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by Jonathan Margolis

  But a certain proportion of these thinkers’ pronouncements was underwritten by hypocrisy, or by the sour grapes attitude of old men who could no longer take advantage of the gloriously licentious society in which they found themselves. As the Greek scholar Robert Flacelière wrote in his 1960 Love in Ancient Greece: ‘In practise the Epicurean outlook closely resembled that of an egotistical old bachelor, valuing peace of mind above all things, and dignifying it with the high-sounding name of “philosophic wisdom”.’

  In Ancient Greece much as in other male-dominated societies through the ages, from the quadrangles of the great Western universities to the Muslim world, the exclusion of women from the mainstream of life in the interests of a supposedly greater intellectual or spiritual calling led to an extraordinary amount of homosexuality, especially between the sixth and the fourth century BC. According to Aristotle, it was initially employed in Crete as a method of birth control, and that island provides the earliest representation of homosexuality, in the form of a bronze plaque of around 650 BC. It was soon considered shameful in Crete for a well-born boy not to have an older man as lover.

  Gay love on the Greek mainland was originally about male companionship and devotion to warrior buddies, shared bravery rather than sex, and certainly nothing to do with population control. Too many young Greeks died in their warrior years, having experienced no love life other than the closeness of military bonds. The military requirement for fitness segued into a homoerotic culture. The fitter a boy, the more orgasmic pleasure he seemed equipped to deliver to his comrades; the more beautiful he was, the better mind he was assumed to possess. The best-looking boys, therefore, attracted older male sexual lovers as tutors.

  Anal sex was perfectly legal and the common sexual mode for men, being considered an enjoyable, healthy, and uplifting activity. One Greek physician explained that men enjoy anal intercourse because sexual enjoyment depends on friction of the part of the body where seminal fluid is secreted, and due to a birth defect, theirs happens to be in the rectum.

  Vase paintings of anal intercourse usually show the participants as being members of the same age group. But paintings and illustrations on the male drinking cups used at evening symposia (drinking and intellectual discussion parties) tended to show the older men bringing themselves to orgasm between a naked teenage boy’s thighs. The boy would be the guest of honour, attending with his father’s permission, having been invited by another older man who fancied him – and who would commission special crockery celebrating his beauty.

  Homosexuality was seen straightforwardly as morality in action, the unquestioned proper way to bring up a boy to be an upstanding citizen. A man was not really considered to be upholding community standards unless he practised sodomy. Lycurgus, the Spartan legislator, refused to consider any citizen to be a worthy man if he did not have a male lover. And any parental squeamishness about anal intercourse would damage a boy’s education. The best teaching was conducted through the love between teacher and student, called paiderastia, and there was a common feeling that virtue could literally be implanted in a boy by receiving the anal ministrations of his teacher.

  At the same time, however, heterosexual prostitution was an enormous and respected industry. While wives were breeding machines secluded at home, prostitutes, of the market place or the boudoir, were the liberated women with whom men could explore their sexual fantasies. The beauty and sexual skills of the upmarket and fabulously wealthy hetairai are illustrated on precious vases. One hetairai practice said to have survived in Greece to modern times is that of using the feet to masturbate a lover. Lower-ranking streetwalkers had their charms, too; some would wear a sandal whose sole imprinted on a dirt surface the words, ‘Follow me’.

  One of the most famous women of ancient Athens was a positively regal prostitute, Phryne, who held court with the leading men of her day in the late-fourth century BC. Her affair with Praxiteles, the greatest of the Attic sculptors and the most original artist of his day, was famous. She was his model for the first ever naked statue of a woman, Aphrodite. The statue became the masturbatory fantasy of every red-blooded Athenian man unable due to youth or lack of cash to aspire to a prostitute of Phryne’s shimmering wonder. Erotes, by the satirist Lucian of Samosata, tells of a rather earnest young soldier who falls in love with the Phryne Aphrodite statue and achieves his ambition to spend a night in its company. ‘The statue is a flawless work of Parian marble. The goddess’s lips are slightly parted in a disdainful, ironic smile. No garment veils her charms, but one hand screens her modesty with a casual gesture,’ Lucian writes.

