Greek Homosexuality

by K J Dover

  Members of a closed and secretive community are apt to meet by simple, confident denial any allegation by outsiders that the community misbehaves.17 If Spartans in the fourth century B.C. unanimously and firmly denied that their erastai and eromenoi ever had any bodily contact beyond a clasping of right hands, it was not easy for an outsider even at the time to produce evidence to the contrary, and for us it is impossible. Secretiveness was built into the Spartan way of life (cf. Thuc. v 68.2); according to Plu. Lyc. 15.8 a young married Spartan, living with his age-group, was expected to conceal utterly his visits after dark to his wife.18 Athenians no doubt prided themselves on their smartness in ‘knowing’ that any Spartan would present his buttocks to anyone for the asking (Theopompos F225 says much the same of the Macedonians, adding the shocking fact that they do it even after their beards have grown). Anyone today who is sure he knows what the people of a remote culture ‘must have done’ is at liberty to express his assurance, and we are naturally tempted to believe that a society such as Sparta, capable of great cruelty and treachery, was guilty also of hypocrisy; but an alliance between ignorance and partisanship is a poor foundation for historical hypotheses.

  The Homeric epics are composed in a language which, although a highly artificial amalgam, is basically Ionic in its phonology and largely Ionic in its morphology also; and of the various places which claimed to be Homer’s native land the Ionian island of Chios has the oldest and strongest claim. The epics narrate events believed to have occurred in what we would call ‘the twelfth century B.C.’, and the Greek world as they present it – a world which, like epic language, is an amalgam – contains cultural, technological and political elements which must have survived in tradition (presumably a tradition of narrative poetry) from the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C. Since there is no overt homosexuality at all in these epics, neither enshrined in the traditional ingredients nor imported by the Ionian culture which generated the poems as we now have them (cf. p. 196), it is reasonable enough to look for the point of origin of Greek homosexuality neither in the Bronze Age nor in Ionia, and the Dorians suggest themselves as that point of origin in so far as they moved down into southern mainland Greece at the end of the Bronze Age and forced a large-scale migration of Greek-speaking peoples, notably the Ionians, eastwards across the Aegean. At least one question is begged by this hypothesis, for if the Dorians were not already differentiated by the overt practice of homosexual relations when they first arrived in southern Greece – if, that is to say, it began at a point in time later than the establishment of the pattern of ethnic groupings with which we are familiar in the archaic period – it could just as well have begun in a non-Dorian as in a Dorian region. We come back to the Dorians, in that case, solely on the strength of the link between military organisation and homosexuality, and the chronological order of the Trojan War, the Dorian Invasion and the composition of the Iliad ceases to have any bearing in itself on the history of homosexuality.

  It might be more helpful to consider the order in which direct evidence for homosexuality is to be found in different times and places during the archaic period. The graffiti of Thera, a Spartan colony, may go back well into the seventh century B.C., but the paucity of relevant evidence leaves much room for disagreement on their date,19 and if I am right in interpreting them as essentially frivolous (p. 123), those of them which allege or proclaim that X buggered Y do not help us at all to date the emergence of socially acceptable homosexuality among the Dorians or anyone else. There are no homosexual elements discernible in the iambic and elegiac poetry which flourished in the middle of the seventh century and is known to us through fragments and citations from the Ionians Kallinos and Arkhilokhos and the Spartan Tyrtaios; the absence (so far) of homosexuality from Arkhilokhos may be significant, since he is notably uninhibited in his description of heterosexual behaviour, and so may the lack of any reference in later erotic literature (e.g. Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love) to Tyrtaios in connection with homosexual eros among the Spartans for whom, and about whom, he composed.20 Strong evidence for female homosexuality appears in the Lesbian poetry of Sappho in the early part of the sixth century B.C., and language strongly suggestive of female homosexuality makes a virtually simultaneous appearance in Sparta (cf. p. 179) in the partheneia of Alkman. Sappho’s Lesbian contemporary Alkaios is described by Cicero (Tusculan Disputations iv.71) as ‘singing of the love of youths’. Not one of the extant fragments of Alkaios supports this generalisation; but the total percentage of Alkaios which we possess is so small that we can blame chance for our loss, and instead of imagining that Cicero may have confused Alkaios with Anakreon or that he may have meant ‘the love felt by youths for girls’ we must note that Horace Odes i 32.9-11 is much more precise: Alkaios ‘sang of Lykos, beautiful with his dark eyes and dark hair’. The earliest expression of male homosexual eros in poetry is therefore non-Dorian, and so is all its expression in the arts for the rest of the sixth century: the earliest scenes of homosexual courtship on Attic black-figure vases (on C42 cf. p. 94) are contemporary with Solon fr. 25:

