Greek Homosexuality

by K J Dover

  Many other features help us to decide whether or not a picture is erotic. In R636 the end of a bed appears in the background of a conversation between a man and a woman. Sometimes a small figure of Eros, the divine personification of heterosexual and homosexual passion, flies above or between the participants in a scene, e.g. B478 (men and boys), R168 (women, with breasts bared, embracing youths). Often a boy or youth receives from an older male a gift (e.g. a cockerel or hare) of the kind held by the passive partner in a scene of homosexual copulation. Occasionally the painter gives words to one or other of the participants in a conversation between an older and a younger male, e.g. (R463) ‘Let me!’ and ‘Stop it!’7 Our knowledge of mythology is also useful; when we see a bearded male dropping a sceptre in order to seize a struggling youth or boy, we know that we are witnessing not a domestic brawl or a political dispute, but the manifestation of Zeus’s irresistible passion for Ganymede, for we can compare such scenes with others in which a winged female (Dawn) lays violent hands on Tithonos, for whom she conceived a passion.

  Representations of Ganymede and Tithonos, legendary persons whose beauty aroused even deities, enable us to define the criteria of male beauty, and we can observe that the same criteria are satisfied by portrayals of eternally youthful gods (notably Apollo) and of the boys or youths depicted as pursued, courted or embraced by everyday human lovers. From this we can derive a justification for categorising as ‘pin-ups’ the great number of youths portrayed in a variety of poses on vessels of all kinds, particularly the typical isolated youth (usually naked, sometimes dressing or undressing) who occupies the interior surface of a shallow vessel. We cannot fail to notice how greatly the male pin-up outnumbers the female at the beginning of the classical period, and how the balance is somewhat redressed later.8 The positive evidence of these pictures is reinforced by the negative evidence of pictures in which the painter intends to depict what is ugly, disgusting or ridiculous: satyrs (cf. Xen. Smp. 4.19, ‘If I weren’t better-looking than you, I’d be uglier than all the silenoi9 in the satyr-plays!’), ‘comasts’ (drunken revellers dancing and losing all their inhibitions),10 shrivelled old men, actors dressed for comic burlesques on mythical themes, Asiatics and slaves in degrading situations, or – identifiable through their combination of features characteristic of these other categories – simple comic caricatures. Contrast between the pin-ups and the uglies enables us to say what the Greeks admired and despised in the shape and size not only of the facial features and torso but also of the genitals.

  We must not imagine, however, that the vase-paintings directly ‘illustrate’ the literature available to us or that this literature is any kind of ‘commentary’ on the vase-paintings. Most of the vases which portray homosexual relations, and a great many of those which portray anything relevant to the questions which arise out of a consideration of homosexuality, were made between 570 and 470 B.C.; the great age of erotic vase-painting was therefore at an end half a century before the birth of Plato and the earliest plays of Aristophanes. Except for some citations from the poems of Solon, we have no Attic literature earlier than the Persians of Aiskhylos (472 B.C.). When the evidence of Attic literature becomes abundant, erotic vase-painting is already severely inhibited (cf. pp. 152 f.), and vase-painting as a whole declines to vanishing-point in Attica during the fourth century. Much interesting material can be found in the vases produced from the middle of the fifth century to the end of the fourth in the Greek cities of southern Italy and Sicily, but that is a long way from Athens. It should be added that down to the mid-sixth century Corinth was a major centre of production of painted pottery, and much was also produced during the archaic period in (e.g.) Lakonia, Euboia and the eastern coasts of the Aegean; the Athenian ‘monopoly’ of this art-form is not in evidence until the latter part of the sixth century, and our literary evidence for the sexual behaviour and attitudes of (e.g.) archaic Corinth is negligible (cf. p. 195).11 Equally, there is very little literary evidence relating to Boiotia, where certain genres of vase-painting maintained themselves throughout the period of Athenian cultural and artistic dominance.

