by K J Dover
If that was his view, Xenophon would have agreed with him. In a passage of Hiero (1.31-3) the poet Simonides is represented as conversing with the tyrant Hieron:
‘How do you mean, Hieron? Are you telling me that eros for paidika does not grow (emphūesthai) in a tyrant (sc. as it does in other people)? How is it then that you are in love with Dailokhos ...?’ Hieron said ... ‘My passion (erān) for Dailokhos is for what human nature perhaps compels us to want from the beautiful, but I have a very strong desire to attain the object of my passion (sc. only) with his love and consent.’
This ‘perhaps’ must be understood in the light of a view, put forward by the earnest young Araspas in Xen. Cyr. v 1.9-17, that to speak of being ‘compelled’ to eros by beauty is an immoral evasion; it is doubtful whether Xenophon entirely shared this view, for he describes later how Araspas, put in charge of a beautiful woman, ‘was overcome by eros, hardly surprisingly’ (ibid. 1.19) and in consequence (vi 1.31) ‘was compelled to try to persuade her to have intercourse with him’. It must be remembered that anankē, ‘compulsion’, ‘necessity’, and its adjective anankaios do not always denote what is absolutely inevitable and inescapable, but sometimes forces which can be defeated by resolute resistance or predicaments from which resilience and intelligence provide an escape.64 This does not, however, affect the point that the terms in which reference is made to heterosexual and to homosexual emotion are the same. Simon’s adversary (Lys. iii 4), embarrassed at having to describe his homosexual entanglement at an age of which discretion would be expected, says ‘It is in all men to have a desire’.
Apart from the ‘nature’ (phusis) of the human species, each human being has his own ‘nature’, i.e. the way in which he has developed mentally and physically; and whatever characteristic anyone has, he is likely to have it more than some people and less than others. Greek recognition that some people are more homosexual than others need not surprise us. It is clearest in the story put into the mouth of Aristophanes by Plato in Smp. 189c-193d: human beings were originally double, each with two heads, four legs, two genital systems, and so on, but Zeus ordered their bisection, and ever since (as commonly in the folktale genre, the time-scale is ignored and the distinction between species and individual is blurred)65 each of us goes round seeking his or her ‘other half’ and falling in love with it when we find it. In this story the products of an original double male are homosexual males (191e-192c), who marry and beget children ‘under the compulsion of custom, without natural inclination’ (192b); the products of an original double female are homosexual females (191e); and the rest are heterosexual, the products of an original male-female. The variability of people in respect of their sexual orientation (genetically determined, in Aristophanes’ story) is incidentally recognised in Aiskhines’ reference to the ‘extraordinary enthusiasm’ of Misgolas for homosexual relations (§41) and in Xenophon’s use of tropos – ‘way’, ‘character’, ‘disposition’, ‘inclination’ – in describing the behaviour of the extravagant paiderastēs Episthenes (cf. p. 51); cf. also Aiskhines’ use of prohairesis (p. 32). Aiskhines contemplates (§140) substituting tropos for ‘eros’ as the appropriate word for the emotion which inspired Harmodios and Aristogeiton (it is, of course, to his advantage if he can deprive the defence of such support as it might gain from the magic names of the tyrannicides):
Those whose valour has remained unsurpassed, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, were educated by their chaste and law-abiding – is ‘eros’ the right word, or ‘inclination’? – to be men of such a kind that anyone who praises their deeds is felt never to do justice, in his encomium, to what they accomplished.
(It should however be mentioned that Aiskhines may have written ‘law-abiding eros, or however one should call it, to be men ... ’).66
Aphrodite and Eros are both, in somewhat different ways, personifications of the forces which make us desire people and fall in love with them. In so far as the term aphrodīsia, lit., ