by K J Dover
Also, the boy does not share in the man’s pleasure in intercourse, as a woman does; cold sober, he looks upon the other drunk with sexual desire.
In crude terms, what does the eromenos get out of submission to his erastes? The conventional Greek answer is, no bodily pleasure (cf. Pl. Phdr. 240d); should he do so, he incurs disapproval as a pornos (cf. p. 103) and as perverted (cf. p. 169). There is no particular good humour in Asklepiades 46, on the theme ‘Now you’re getting past it, you’re asking for it!’; epigrams on the theme ‘Soon you’ll be too old, and it’ll be too late!’ (Alkaios of Messene 7, 8, Phanias 1, Thymokles 1) imply ‘You won’t have the satisfaction of being desired and admired’.
What the erastes hopes to engender in the eromenos is not eros but love; that is clear from the use of antiphilein, ‘love in return’, in the passage from Xen. Hiero cited above and from ibid. 1.34f., Mem. ii 6. 28, Smp. 8.16, 8.19, Pl. Phdr. 255d-256a, Smp. 217a, 218c. It clearly emerges also from Pl. Smp. 182c on ‘the eros of Aristogeiton and the (sc. resultant) love (philiā) of Harmodios (sc. for Aristogeiton)’. Love inspired by admiration and gratitude towards the erastes, coupled with compassion, induces the eromenos to grant the ‘favours’ and perform the ‘services’ which the erastes so obviously and passionately desires; in that case, there is indeed love on both sides, but eros on one side only – and of course it is possible for an eromenos to hate his erastes (Pl. Lys. 212b), as a woman may hate a man who is obsessed with her and never gives her a moment’s peace. Aiskhines i 133 represents the general defending Timarkhos as praising the ‘love (philiā) of Patroklos and Achilles which is said to have come into being through eros’, and in §142 he enlarges on this theme:
Homer has many occasions to speak of Patroklos and Achilles; but he maintains silence on their eros and the specification (epōnumiā, ‘additional name’) of their love (philiā), judging that the extraordinary degree of their affection (eunoia, ‘benevolence’, ‘goodwill’) was obvious to sensitive (lit., ‘educated’, ‘cultured’) hearers. There is a passage in which Achilles says ... that he has unwillingly broken the promise he made to Patroklos’s father Menoitios; for he had declared that he would bring him back safe to Opus if Menoitios sent Patroklos to Troy with him and entrusted him to his care. It is obvious from this that it was through eros that he took charge of Patroklos.
(‘Obvious’ only on the assumption that the eromenos was in some sense dependent on the erastes and the erastes responsible for him; Pl. Smp. 179e-180b represents Patroklos as the erastes and Achilles as the eromenos whose sacrifice of his own life was inspired by devoted admiration).51
So long as the language of eros was imprecise (and it seems, from what Aiskhines says of Homer, that reticence was de rigueur), and so long as behaviour in public was decorous and circumspect (in Xen. Smp. 1.2 Kallias invites his eromenos Autolykos to dinner not alone, but with Autolykos’s father, and is praised [8.11] for doing so), the substance of any given homosexual relationship could only be, for everyone but the erastes and eromenos themselves, a matter of conjecture. Was the ‘service’ or ‘favour’ that A desired from B a kindly smile, a readiness to accompany him to watch a race, or what? In Xen. Smp. 8.24 Socrates apologises for his ‘coarseness ‘ in mentioning homosexual bodily contact in a generalisation, even though he speaks only of kissing and caressing; he apologises in exactly the same terms in 8.41 for being over-serious at a party where people wish to feel at their ease. When Alkibiades tells the guests at Agathon’s party about his own attempt, long ago, to seduce Socrates, he makes it plain (Pl. Smp. 217b, 217e) that he is breaking the rules of polite conversation in a very striking way. We do not and cannot know whether there were erastai and eromenoi who abstained from bodily contact; perhaps they would always have said they did, if asked,52 but in educated society convention protected them from direct questioning; in most heterosexual cultures, after all, it is not common form to ask A, ‘Yes, but haven’t you screwed B yet?’, no matter how greedily the question may be discussed by C and D.
4. Following and fighting
Two of the three specific allegations which Aiskhines expects to encounter (§135) are ‘making myself a nuisance in the gymnasia’ and involvement in ‘hard words and blows arising out of this activity’. The second allegation he accepts as true (§136), with so little sign of shame that we can easily imagine the words spoken in a tone of pride; the judgment implicit in the first allegation he naturally rejects by silence while accepting and repeating its substance, ‘I myself have been erōtikos and remain so’ (~ §135, ‘that I have been erastes of many’).