  Despite the limitations, imposed by uneven distribution of the material in time and place, on our use of vase-painting as if it were contemporary illustration of literary references to homosexual behaviour, we may nevertheless find that a vase-painting and a passage of literature separated by two hundred years or more contribute significantly each to the understanding of the other even when either of the two in isolation would be open to a variety of interpretations. This is not as surprising as it might seem, for the rate of change of Greek attitudes, practices and institutions, although faster than that of older civilisations – and faster at Athens than elsewhere in the Greek world – was still very slow compared with anything to which we are accustomed in our own day. The most important reservation in the use of vase-painting for the interpretation of Greek literature or society concerns not the time-scale or the diversity of regional cultures but the autonomy of the visual arts in general and the autonomy of each artistic genre. If at a certain date we find a great increase in the depiction of a certain type of behaviour, it does not follow that this type of behaviour had actually increased. It may be that its depiction is peculiarly well adapted to the shape of the surface used by the painters, or that it was a predilection of an individual painter who was greatly admired and imitated, or even that by some trivial accident it became a subject associated with, and therefore expected from, a particular style of painting. It is worth remembering in this connection that the story that Herakles tried to carry off the tripod from the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, a story illustrated by more than 150 vases and by some important sculpture at Delphi and elsewhere, is known in extant classical literature only from a single oblique allusion in Pindar (Olympian Odes 9.32f.). Stories about violent conflicts between deities were undoubtedly less acceptable to the classical period than to the archaic, but it is also true that the configuration of the struggle for the tripod made it an ideal subject for vase-painting12 or for a pedimental sculpture. Similarly, the fact that vase-painters most commonly represent heterosexual intercourse as penetration from the rear, the man standing and the woman bending over, does not in itself tell us that the Greeks preferred that position, for it is a configuration which can have evolved from the ‘processional’ character of the earliest Greek figure-painting; we need later literary evidence (and in fact we have some) to sustain the inference that it was indeed a favoured posture.

  Many vase-paintings include short inscriptions, of which the commonest single type is an exclamation about the beauty of a named or unnamed boy or adolescent youth. Exclamations about female beauty are much less common; this fact accords with the predominance of male over female nudes in the paintings, and it is an independent fact, since the inscription often conveys a message not apparently related to any figures, objects or motifs in the picture itself. Vase-inscriptions should not be considered in isolation from graffiti painted13 or incised on vases after firing, or on broken fragments, rocks or walls, and there are types of graffiti to which allusion is made in literature (cf. III A.). Consideration of all these categories indicates that expression of admiration for the beauty of a male was much commoner than the expression of personal and political malice and ridicule, but it also warns us that the range of significance of any given vase-inscription or graffito can be very wide; the Greeks were often arbitrary, impulsive, frivolous, cynical, witty or jocular, and they are not always well served by too earnest or solemn a temperament in a modern interpreter.

  3. Literature

  The five most important sources of material on homosexuality are: (a) late archaic and early classical homosexual poetry; (b) Attic comedy, particularly Aristophanes and his contemporaries; (c) Plato; (d) a speech of Aiskhines, the Prosecution of Timarkhos; (e) homosexual poetry of the Hellenistic period. The questions raised by this material can sometimes be answered by reference to comparatively brief allusions and comments in other authors
, especially Xenophon (whose activity as a writer spanned the first half of the fourth century) and the authors of speeches made in the Athenian lawcourts at various times in the fourth century.14

  (a) The chief concentration of homosexual poetry before Hellenistic times is the last 164 verses (‘Book II’) of the corpus of verses ascribed to Theognis of Megara. It is a succession of short poems (some consist of only one elegiac couplet) predominantly of homosexual character, addressed to boys or expressing feelings about boys. Its segregation from the work of Theognis as a whole (‘Book I’ contains 1220 verses) was probably effected in the early Middle Ages, when sensibilities were jolted by the juxtaposition of extravagant expressions of homosexual emotion with stern exhortations to honesty and truthfulness.15 There is room for controversy both about the date of Theognis himself and about the authenticity of much of the poetry ascribed to him. An Attic red-figure vase of the early fifth century (R1053) depicts a man at a dinner-party singing the words ‘O most handsome of boys’, which (in Greek; English word-order is different) are the opening words of Theognis 1365f., ‘O most handsome and desirable of all boys’, but the phrase is not a remarkable one and may well have been a poetic cliché. However, quotations of Theognis in Plato suggest that there was a substantial degree of coincidence between the text of Theognis known to Plato and at any rate the first third of what we call ‘Theognis’. Since the great age of moralising elegiac poetry extended approximately from the middle of the seventh century B.C. to the middle of the sixth, at least one passage of Theognis (1103f.) makes a historical allusion for which a date at the end of the seventh century is most appropriate, and several others may plausibly be considered to point to the same period, the core of the body of poetry ascribed to Theognis may take us well back into the archaic period;16 but the accretions may be strung out over a long time, perhaps even extending to the Hellenistic age.