  ‘I need not,’ he continues, ‘be so indiscreet as to recount the details of the crime that he committed on that disgraceful occasion. When daylight returned, the goddess had a stain as a tribute to the traumas she had been through. After perpetrating this outrage, the young man threw himself into the sea.’

  Despite this slightly disdainful tone, the Greeks regarded male masturbation – which they called cheiromania or ‘passion with the hand’ – as wholly normal and a safety-valve substitute for men to whom sex was not available. The Ancient Greeks also knew that a man could ‘see stars’ and feel as if he was fainting when his prostrate gland was probed, and they were known to experiment with prostates in the manner of modern people and soft drugs. (The prostate gland is still used today by some as a kind of male G-spot.) Masturbation proper was talked about avidly, and frequently featured in comedy. In an Aristophanes play, a slave talks about his much-manipulated foreskin, saying that it is soon going to look like the back of a flayed slave.

  Cynical philosophers encouraged masturbation as a defining act of self-sufficiency. Masturbating men were depicted on vases and terracottas; the Royal Museum in Brussels has a cup showing a garlanded youth performing the act. Plutarch records that Dio Chrysostum, a Stoic philosopher of the first century AD, praised the fifth-century BC philosopher Diogenes for his stance on masturbation. Diogenes was generally anxious to contravene social convention, especially in the matter of performing natural functions in public. He argued that sexual competitiveness was a destructive force in society, unnecessary since it was possible to find, ‘Aphrodite everywhere, without expense’. When someone asked what he meant, Diogenes started to masturbate in front of his audience in the marketplace, saying to his surprised fans and critics: ‘Would to Heaven that by rubbing my stomach in the same fashion, I could satisfy my hunger.’ He attributed the origins of masturbation to Pan, who was distraught when Echo had left him bereft of sexual fulfilment; he was duly taught masturbation by Hermes/Mercury, his father, whose special subject it happened to be.

  In a reversal of the custom at symposia for older men to perform frottage between a boy’s thighs, vase paintings show young men masturbating by placing their penis between the thighs of an older, stooping man. This was delicately called, ‘interfemoral connection’. Fears that masturbation wasted semen were not taken seriously, even though it was commonly believed that it took forty parts of blood to create one of semen.

  As for female sexual pleasure, especially masturbation (of which more later), there is, as in so many matters Ancient Greek, a dichotomy. Greek mythology, with its chaste and demure goddesses – even Aphrodite was portrayed with a hand casually shielding her genitalia – displays women in an idealised form, minus the rampant sexuality believed to exist in mortal woman. But the evidence is that in reality, as in so many cultures where a formal decorousness surrounds female sexuality, Greek women, while not the nymphomaniacs of their men’s fears, were not as obedient and modest as the men thought, either, even after their wilder sexual feelings had been strictly curbed by their closeted existence.

  The freedoms of a woman such as Phryne were unbelievable to wives who were supposedly only allowed out of their house once a year for fertility ceremonies. Yet it is now known that there were secret women-only sanctuaries at which they could take breaks, get-away-from-it-all oases which had their own erotic life and ceremonial. Here, they told ru
de sexual jokes, reclined to eat from naughty pottery designed to amuse women, and conspired to win back a modicum of control over their own bodies, offering the gods plants like pomegranate that were thought to be contraceptives and abortifacients – the polar opposite of the fertility they were imagined by their husbands to be on holiday to improve.

  The very existence of contraceptives, real or imagined, argues eloquently for Greek wives having had a more assertive, independent Nature than that with which they are generally credited, even if only a determination to enjoy a little sex without the encumbrance of pregnancy. Another popular method of birth control was ‘misy’, copper sulphate, which was thought, when drunk in solution, to ward off pregnancy for a year. The idea of heavy metals as contraceptives persisted for thousands of years. Women of other ancient cultures would drink water from blacksmiths’ fire buckets, and English women near Birmingham as recently as 1914 drank, as a contraceptive, water boiled with copper coins.