The gymnasium as a whole or the wrestling-school (palaistrā) in particular53 provided opportunities for looking at naked boys, bringing oneself discreetly to a boy’s notice in the hope of eventually speaking to him (for the gymnasium functioned as a social centre for males who could afford leisure), and even touching a boy in a suggestive way, as if by accident, while wrestling with him (cf. Pl. Smp. 217c ‘I often wrestled with him, and no one else was there ... but I didn’t get any further’). Ar. Peace 762f. refers to ‘hanging around palaistrai trying to seduce boys’, and in Birds 139-42 a character envisages an encounter with a handsome boy who has ‘left the gymnasium, after a bath’ as an occasion on which steps towards homosexual seduction might be taken. Certain introductory scenes in Platonic dialogues convey a lively impression of the situations created by the presence of exceptionally good-looking boys in wrestling-schools. In Chrm. 154a-c Socrates, having arrived at the wrestling-school of Taureas after a long absence from Athens, has asked Kritias who among the young is now ‘outstanding in accomplishment (sophiā) or beauty or both’:
Kritias glanced towards the door, where he had seen some young men coming in, quarrelling with one another, and a crowd following behind them.
‘So far as the good-looking (kalos) ones are concerned’, he says, ‘I think you’ll soon know. The people coming in are the advance party, the erastai of the one who is regarded as the best-looking of all at the present time.’
When the youth – Kritias’s nephew Kharmides – has come in (154c):
I marvelled at his stature and beauty, and I felt everyone else in the room was in love (erān) with him; they were thrown into such amazement and confusion when he came in, and there were many other erastai following after him too.
Similarly in Euthd. 273a the young Kleinias is followed in by a ‘great many erastai, including Ktesippos’; Ktesippos at first sits at a distance while the boy talks to the sophists Euthydemos and Dionysodoros, but comes nearer when Euthydemos keeps on leaning forward and obscuring his view of his eromenos (274bc). In Lysis 206e we find that boys and youths are standing around together in the wrestling-school of Mikkos; the handsome Lysis comes and sits with Socrates and Ktesippos only when a boy of the same age, Ktesippos’s nephew Menexenos, has already done so, and the youth Hippothales, hopelessly infatuated with Lysis, takes up an inconspicuous position on the edge of the ground, ‘afraid of annoying Lysis’ (207b).
An erastes who formed part of a group such as Plato describes could not expect his sentiment to remain unremarked for long. We have seen (p. 48) that ‘following’ a boy is recognised as overt erotic behaviour in a law cited by Aiskhines (§139), which he interprets as permitting the erastes, even encouraging him, to watch the object of his eros in silence from a discreet distance. This may have conformed to an ideal pattern of behaviour, an element in the ritualisation of homosexual eros, but the boundary between silent and vocal importuning is ill-defined and easily crossed. The non-erastes in Pl. Phdr. 232ab recognises no such boundary:
It is unavoidable that many people should know of erastai (i.e. identify the erastai of a given eromenos) and see them following those with whom they are in love and devoting their time to that; so that when they (sc. erastes and eromenos) are seen conversing, it is assumed that the (sc. erastes’) desire that they should be together54 has been realised, or is about to be.
The young men who came ahead of Kharmides
into the presence of Socrates were ‘quarrelling’. About what? Perhaps Plato refers only to the brutal badinage of the young, though loidoreisthai, ‘vilify’, ‘abuse’, is a strong word. But what were Aiskhines’ ‘contentions and fights’ about? The jurors would hardly have accepted from him a protestation that his only object was to rescue modest and virtuous boys from the lust of ‘wild men’; fighting over eromenoi, or women, or both, had familiar enough associations for everyone, such as are indicated by a passage of Xenophon (Anab. v 8.4), in which Xenophon addresses some soldiers who have complained of his rough handling:
Did I ask you for something and hit you when you wouldn’t give it to me? Did I demand anything back from you? Fighting over paidika? Did I get drunk and beat you up?
These words recall the quarrel which was the occasion of Lysias’s Defence against Simon, where the rival claims of Simon and the speaker on the young Plataean were of a very earthy nature. There is a heterosexual analogue in Lysias iv, the outcome of a brawl in which, it seems, the speaker secured a woman for whom he and his adversary had paidjointly (§9):
He is not ashamed to call his black eyes a ‘wound’, and be carried about on a couch, and pretend to be at death’s door, all because of a prostitute – whom he can keep, so far as I’m concerned, if he’ll pay me back my money.