  when in the delicious flower of youth he falls in love with a boy (paidophilein), yearning for thighs and sweet mouth,

  a couplet which raised some eyebrows in later times, since Solon was revered at Athens as a lawgiver and upright moralist. In the generation after Solon the Ionian lyric poets Ibykos and Anakreon include among their erotic poems some which are addressed to eromenoi, e.g. Ibykos fr. 288, Anakreon frr. 346 and 357 (cf. Maximus of Tyre 37.5 on the various eromenoi of Anakreon).

  It will be seen from the evidence cited and discussed that there can be no question of tracing the diffusion of homosexual eros from Sparta or other Dorian states. We can only say that its social acceptance and artistic exploitation had become widespread by the end of the seventh century B.C. Ephoros gives us a glimpse of its peculiarly formal evolution in Crete; terminology affords evidence that it was possible in classical Athens to regard it as characteristically Spartan and possible somewhere, at some time, to regard it as especially conspicuous at Khalkis; Xenophon and Plato’s Symposium tell us that its most direct and uninhibited expression was to be observed in Elis and Boiotia; Plato at the end of his life criticises its exceptionally entrenched position in the society of Sparta and of Crete. The extent of the period summarised in this paragraph is two and a half centuries, eight generations, and regrettable though it may seem to those who would like the shape of the past to be bold and simple, we are probably confronted with a phenomenon which varied not only from place to place but also from time to time.

  B. Myth and History

  The statement (p. 194) that there is no overt homosexuality in Homer is not in conflict with Il. xx 231-235:

  And Tros begot three noble sons, Ilos and Assarakos and godlike Ganymede, who was the most beautiful of mortal men; him the gods carried off, to be wine-pourer for Zeus because of his beauty, that he might be among the immortals.

  (Cf. Il. v 265f., where Zeus is said to have given fine horses to Tros in recompense for Ganymede.) If the original form of the Ganymede legend represented him as eromenos of Zeus, Homer has suppressed this important fact. If the legend had no erotic element, we may wonder why beauty (as distinct from zeal and a steady hand) is a desirable attribute in a wine-pourer, but it should not be impossible for us, even after a prolonged immersion in the ambience of Greek homosexuality, to imagine that the gods on Olympos, like the souls of men in the Muslim paradise (Koran 76.19), simply rejoiced in the beauty of their servants as one ingredient of felicity. The earliest surviving testimony to Zeus’s homosexual desire for Ganymede is Ibykos fr. 289, where the ravishing (harpagē) of Ganymede is put into the same context as the rape of Tithonos by Dawn (who did not want a wine-pourer). The Hymn to Aphrodite 202-206 draws heavily on Il. v 265f. and xx 231-235 but makes Zeus himself the ravisher of Ganymede and goeson(218ff.) to speak ofDawnand Tithonos.21

  Homer, as Aiskhines i 142 remarks, nowhere speaks of an erotic relationship between Achil
les and Patroklos. We would reasonably attribute the poet’s silence to the absence of any erotic element from the relationship as he envisaged it, but to Aiskhines, as to other Greeks of the classical period, the extravagance of Achilles’ emotion when Patroklos is killed, combined with the injunction of Patroklos that when Achilles too dies their ashes should be interred together, signified homosexual eros, and Aiskhines treats Homer’s reticence as a sign of cultivated sensitivity. The mainstay of the erotic interpretation of the central motif of the Iliad was undoubtedly Aiskhylos’s trilogy Myrmidons, Nereids and Phrygians (or Ransoming of Hektor), about which Phaidros in Pl. Smp. 180a has this to say:

  Aiskhylos is talking nonsense in saying that Achilles was in love with Patroklos. Achilles was more beautiful not only than Patroklos but than all the heroes, and his beard was not yet grown; moreover, he was much younger than Patroklos, as Homer says.

