Greek Homosexuality

by K J Dover

  The famous tale told by Alkibiades in Pl. Smp. 216c-219e is intended to illustrate Socrates’ own relationship with the young Alkibiades. Convinced that his beauty, of which he is very proud, has excited Socrates’ desire, and no less convinced that Socrates is a man of remarkable quality, from whose wisdom and guidance he can profit, Alkibiades decides that he will kharizesthai Socrates (217a). He therefore creates, with increasing indiscretion, opportunities for Socrates (whose behaviour he expects to follow the normal pattern of erastai) to ask him for bodily favours: he dismisses his attendant slave when he meets Socrates (217ab), he invites Socrates to wrestle (217bc) and to dinner (217cd), ‘for all the world as if I were an erastes with designs on a paidika’. Finally, despairing of less direct methods, he detains Socrates after dinner until late at night, goes to bed in the same room, and sends away his slaves (217d-218b). Then (218cd):

  I thought it was time for me to cease my roundabout approach and say freely what was in my mind. So I nudged him and said ‘Are you asleep, Socrates?’

  ‘No, no’he said.

  ‘Do you know what I think?’

  ‘No, what?’he said.

  ‘In my opinion’ I said ‘you have been the only erastes worthy of me, and you seem to me to be hesitant to say anything about it to me. Now this is my feeling about it: I think it silly of me not to grant you that favour and anything else you might want from my property or my friends. Nothing is more important to me than to become the best man I can, and I don’t consider anyone can do more than you to help me in that. I would be much more ashamed of the judgment of intelligent people if I didn’t grant you a favour than of the judgment of the stupid majority if I did.’

  Socrates replies that if Alkibiades really sees in him a ‘beauty’ of the kind he describes, he (Alkibiades) is getting the best of the bargain in offering bodily beauty in exchange (218e-219a). Encouraged to believe that the ‘shafts’ which he has loosed have ‘wounded’ Socrates, Alkibiades without more ado gets on to Socrates’ bed, puts his cloak over them both, and lies down with his arms round Socrates (219bc). Socrates makes no sign of being aroused, and in the morning they part, Alkibiades mortified at the insult to his beauty (219d) but overcome with admiration for the control exercised in Socrates by rational principle over the demands of the body; this karteriā, ‘endurance’, is the quality which he displayed also on campaign at Poteidaia, showing no sign of intoxication however much he drank, and going about in icy weather without sandals, wearing only the cloak he wore at Athens (219e-220b).

  The notion that there are unseen beauties far excelling the visible beauty of bodies is used to good dramatic effect at the opening of Protagoras (309b-d):

  Have you come from him (sc. Alkibiades)? And how’s the young man getting on with you?

  Very well, I thought, especially today. He said a lot in my defence, coming to my support. In fact, I’ve just left him. But I must tell you an extraordinary thing: even though he was there with me, I didn’t pay any attention to him, and I kept on forgetting him.

  What can have happened of such importance affecting you and him? You’re not going to tell me you’ve met someone else more beautiful – not here in Athens, anyway!

  Oh, yes, much more.

  Really? Citizen or foreigner?

  A foreigner.

  Where from?

  Abdera.

  And did you think this foreigner was so beautiful that he actually seemed to you more beautiful than the son of Kleinias (sc. Alkibiades)?

  How can the height of wisdom fail to appear more beautiful?

  Why, you’ve come from meeting somebody wise, Socrates?

  The wisest man of our time, surely – I assume you count Protagoras the wisest.

  Eros for wisdom is more powerful, and more important to Socrates, than eros for a beautiful youth; in Xen. Smp. 8.12 he treats it as better to be in love with the qualities of a person’s soul than with the attributes of the body. It does not follow logically from this that homosexual copulation should be avoided, unless one also believes that any investment of energy and emotion in the pursuit of an inferior end vitiates the soul’s capacity to pursue a superior end. Socrates does believe this, and therefore forbids homosexual copulation, as is clear from his own conduct with Alkibiades and from Rep. 403b, where ‘right eros’ in the ideal city permits the erastes to touch his paidika ‘as a son’ but to go no further than that. Pausanias in Smp. 184b-185b came to the conclusion that in the pursuit of virtue and wisdom it is permissible to render any service and offer any favour (cf. p. 91), a principle which the young Alkibiades followed in his vain attempt to seduce Socrates; but in Euthd. 282b Socrates himself makes a significant addition:

  For the sake of this (sc. acquisition of wisdom) there is nothing disgraceful or objectionable in subordination or enslavement to an erastes or any person, in complete readiness to perform any service – of those services which are honourable – out of zeal for becoming wise.