Indeed, Lys. iii 43 treats the fight with Simon as coming into the same category as a commonplace fight over a woman:
It would be intolerable if, whenever people get hurt through drunkenness or horseplay or hard words or through fighting over a hetaira ... you are going to impose such insupportably heavy penalties.
Compare also Dem. liv 14, much closer in date to Aiskhines:
And he’ll say: there are in this city plenty of good men’s sons, who get up to the sort of mischief that young men do ... and some of them are in love with hetairai; and his son is one of them, and he’s often given and taken blows over a hetaira; and that’s the way young men behave.
This sounds like the kind of fighting which involves people who are rivals for possession of a sexual object; the mauling and pulling of a slave-girl, with the imminent intervention of someone who wants to take her to a different destination, is not an infrequent motif in late archaic and early classical vase-painting, and the end which the energetic males in these pictures are pursuing is not philosophical discussion. An eromenos of citizen status, protected from treatment of this kind by the law restraining hubris (cf. pp. 34-9), is in the position of a female animal or bird which waits with apparently patient indifference for the outcome of noisy conflict between males; precisely the fact that it is perilous to lay hands on him without his consent, and even self-defeating to thrust oneself into his company without positive encouragement, perpetuates the conventional uncertainty about what exactly will happen if in the end he goes off with one erastes rather than with another.
5. Homosexual poetry
We do not possess any of the erōtikos poems which Aiskhines composed, but it is possible to infer their character from such poetic material as we do possess, principally ‘book ii’ of Theognis and the Garland of Meleagros (the encomia in verse and prose with which Hippothales, in love with Lysis, bored his friends to distraction [Pl. Lysis 204cd] seem to have been of Pindaric type, commemorating the boy’s ancestors [ibid. 205cd]). The Theognidean collection contains some poems which may have no sexual reference at all (e.g. 1381ab), some which could just as well refer to heterosexual as to homosexual eros (1231, 1275, 1323-6, 1386-9), and many more which speak in terms of friendship and enmity, loyalty and treachery, or good and bad advice (1238a-40, 1243-8, 1257f., 1295-8, 1311-18, 1351f., 1363f., 1377-80), verses which would not be out of place in didactic, moralising or political poetry. Some which could otherwise be given a non-sexual interpretation reveal their character only through brief but explicit mention of the boy’s beauty (1259-62, 1279-82) or of the poet’s eros55 (1337-40, 1341-4, 1345-50, 1357-60 [the ‘fire of eros’]). The couplet 1327f. is more specific in declaring that the poet will never cease to ‘fawn on’ the boy so long as the boy’s cheek is hairless. The poet demands that the boy should ‘listen’ to him (1235-8, 1319-22 [for ‘eros is hard to endure’], 1365f.); he ‘asks’ in the hope that the boy will ‘give’ (1329-34); he expects ‘gratitude’ or ‘favours’ in return for benevolence or benefaction (1263-6). The boy flees, the poet pursues: 1287-94, where the boy’s flight is compared to that of the legendary Atalante, who shunned marriage but yielded in the end; 1299-1304, where the boy is reminded that his beauty will not last long (cf. 1305-10, a reminder to a ‘cruel boy’ that he, like the poet now, will one day meet with refusal of ‘the works of Aphrodite’, i.e. love-making); 1353-7, where ‘pursuit’ may or may not issue in ‘accomplishment’ (cf. 1369f.). ‘Accomplishment’ is expressed figuratively in 1278cd:
A lion trusting in its strength, I seized in my claws a fawn from under a hind, but did not drink its blood.56
This is also the first couplet of 949-54, which continues in similar vein (‘I mounted the high walls but did not sack the city ...’). Evidently the editor who segregated the homosexual poems of Theognis into ‘book ii’ did not think 949-54 homosexual. Closer attention to the poems which follow (955-62) might have changed his mind (note 959-62, on drinking no more from a spring which is ‘now muddied’ [cf. Kallimakhos 2.3]).