  Most literary genres in classical Greece depict women less like chaste goddesses or dangerous energy-sapping sex addicts, and more like the women of these sanctuaries – normal mortals suffering or enjoying the same sort of erotic desires as men. The reality of female sexuality was not as well represented, however, by the medicine of Ancient Greece, the famous Hippocratic Corpus, the body of so-called medical knowledge either garnered by a mysterious ‘Hippocrates’ (or, more likely, a group of practitioners around 400 BC who all called themselves Hippocrates) and celebrated in name to this day by the Hippocratic Oath.

  It is self-evident that the ancients, free from such tedious requirements as scientific data, more often than not made up their medical pronouncements as they went along. Medical experts were, naturally, all men, and they unsurprisingly devised a model for sexuality that seems rather to justify male sexual acquisitiveness. They averred that women ‘need’ regular sex so as not to become ill – which conveniently gave men free range to ‘treat’ them without any issue of morality intervening. They were, after all, doing women a medical favour by having sex with them. Women therefore dare not for their own health’s sake refuse their husbands sex, even when they felt no desire for them. In Ancient Egyptian and Hippocratic medicine conversely, an active female desire for sex, its symptoms including arousal, erotic fantasy, vaginal lubrication and generally melancholic or irrational behaviour, was known as an illness called hysteria – literally, a sickness caused by shifting of the uterus; the word hysteria has the same root as hysterectomy.

  The Hippocratic author of a section of the corpus called De Virginibus asserts that the suicidal tendency of young virgins was due to lack of sex, rather than their being married off at the age of twelve to dirty old men. He thinks that the best cure is for women to marry young. Women, he contends, have a psychological need for sex yet no conscious desire for it or knowledge of what they really require physically. The satisfaction of their appetite has little to do with pleasure, apart from simply relieving the pressure of their blood on their heart. (It should be noted that the concept of hysteria as being almost interchangeable with orgasmic was only officially dropped by the American Psychiatric Association as late as 1952, and only then because of the confusion with the more modern meaning of hysteria.)

  A connection is also seen in Ancient Greek medical hypothesising between female orgasm and the enhancement of fertility. For the Hippocratics, it has been said, a woman’s enjoyment of sex is not proof that she will become pregnant; rather, becoming pregnant is evidence that she enjoyed intercourse. Some women apparently insisted accordingly that their husband bring them to orgasm as a means of improving the chance of begetting children. This, at least, is the way they put it.

  With fertility in mind, then, if not shared adult pleasure, people were willing to go to great trouble to try to bring about simultaneous mutual orgasm, using, according to Thomas W. Laqueur, a physician and historian of sex at the University of California, Berkeley, both foreplay and an assortment of natural remedies. (Tribulus terrestris or ‘puncture vine’ from Bulgaria, oriental ginseng, the bark of the tropical African Corynanthe yohimbe tree, the Brazilian Muira puama (‘potency wood’) stem, the Mexican damiana leaf, wood betony from Europe, ashwagandha (winter cherry) root from India, Central American saw palmetto berries and Avena sativa – wild oats – have all been used at various times in the past as aphrodisiacs to enhance erection, sexual stamina and so on.)

  Female sexual pleasure and orgasm were not necessarily synonymous in Greece, however. Women were thought to feel pleasure from the moment of penetration, and then experience a steady level of enjoyment from the friction of the penis in the vagina, rather than any kind of peak of excitement. ‘Once intercourse has begun,’ one Hippocratic writer states, ‘the woman experiences pleasure throughout the whole time, until the man ejaculates. If her desire for intercourse is excited, she emits before the man, and for the remainder of the time she does not feel pleasure to the same extent; but if she is not in a state of excitement, then her pleasure terminates along with that of the man.’

  The Hippocratic notion of the womb was of an independent entity within a woman’s body that could override the woman’s will with its own desires. The best way to fight the womb back was to sit the woman on some perfumes and burn mule-dung under her nose. The womb would flee from the bad smell around the brain and be attracted towards the good odour, closer to where it belongs, in the region of the pelvis. The woman’s sexual desire – not surprisingly, given the mule dung under her nose – would then dissipate.