  (b) Homosexuality afforded good material for humour to Aristophanes, whose eleven extant plays run from 425 to 388 B.C., and to the many other comic poets whose plays are known to us through fragments and citations (comparatively few of these can be dated with assurance earlier than the 430s, and overtly sexual humour declined in popularity17 after the mid-fourth century). It was not the business of the comic poets to present scholars of later times with a judicious delineation of Athenian society, but to make their audiences laugh, and in particular to afford those audiences temporary vicarious release from the constraints imposed by law, religion and social convention. Characters in Aristophanes therefore realise outrageous ambitions, often by means which belong to the world of fairy-tale rather than to our familiar world of cause and effect, and in the process they may insult, trick and triumph over generals, politicians, administrators, intellectuals and deities.18 This kind of comedy is characterised by lavish use of the Greek equivalents of our ‘four-letter words’, a feature which it shares with iambic poetry of the archaic period (Arkhilokhos and Hipponax) but not with other literary genres; the language of serious Greek literature, poetry and prose alike, is euphemistic and its allusions to processes of the genitourinary system tend to be imprecise. The comic poets also inherited a tradition which accorded poets the right to admonish and upbraid the community, and this conjunction of a didactic role with a liberating role produces the comic world in which people are (in the words of Aristotle, Poetics 1448a 16-18) ‘not as good’ as we find them to be in life.19 Comedy tends to assume that we all want to cheat our neighbours and evade our obligations; and it translates both heterosexual and homosexual relations into the most explicit physiological terms, with little regard for their ‘romantic’ aspects (cf. III C.). The comic poet would perhaps have claimed that through the medium of his choruses and his shrewd, robust, somewhat philistine and cynical characters he rescues us from deception and self-deception, but the interpreter of comedy must remember that there are many things in life with which Aristophanic comedy does not try to cope. It is often hard to decide just what the evidence of a comic passage proves, but fortunately not so hard to detect usages and attitudes which must be accepted as the background of a joke or comic idea if an audience is to get the point.