  Phaidros is right in saying that Homer represents Achilles as younger than Patroklos (Il. xi 786), yet he does not discard the erotic interpretation of the story; for him Achilles is the eromenos who so honoured his erastes Patroklos that he was ready to die in avenging him. Aiskhylos seems to have used at some points a directness of expression which characterised the earlier part of the fifth century; this appears in fr. 228, where Achilles addresses the dead Patroklos:

  And you felt no compunction for (sc. my?) pure reverence of (sc. your?) thighs – O, what an ill return you have made for so many kisses!

  Again in fr. 229 we read ‘god-fearing converse22 with your thighs’ (cf. p. 70).

  Aiskhylos was never afraid to modify inherited myth (some of his modifications fared better in later generations than others) but he is nowhere as explicit – as a tragic dramatist, he could not explain himself in propria persona to his audience – as Pindar in Olympian Odes 1, composed for Hieron, tyrant of Syracuse, in 476. Pindar is there dealing with the myth of Pelops, which, in the form in which he inherited it, said: Tantalos, having been entertained by the gods, invited them to his house for a banquet, and to test their omniscience killed, cooked and served up his own son Pelops; Demeter alone ate some of the meat; the other gods, knowing well what had happened, brought Pelops to life and gave him a shoulder of ivory to replace what Demeter had eaten. To Pindar the idea that the gods should tuck into human food is revolting, and he refuses to countenance it (52); he declares that he will tell the story of Pelops ‘in opposition to earlier (sc. poets)’ (36), and in this new story Pelops disappears not because he has been cooked but because Poseidon, in love with his white shoulder (25-7), has ravished him (40-5):

  Then he of the Shining Trident carried you off, overcome in his heart by desire, and transported you in a golden chariot to the lofty home of Zeus, who is honoured everywhere; whither in later time Ganymede also came, to serve Zeus in the same way.

  When Pelops’ beard grows (67f.) he returns to earth, and, needing the help of Poseidon if he is to win Hippodameia as his bride, he reminds the god of ‘the fond gifts of Aphrodite’ and asks for a favour in return (75f.).

  This passage is the most daring and spectacular ‘homo-sexualisation’ of myth that we have; Pindar’s gods are too refined to digest anything but ambrosia, but never so insensitive that their genitals cannot be aroused. It may well be that the late sixth and early fifth centuries, the generation of the men who (like Aiskhylos) defeated the Persians, witnessed a more open, headstrong, sensual glorification and gratification of homosexuality than any other period of antiquity. The late fifth century probably knew this; it had the art and poetry of Aiskhylos’s day as evidence, and if in the contest between Right and Wrong in Aristophanes’ Clouds it seems to us that Right, the champion of the good old days, is curiously concerned with boys’ genitals, we must remember that he is looking at the manners and life-style of boys in the 420s through the eyes of an old-fashioned erastes, for whom shyness, modesty, discretion and respect for grownups (whatever their intention) greatly enhance the charm with which hard exercise, exposure to the elements and conscientious learning of traditional musical skills invest a boy.

  In Xen. Smp. 8.31 Socrates denies that Homer intended any erotic element in his portrayal of Achilles and Patroklos, and he cites other pairs of comrades in legend, such as Orestes and Pylades, or Theseus and Peirithoos, who ‘are celebrated not for sleeping together but because they admired each other for their accomplishment of the noblest achievements in joint endeavour’. Socrates’ picture of heroic legend is correct, but he lived in an age when legend owed its continued hold on the imagination at least in part to the steady importation of homosexual themes.23 The Boiotians turned Iolaos, the comrade-in-arms of Herakles, into his eromenos, and in Aristotle’s time (fr. 97) the tomb of Iolaos was a sacred place where erastai and eromenoi exchanged pledges of mutual love and loyalty. Ibykos (fr. 309) made Rhadamanthys the eromenos of Talos (nephew of Daidalos). The Hellenistic poets, notably Phanokles (frr. 1, 3-6) took the process further; Zenis of Chios made Minos fall in love with Theseus (F1), and in Kallimakhos Hymn to Apollo 49 Apollo is described as ‘fired with eros for the youthful Admetos’. The most bizarre of these developments was the portrayal of Herakles by a minor epic poet Diotimos (Athenaios 603d) as performing his labours in thrall to Eurystheus because Eurystheus was his paidika (one sees here the reflex of anecdotes [e.g. Konon (F1.16)] about the perilous tasks imposed on erastai by unrelenting eromenoi). Hylas, the eromenos of Herakles whose seizure by water-nymphs is the subject of Theokritos 13, is the squire of Herakles as the story is told by Apollonios Argonautica i 1187-1357, and on present evidence it is not possible to trace an erotic relationship between him and Herakles further back than Theokritos.