  According to Xen. Mem. i 2.29f. enmity between Kritias and Socrates arose from the following incident:

  He saw that Kritias was in love with Euthydemos and wanting to deal with him in the manner of those who enjoy the body for sexual intercourse. Socrates tried to dissuade Kritias, saying that it was mean and unbefitting a good man to importune his eromenos, in whose eyes he wishes to appear a man of merit, by beseeching him as beggars do and asking for charity, and that too when what he asks is not a good thing. Kritias took no notice and was not dissuaded. Then, it is said, Socrates, in the presence of Euthydemos and many other people, said that he thought Kritias was no better off than a pig if he wanted to scratch himself against Euthydemos as piglets do against stones.

  In another moralising story (Xen. Smp. 3.8-14) we are told that on hearing that Kritoboulos had kissed Alkibiades’ son Socrates said that kissing a beautiful youth could turn a free man into a slave; he compares a kiss to the bite of a poisonous spider, which may drive a man out of his mind. Xenophon’s Socrates lacks the sensibility and urbanity of the Platonic Socrates, but there is no doubt that both of them condemn homosexual copulation.

  Why then does Socrates attach such importance to the combination of bodily beauty with good qualities of mind and character (Pl. Chrm. 153d, 154e, 158b, Smp. 209b), instead of saying outright that bodily beauty is irrelevant? Why, indeed, does he speak so often (cf. p. 155) as if his own heart were almost continuously thumping at the sight of beautiful youths and boys?

  Plato’s Socrates believes that particular persons, animals, things, artefacts, acts and events which constitute our sensory experience, all possessing definable duration and location in space and all subject to change and decay, give us faint and fitful glimpses of a different world, a world of everlasting, unchanging entities, ‘forms’ or ‘ideas’, accessible to systematic reasoning (progressing towards logically irrefutable ‘knowledge’) but not perceptible by the bodily senses (upon which only indefinitely corrigible ‘opinion’ can be founded). The relation between forms and particulars is never defined; it can be said that the former are ‘present in’ the latter or that the latter ‘participate in’ the former. The ultimate cause, towards which all rational explanation progresses, is Good itself; qua form, it is the goal of reason, and qua Good it is the goal of desire. Hence to perceive it is to love and desire it, and error blinds us to it; reason and desire converge upon Good, and in its vicinity fuse together. Eros is treated in the Symposium as a force which draws us towards the world of eternal being, of which Good is the cause, and in Phaedrus (245b, 265b) as a ‘madness’ inspired by deities, Aphrodite and Eros (rather as falling in love, an experience which happens to us without conscious design on our part, was popularly regarded [e.g. Xen. Smp. 8.10, 8.37] as god-sent). According to the doctrine expounded in Phaedrus (and elsewhere in Plato, but not in the Symposium)95 the soul of any individual person existed always, before it was joined with the body of that person in the world of ‘Becoming’, and it once ‘perceived’ the forms in the world of ‘Being�
�. The strength of my own impulse to pursue Good through philosophy and to maintain the pursuit despite all adversity and temptation depends less on the opportunities which present themselves to me in my life than on the length of time which has elapsed since my soul was acquainted with the world of Being and on its vicissitudes between that time and its conjunction with my body (Phdr. 250e-251a).

  From these metaphysical beliefs a prescriptive schema of sexual values is derived. Response to the stimulus of bodily beauty is a step in the direction of absolute Beauty, an aspect of Good.96 The ‘right approach to ta erōtika’, as described by Diotima (the Mantinean woman – real or imaginary – from whom Socrates in the Symposium professes to have learned about eros),97 is (Smp. 211c-e):

  Beginning from these beauties (i.e. the beautiful particulars which we perceive by the senses), to ascend continually in pursuit of that other Beauty, going, as it were, by steps, from one to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, and from beautiful bodies to beautiful pursuits (‘practices’), and from these to beautiful studies, and from studies to end in that study which is a study of nothing other than that Beauty itself... If you ever see it, it will not seem to you beautiful in the sense that gold and clothes and beautiful boys and young men are – though now you are excited when you see them, and you are ready, as many others are too, so long as you see your paidika and are always with him, to go without food and drink, if that were possible, simply gazing on him and being with him. What are we to think a man would feel if it were open to him to see Beauty itself, genuine, pure, uncontaminated, not infected with human flesh and colour and all that mortal trash, but to see divine Beauty itself, unalloyed?