Felicitation of an erastes who can ‘sleep all day with a handsome boy’ (1335f.) is unusually direct for Theognis. There are however a few poems which would have sounded to a fifth-century Athenian, and probably also to Greeks of other times and places, heavily charged with allusions to copulation, e.g.: 1249-52, where a boy is compared to a horse which, ‘sated with barley’, has ‘come back to our stable wanting a good charioteer’;57 1267-70, complaining that a boy, who ‘loves (philein) him who is present’ (i.e. the erastes of the moment), is like a horse which cares nothing for the charioteer cast in the dust but ‘bears the next man, sated with barley’; 1361f., in which the poet tells the boy who has ‘strayed from my philotēs’ that he (the boy) ‘ran aground’ and ‘took hold of a rotten cable’.58 ‘Barley’ (krīthai) is comic slang for ‘penis’;59 ‘rotten (sapros) rope’ is used figuratively in Ar. Wasps 1343, where Philokleon tells a girl to take hold of his aged penis; and the imagery of horse, reins and rider is familiar with reference to heterosexual intercourse from Anakreon fr. 417.60 Moreover, 1270, ‘he loves the man of the moment ‘ is echoed in 1367f.:
A boy shows gratitude, whereas a woman has no steady companion; she loves the man of the moment.
Among the epigrams attributed in antiquity (though not unanimously)61 to Plato, one (10) addresses the dead Dion in extravagant terms, ‘O Dion, who drove my heart insane with eros!’, and another (3) represents the poet as all but expiring with joy when he kissed Agathon (not the dramatist) on the mouth (cf. p. 94). Some of the Hellenistic poems are more blatantly physiological than anything which preceded them, but the majority deal with love, desire, pain, gratitude and the emotions generally in terms which are strictly – lexicographically, one might say – compatible with the supposition that the erastes desires absolutely no more than to monopolise the presence and converse of the eromenos whose beauty he admires. It is only when we insist, as we must, on translating such words as ‘pursue’ and ‘accomplish’ into concrete realities that the extent of the disguise which convention imposed upon the expression of homosexual eros becomes apparent. This convention left it open to Aiskhines to deny (§136) that his own poems meant what his detractors said they meant.
C. Nature and Society
1. Natural impulse
There is one passage in Aiskhines, and one only, which suggests that heterosexuality is natural and homosexuality unnatural; this comes (§185) after he has recited details of the law’s debarment of adulterous women from public festivals and sanctuaries:
Now, when your ancestors distinguished so firmly between shameful and honourable conduct, will you acquit Timarkhos, when he is guilty of the most shame
ful practices? Timarkhos, who is a man and male in body, but has committed a woman’s transgressions (lit., ‘errors’)?62 Who among you will then punish a woman caught in wrongdoing? Will it not deserve a charge of insensitivity, to deal harshly with her who transgresses according to nature, yet listen to the advice (sc. in council or assembly) of him who has outraged (hubrizein) himself contrary to nature?
It looks straightforward; yet if Aiskhines really means that homosexual relations in general are unnatural, he is adopting a standpoint otherwise expounded only in one strand of the Socratic-Platonic philosophical tradition (cf. p. 167) and contradicting what is implicit in many unphilosophical utterances of his time (including his own in §136). What is more important, he is contradicting the view which he adopts in §138, where he leads up to the conclusion (cf. p. 48) that the law positively encourages the ‘following’ of a handsome boy by a male citizen:
Our ancestors, in making laws on the subject of practices and the compulsions of nature (lit., ‘those [sc. things] which are necessary from nature’), forbade slaves to do what, in our ancestors’ view, free men ought to do.
There follows the reference to the debarment of slaves from gymnasia, and then the clause which prescribes punishment for a slave who falls in love with a boy of free status. An expositor of Aiskhines in late antiquity or the early Middle Ages added the words ‘goods and evils’ to ‘compulsions of nature’, in order to make the passage refer to moral choice at the most general level, and the interpolated words appear in one branch of the manuscript tradition.63 But ‘those goods and evils which are compulsory’ (or ‘inevitable’, ‘necessary’, etc.) ‘by nature’ is not an expression which reflects Greek ways of talking and thinking about good and evil; another meaning which could be attached to the words in isolation, ‘bare minimum goods and evils’, does not make sense with reference to gymnasia and homosexual eros; whereas ‘compulsions of nature’ can be paralleled from classical Attic if it refers to the sexual instinct and the universal impulse to possess beautiful people. In Ar. Clouds 1075-82 the immoralist Wrong embarks on the subject of ‘the compulsions of nature’ and illustrates it by the example of a man who falls in love with a married woman and commits adultery with her. ‘Nature willed it’, says a character in Menander (Epitrepontes 1123, quoting Euripides [fr. 265a]) in extenuation of a rape, ‘and she cares nothing for law’; in Eur. fr. 840 Laios, referring to his own homosexual rape of Khrysippos, says helplessly, ‘I have understanding, but nature forces me’. It is difficult in these circumstances to explain Aiskhines’ ‘compulsions of nature’ except on the assumption that he regards the homosexual response of one male to the beauty of another as natural.