  (c) Plato, who was born in 428 B.C. and died in 347 B.C., treated the love which is aroused by the stimulus of visual beauty as a special case, operative at a low level, of the force which impels humanity to seek understanding of the eternal, immutable ‘form’ or ‘idea’ of ‘the Beautiful itself’. Since Plato experienced, and was not able to reject, a craving20 to believe both that the ultimate order of the universe is accessible to human reason and that the ultimate cause of its being what it is is good, and since our response to good is love and desire (for that is what we mean21 when we call something good), it follows that for Plato a philosopher, as he frees himself from concern over the body and the material world of particulars, progressing ever ‘upwards’ by reason, becomes increasingly aware that reason and love are convergent upon a point at which they must in the end fuse together. In two works above all, Symposium and Phaedrus, Plato takes homosexual desire and homosexual love as the starting-point from which to develop his metaphysical theory; and it is of particular importance that he regards philosophy not as an activity to be pursued in solitary meditation and communicated in ex cathedra pronouncements by a master to his disciples,22 but as a dialectical progress which may well begin in the response of an older male to the stimulus afforded by a younger male who combines bodily beauty with ‘beauty of the soul’.23 Cause and effect are not easy to disentangle in the interpretation of Plato’s philosophical method. An Athenian aristocrat, he moved in a section of society which certainly regarded strong homosexual desire and emotion as normal, and Athenian society in general entertained a low opinion of the intellectual capacity and staying-power of women.24 Plato’s philosophical treatment of homosexual love may have been an outcome of this ambience. We must however leave open the possibility that his own homosexual emotion was abnormally intense and his heterosexual response abnormally deficient. He may therefore present a somewhat exaggerated picture of the homosexual orientation of his own time, place and class. In any case, Plato does not speak in propria persona, but represents Socrates and others discussing moral and philosophical questions; Socrates himself left nothing in writing, and the other participants in the Socratic dialogues which Plato composed express a variety of views.25 We might go badly wrong if, for example, we simply assumed that all the statements about Athenian sentiment put into the mouth of ‘Pausanias’ in Plato’s Symposium must be objective statements of fact or even Plato’s own considered opinion on a question of fact; they may prove to be so in the light of other evidence (and I think they are), but we cannot dispense with that other evidence, and the difference between ‘the Athenians thought ...’ and ‘Plato represents Pausanias, in such-and-such a context and for such-and-such a purpose, as saying that the Athenians thought...’ is a very important difference indeed, not least because Pausanias was a real person whose disposition, we have some reason to think (cf. p. 84), was more exclusively homosexual than was common in the Greek world. It is even more important to distinguish between what was characteristically and peculiarly Platonic and what was generally thought and felt in fourth-century Athens, let alone in the Greek world as a whole. Plato differed from most Athenians of his time in possession of wealth and leisure, in boundless zeal for the study of philosophy and mathematics, in a suspicious and censorious attitude to the arts,26 and in contempt for democracy (to which it is fair to add that he differed from them also in his ability to write in a way which combines to a unique degree dramatic power, convincing characterisation, vitality and elegance). Modern readers of Phaedrus and Symposium, which they may well have seen in the pornography section of a bookshop, are apt to believe that what they find therein is the quintessential doctrine of the Greeks on the whole topic of homosexuality, expressed in definitive terms by their acknowledged spokesman. Yet Plato’s right to speak even for Greek philosophy – to say nothing of a right to speak
for Greek civilisation – was not conceded by other pupils of Socrates, and although Plato gave great impetus to philosophy, neither his own pupils nor the philosophical schools which arose in the two following generations accorded his teaching the status of revelation.

  (d) In 346 B.C. an Athenian politician, Timarkhos, was prosecuted under a law which provided that an Athenian citizen who had prostituted himself to another male – that is to say, had accepted money or goods in return for the homosexual use of his body – should be debarred from participation in political life. Aiskhines’ Prosecution of Timarkhos (number ‘i’ in modern editions of the surviving speeches of Aiskhines) is a written version of the principal speech for the prosecution, and its peculiar value is twofold. It is the only surviving work of Greek literature on a substantial scale (45 printed pages in a modern edition) which is entirely concerned with homosexual relationships and practices; and just as the original speech was designed to persuade a jury of several hundred ordinary citizens, so the written version is designed to persuade the reader that the prosecutor is of value as a politically active member of the community and the defendant unworthy to exercise the normal functions of a citizen. There was no judge in an Athenian court of law, no one to give the jury skilled and objective guidance, no one to rule evidence inadmissible or to restrain a speaker who introduced narrative, comment or allegations irrelevant to the point of issue.27 Each of the speakers had to try to convince the jury that he, and not the opposing party, was the person to be trusted, the good citizen whose exemplary record in public and private life created a presumption that he was in the right; and each had to try to impose the contrary persona on his adversary. Accordingly, a speaker could not take the risk of expressing sentiments which, in his judgment, were likely to be suspect or repugnant to the average juror. If we want to discover the social and moral rules which the average Athenian of the fourth century B.C. treated with outward respect and professed to observe, we cannot do better than study the sentiments and generalisations which the forensic orators make explicit, the implications of their allusions, boasts or reproaches, and the points at which they introduce, or omit to introduce, evaluative terms into a narrative.28 Aiskhines i is thus the only surviving text which gives us access to the sentiments which it was prudent to profess in public on the subject of homosexuality in Athens during the classical period; Plato, by contrast, was writing for readers interested in philosophy, who could put a book down if it angered, shocked or bored them, not for a jury which could deprive him of his life or citizenship or property if he failed to conciliate them, and the humorous treatment of homosexuality in Aristophanes’ plays was a seasoning, not a central motif which could seriously affect his chances of winning first prize at a dramatic festival. We must however remember, in making use of Aiskhines i, that the sentiments of 346 B.C. were not necessarily the same as those of (say) 446; for the mid-fifth century we entirely lack the evidence of forensic speeches.