  What happens when I meet another person who combines beauty of body and beauty of soul to an even greater degree than my existing eromenos? Diotima’s doctrine implies that I have a duty to prefer Y to X, at whatever cost in agony to myself and to X, if it is clear that Y is a better instrument for the attainment of metaphysical enlightenment. Plato’s argument is easy enough to follow so long as we keep ‘eros’ in Greek, but is he talking about love? There is no reason to suppose that Plato did not experience or did not understand love, for he may well have come to believe that love for another person as an end rather than as a means, however intensely he felt it, was a malfunction or deficiency in his own soul.98 He certainly perceived the difference between the eros which he praises and what is commonly regarded as love, for having given Aristophanes the argument that eros is the individual’s response to his ‘other half’, the recognition of ‘affinity’ being an essential part of its joy (Smp. 192b),99 he makes Diotima explicitly reject this view(205de):100

  There is an argument that those who are in love are those who seek the other half of themselves; but my argument is that eros is not eros of half or of whole, except in so far as that may be good... Surely people do not embrace what is their own, unless one calls good ‘akin’ and one’s ‘own’ and bad ‘alien’, for there is nothing with which men are in love other than good.

  When Socrates had finished speaking, Aristophanes ‘tried to say something, because Socrates had referred to his argument’ (212c), but his protest was never uttered, for just then the drunken Alkibiades arrived at Agathon’s house. The description of erotic response in Phaedrus 251a-c is more dramatic than anything in Diotima’s exposition – shuddering, sweating, fever, pain and joy together, religious awe – but the response is still the recognition of something in the eromenos other than the individual eromenos himself; the end lies in the world of Being, and however intense the love generated between erastes and eromenos, each is a means.

  Throughout Symposium and Phaedrus it is taken for granted that eros which is significant as a step towards the world of Being is homosexual. In this respect Diotima’s standpoint coincides with that of Pausanias’s speech, and although Phaidros’s speech includes Alkestis’s devotion to Admetos and (with reservations) Orpheus’s love for Eurydike as exemplifications of conduct inspired by Eros (179b-d), he makes much of a homosexual example (Achilles and Patroklos [179e-180b]), and his generalisations about eros are all cast in homosexual terms (178c-179a, 180b). Procreation, as explained by Diotima, is an expression of the desire of mortal bodies to achieve a kind of immortality, and is shared by mankind with the animals (207ab); anyone, she remarks, would rather compose immortal poems or make enduring laws than procreate mere human children (209cd), and the generation of rational knowledge is the best of all manifestations of the human desire for immortality. Those men who are ‘fertile in body’ fall in love with women and beget children (208e), but those who are ‘fertile in soul’ transcend that limitation (209a), and the ‘right approach’ is open to them alone. Similarly in Phaedrus the man whose soul has long forgotten its vision of Beauty wishes only to ‘go the way of a four-footed beast ... and sow children ... and is not ashamed to pursue pleasure contrary to nature’ (250e).101 Here heterosexual eros is treated on the same basis as homosexual copulation, a pursuit of bodily pleasure which leads no further (on ‘contrary to nature’, cf. p. 167), and in Symposium it is sub-rational, an expression of the eros which operates in animals. The eros commended in Phaedrus begins with a homosexual response, but the ‘charioteer’ of the soul, driving a noble horse and a wicked horse, has to prevent the wicked horse, on sighting a beautiful boy, from making indecent propositions on the spot (254a). The language in which the ‘capture’ (253c) of the eromenos is described is highly erotic: at first sight the charioteer experiences a ‘tickling’ and a ‘pricking of desire’ (253e; cf. Ar. Thesm. 133, where Agathon’s seductive music gives the Old Man a ‘tickling under the bottom’), the erastes follows his eromenos about ‘in the gymnasium and elsewhere’ (255b), the eromenos is so overcome with gratitude for the benevolence of the erastes that he embraces and kisses him, wants to lie down with him, and is disposed to refuse him nothing (255d-256a), and if their philosophical zeal is deficient they may in an unguarded moment yield to temptation (256cd). This lapse will not destroy their eros or render it valueless, for the good in it is not undone,102 but the erastes and eromenos who have withstood temptation to the very end are superior; they have successfully ‘enslaved’ the source of moral evil within them and ‘liberated’ the forces for good (256b).