  The Hippocratic Corpus was not the only repository of medical assertion and supposition. Everyone was allowed to chip in with a bit of homespun sexual advice. Aristotle, a man of extraordinary breadth of interest and wisdom but not known as a physician, felt free nevertheless to opine in The Nicomachean Ethics that, ‘Erection is chiefly caused by parsnips, artichokes, turnips, asparagus, candied ginger, acorns bruised to powder and drunk in muscatel, scallion, sea shellfish, etc’ – and be taken seriously. (To be fair, Aristotle’s body of opinion on sexual matters was generally more considered than this. He was often ahead of his time. He did not agree, for example, with those who believed that a woman’s need for sex was caused by the displacement of the womb.) Plato, Aristotle’s tutor, could similarly mention in passing (although quite sensibly, as it happens) that male and female sexual experience are ‘owing to the same causes’, and be taken, again, as an authority. This free-for-all in medical advice-mongering, although not unique to the intellectual hothouse of Athens, still seems alien and bogus compared to later cultures that valued what we recognise as expertise.

  Despite the wide variety of great thoughts in circulation on sex, there was still no agreement in Ancient Greece as to how sexual reproduction took place. In Homer’s day, around 800 BC, it was believed that the female became pregnant as a result of airborne ‘animalculae’ that somehow found their way inside the woman. The Hippocratics believed in some form of meeting between male and female seed. Male seed was provided by a sudden, and highly pleasurable, ejaculation from the body, so it was thought that the mother must also contribute the same sort of fluid to help form the foetus This would explain why a child resembled its mother, but was not taken as an indication that women played an equal part in reproduction to the extent that husbands ought to be concerned that their wives’ enjoyed sex. The Hippocratics connected the production of female seed with orgasm, too, but were not convinced that the wife had to enjoy her orgasm as the husband enjoyed his. Aristotle, who tended to dissent from Hippocratic conclusions, thought females produced semen from their ovaries and an egg was in the womb, this from a combination of menstrual blood and the female sperm. Four hundred years later, the physician Galen, whose influence dominated medicine in Europe and the Muslim Middle East until the seventeenth century, came close to a modern understanding of conception with his theory that female testes made semen which, when mixed with male semen in the womb, produced an embryo.

  Galen also believed women coul
d desire intercourse for its own, pleasurable sake. He was one of the first physicians to advocate therapeutic masturbation or finger ‘stimulation’ for frustrated women such as widows and nuns. Previously, in the section of the Hippocratic Corpus known as De semine, women’s orgasm was seen as a reflection of men’s. Aristotle thought both sexes’ desire for intercourse could be prompted by the need to expel fluid after a period of celibacy. The Hippocratics did not imagine orgasm could serve as an incitement to a woman to want intercourse; if a woman fails to orgasm, therefore, she would not be left frustrated. Aristotle, again, disagreed with this. Putting an interesting new spin on the question, he professed himself aware that both sexes could be incited beyond any immediate need for sexual intercourse by the memory of past pleasures. Therefore the desire for orgasm could be summoned up from the imagination in both sexes even when there was no pressing physical build-up of seminal material.

  Despite the lack of consensus over so much about sex, the Greeks did at least come quite close to working out what and where the clitoris was, even though it would be thousands of years before this information was properly understood in Europe. The Hippocratics did not mention the clitoris (although neither did Gray’s Anatomy as late as 1918), but literary figures such as the poet Hipponax of Ephesus and the playwright Aristophanes both seem to refer to it by the name myrton (myrtle berry), and some scholars believe Sappho, the sixth-century BC poetess and Lesbos’s most celebrated inhabitant, used the word nymphe (bride) to refer to the clitoris. Aristotle mentioned it, too: ‘An indication that the female emits no semen is afforded by the fact that in intercourse, the pleasure is produced in the same place as in the male by contact, yet it is not the place from which the liquid is emitted,’ he wrote.