are, as it were, rival erastai of Demos, who, however, rejects good men and gives himself to ‘lamp-sellers and cobblers and shoemakers and tanners’. A scornful attitude to eromenoi may always have existed in some sections of Athenian society, and one black-figure vase (B614) gives us a glimpse of it. A homosexual courting scene (the eromenos has accepted a cockerel) is accompanied by the letters arenmi and idoren (or iaoren?). If the correct interpretation is arrēn eimi, ‘I am male’, and idou arrēn, ‘Behold, male! ‘, we recall the frequent comic idiom in which a second speaker repeats a word used by the previous speaker and prefaces it with an indignant or contemptuous idou, e.g. Knights 343f., ‘I can speak, too ...’ – ‘Idou, speak!’ The comment ‘What do you mean, male?’ will then express the painter’s view of the eromenoi in the courting scenes which his public liked.78 It is conceivable that the occasional attachment of the feminine adjective kalē to a male name in vase-paintings is sarcastic, but some of these cases can be explained as thoughtless repetition from a proper use of the feminine in another inscription on the same vase (R356, R655, R990) or as a reference to a female in the picture (R385); there are also cases of the masculine kalos with feminine names and pictures of women (R152, R917) and (R1139) an inscription.‘the girl is kalos’ – the painter absentmindedly completed the inscription with the formula most familiar to him – without any picture.
An interesting example of contrasting romantic and cynical treatment of one and the same eromenos is furnished by the case of Autolykos. This is the young athlete who figures in Xenophon’s Symposium, the eromenos of Kallias, invited to dinner together with his father, modest, shy (1.8, 3.13), possessed of a beauty which overawed all the guests (1.9-11). Eupolis in 421/0 produced a comedy entitled Autolykos in which the youth and his parents, Lykon and Rhodia, were targets of ridicule and abuse, Rhodia as a promiscuous adulteress. In this play Autolykos was designated ‘Eutresios’ (fr. 56), which literally denotes an inhabitant of Eutresis in Arkadia but is also clearly meant to suggest ‘easily penetrated’ (trēma is a slang term for the vagina). Whether the alleged homosexual prostitution of Autolykos to Kallias was a central motif of the play, we do not know; the political relationships involving Kallias and Lykon, affected by the public adulation accorded to athletic success,79 may well have been more important, but so far as the evidence goes it shows that the same homosexual love-affair could be looked at in different ways.
The assumption that all homosexual submission is mercenary, and with this a total silence on the possible emergence of extreme devotion, courage and self-sacrifice from a homosexual relationship, is analogous to another characteristic feature of comedy, the assumption that all holders of administrative offices feather their own nests, and with that silence on the possibility of public spirit, integrity and devotion to duty on the part of existing officials. Lys. 490, arguing that ‘we are at war because of money’ and charging ‘Peisandros and those who aim at office’ with pursuing bellicose policies in order to give themselves the chance to steal public funds, leaves it open to the audience to believe that there exists a better kind of politician, and so ibid. 578, where Lysistrata advocates getting rid of organised political corruption, but the tone is different in Birds 1111, ‘If you’ve been appointed to some minor office and want to make a bit on the side ...’, Thesm. 936f., ‘Prytanis, I beseech you by your right hand, which you are wont to hold out, palm upwards, if anyone offers you money ...’, and Wasps 556f., where Philokleon describes a defendant as saying, ‘Sir, pity me, I beg of you, if80 you yourself ever got away with a bit when you held office or when you were buying food for your messmates on campaign!’ Dikaiopolis in Ach. 594-619 wins over the chorus in his contest with Lamakhos by furious denunciation of military commanders and diplomatic envoys as running away from the hard life at home (601, 7If.) in their anxiety to hold office (595) with a prospect of high pay (597, 602, 608); the same resentment underlies the portrayal of the Athenian envoys who have been away in Persia for twelve years, drawing good pay and living in luxury (65-90), or at the court of aThracian king (134-41). In Wasps 691-6 Bdelykleon tries similarly to arouse resentment against young public prosecutors who, he alleges, in addition to getting good pay take bribes from defendants, share the money out between themselves, and ‘fix’ the cases, while the old juror is anxious for his miserable jury-pay. In Clouds 1196-1200 Pheidippides explains a point of legal procedure to his father as designed to allow magistrates to steal the litigants’ deposits. Other passages extend this general accusation of dishonesty to the citizen-body as a whole; cf. Birds 115f., where Peisetairos is talking to the Hoopoe, who was once human: ‘You owed money once, just like us; and enjoyed not paying it back, just like us!’ As for military commanders in the field, Clouds 579f. assumes that an expedition which they announce is ‘senseless’; Peace 1172-90 complains that commanders are the first to run away in battle but never tire of messing about with the call-up lists, so that the individual soldier (the countryman, that is; things go better for the townsman [1185f.]) never knows from one day to the next where he stands.
The reader who turns from Plato to comedy is struck not only by the consistent comic reduction of homosexual eros to the coarsest physical terms but also by its displacement from the centre to the periphery of Athenian sexual life; for comedy is fundamentally heterosexual. In Lysistrata there is, of course, a special motive; the success of the sexual strike of citizens’ wives organised by the heroine turns upon the absence of significant alternatives to marital intercourse, so that homosexuality must be relegated if the plot of the play is to cohere. The same applies to prostitution; and having chosen to portray marital relations essentially in terms of erection of the penis, Aristophanes must also ignore the fact that male tension can be reduced by masturbation (whereas clear references to female masturbation are permit
ted [105-110, 158f.]). Similarly, the wives’ opportunities for intercourse with lusty slaves, a motif which occurs in Thesm. 491f., must be suppressed in Lys. in order that the comic potentiality of sex-starved women may be fully exploited (125-39, 215f., 706-80), and female masturbation is suppressed in Thesm, 473-501 (cf. Lys, 403-23) where the adulterous inclinations of women are the focus of humour; it is never Aristophanes’ purpose to compose a social survey for the instruction of posterity.81 In Ecclesiazusae the takeover of the state by the women, their consequent assumption of sexual initiative, and their rule that the old and ugly must be gratified before the young and pretty, are not allowed for a moment (cf. 611-50, 707-9, 877-1111) to raise in the men the notion that homosexual relations might prove a less exacting alternative. Here too it is easy to find decisive dramatic reasons.
In plays which are not about women the sexual element in the triumph of the hero is heterosexual: Dikaiopolis gets girls at the end of Acharnians, the presentation of the Articles of Peace to Demos in Knights supervenes as climactic upon the presentation of the boy who can be a ‘folding-stool’, Philokleon’s enthusiasm for the good things of life in Wasps leads him to steal a girl, Trygaios in Peace marries Opora and presents Theoria to the Council, and Peisetairos in Birds marries Basileia. For the chorus of Acharnians the return of peace signifies the enjoyment of women (989-99; cf. Trygaios in Peace 894-905), not of boys. It would not be true to say that homosexual relations were never the central subject of a comedy, for in the fourth century we hear of a Paiderastēs produced by Antiphanes and a Paiderastai by Diphilos, not to mention comic treatment of the Ganymede legend by Alkaios Comicus, Antiphanes and Euboulos and of the Khrysippos legend (cf. p. 200) by Strattis, but it happens to be true of the extant plays, Menander’s as well as Aristophanes’. This fact puts us on the track of what may be an important distinction at Athens between rich and poor.