  It is one thing to see how, when and why an existing legend was given a homosexual character, but quite another when we are confronted by an important homosexual myth of which the antecedents are unknown to us. This is the case with the myth of Khrysippos, the subject of a tragedy of that name produced by Euripides in 411-409 and (about the same date) of a brief narrative in Hellanikos (F157). He was the son of Pelops, and Laios, the father of Oedipus, overcome with desire for his extraordinary beauty, carried him off – the first of mankind, according to Euripides’ presentation of the story, to fall in love with a person of his own sex (hence Plato’s reference to ‘the rule as it was before Laios’ in Laws 836c). We know that Aiskhylos produced a Laios, the first play of an Oedipus tetralogy, in 467; we do not know whether the rape of Khrysippos figured in it, and no trace of the rape of Khrysippos can be identified with assurance before Euripides.24 The subject is used by vase-painters (two vase-painters, to be precise) in southern Italy in the fourth century, but has not yet been identified in any earlier picture.25

  Laios, the mythical Theban hero,26 thus became in Greek tradition the ‘inventor’ of homosexuality. The Greek habit of attributing all innovation to a named god or culture-hero or individual figure of the mythical or semi-mythical past27 – or, on occasion, to a named community at a point in past time – strikes us as naive when the ‘invention’ is (e.g.) shelter or religion, or artificial when the invention of inventors becomes an intellectual game, but the impossibility of discovering who was actually the first person to (e.g.) cook meat before eating it does not alter the fact that there was a point in space and a moment in time at which an individual person deliberately cooked meat for the first time in the history of the world.28 Whether the same discovery was made independently in other places at later times is a separate issue. The Greeks had the right end of the stick, at least, in regarding innovation as having precise location. It seemed self-evident that most ‘inventions’ – building houses, for example – were adopted and diffused because they improved human life, and if we could ask ancient Greeks why homosexual eros, once invented, caught on so quickly, widely and deeply, practically all of them (I exclude some philosophers and most cynics) would reply rather as if we had asked them the same question about wine: enjoyment of both females and males affords a richer and happier life than enjoyment o
f either females or males.29 This does not, however, go very far to explain why they developed homosexual eros much more elaborately and intensely than other peoples, or why its elaboration took certain forms rather than others.

  Whether any anthropologist, sociologist or social historian initially ignorant of the Greeks but supplied with a succession of data which did not include any manifest evidence of homosexuality could say after a certain point ‘It necessarily follows that overt homosexuality was strongly developed in such a society’, I do not know, and the experiment is hardly practicable, for a social scientist not already aware that homosexuality was a conspicuous feature of Greek life will not easily be found. The best we can do is first, to make the reasonable assumption that Greek homosexuality satified a need not otherwise adequately satisfied in Greek society, secondly, to identify that need, and thirdly, to identify the factors which allowed and even encouraged satisfaction of the need by homosexual eros in the particular form which it took in the Greek world. It seems to me that the need in question was a need for personal relationships of an intensity not commonly found within marriage or in the relations between parents and children or in those between the individual and the community as a whole. The deficiencies of familial and communal relationships can be derived ultimately from the political fragmentation of the Greek world. The Greek city-state was continuously confronted with the problem of survival in competition with aggressive neighbours,30 and for this reason the fighter, the adult male citizen, was the person who mattered. The power to deliberate and take political decisions and the authority to approve or disapprove of social and cultural innovation were strongly vested in the adult male citizens of the community; the inadequacy of women as fighters promoted a general devaluation of the intellectual capacity and emotional stability of women; and the young male was judged by such indication as he afforded of his worth as a potential fighter. Sparta and Crete alone went to the length of constructing a society in which familial and individual relationships were both formally and effectively subordinated to military organisation; elsewhere varied and fluctuating degrees of compromise between the claims of community, family and individual prevailed.31 Males tended to group themselves together for military, political, religious and social purposes to a degree which fell short of welding them into a totally efficient fighting-machine but was nevertheless enough to inhibit the full development of intimacy between husband and wife or between father and son. 32