  It is easy enough to see why Socrates should handle a doctrine of eros predominantly in homosexual terms: in his ambience, intense eros was experienced more often in a homosexual than in a heterosexual relationship, and it was taken absolutely for granted that close contact with a beautiful, grateful, admiring young male was a virtually irresistible temptation. It is equally easy to see why an eros which perpetually restrained itself from bodily gratification should be homosexual: it was after all the prescribed role of women to be inseminated, whereas popular sentiment romanticised and applauded the chastity of an eromenos and the devotedly unselfish erastes. Why eros should play so conspicuous a part in a metaphysical system is not so obvious, but the most succinct explanation is to be found in Phdr. 250d, where it is observed that beauty is the only one, of those things which are erastos, ‘attracting eros’, which can be directly perceived by the senses, so that the sight of something beautiful affords by far the most powerful and immediate access we have to the world of Being. There is a further consideration: philosophy, as understood by Socrates, was not the product of solitary meditation, to be communicated by a spell-binding orator (or a guru) to a throng of silent disciples, but a co-operative process involving question and answer, mutual criticism and the eliciting of perceptions by one person from another. The climactic section of Diotima ‘s speech in the Symposium envisages the ‘procreation’ of rational knowledge of the world of Being by an elder in a young male (209b), a process of ‘procreation in a beautiful medium’ (cf. 206b) of which the literal begetting of progeny by heterosexual intercourse is the gross and material counterpart (206c). The erastes tries to educate the eromenos (209c; cf. Xen. Smp. 8.23), and ‘paiderastein rightly’ (211b) is philosophical education. At this point we mig
ht ask why, granted that from a methodological standpoint co-operation in discussion and criticism marks a considerable advance on lecturing ex cathedra, there should be such remarkable emphasis on the relationship between a senior and a junior partner rather than on partners of equal age and status. This in fact is the point at which we may decide that the sexual behaviour of leisured Athenians in the late fifth and early fourth centuries had a decisive influence on the form in which Socratic philosophy was realised; not an influence on its basic assumptions – the existence of a world of Being, the accessibility of that world to reason, its dependence upon Good103 – but on its treatment of the patient education of a younger male, to whose beauty one responds with a more intense and powerful emotion than to anything else in life, as the most direct road to philosophical achievement.104 The sexual similes (Smp. 211d) or imagery (Rep. 490b) which Plato is apt to use when he speaks of the soul’s vision of ultimate reality force upon us an analogy between the ecstasy with which ‘true’ eros rewards philosophical perseverance and the ecstasy of genital orgasm, the reward of persistence in sexual courtship. In modern literature we are more likely to find metaphysical language applied to sex than sexual language to metaphysics; in both cases, the analogy is facilitated by the sensation, not uncommon in orgasm, that one’s individual identity has been obliterated by an irresistible force. To speak in this way of Plato is not to ‘reduce’ metaphysics to physiology; it is simply to recognise that whereas both the identification of assumptions and the scrutiny of the validity of deductive processes founded thereon are the business of a philosopher, it is for the biographer to explain the existence of the assumptions.

  In Laws, composed at the end of Plato’s life, he is no longer in the mood for compromise or tolerance such as he shows for the pair who ‘lapse’ in Phaedrus. The theme of homosexuality in Laws is first broached in 636a-c, where (in connection with temperance and restraint) the Athenian speaker declares that the pleasure of heterosexual intercourse is ‘granted in accordance with nature’, whereas homosexual pleasure is ‘contrary to nature’ and ‘a crime caused by failure to control the desire for pleasure’. Later, the theme of sexual legislation as a whole is introduced (835c) with a reference to the magnitude of legislator’s problem in controlling ‘the strongest desires’. The absence of excessive wealth imposes certain limits on licence (836a), and the community is always under rigorous supervision by its magistrates, but (836ab):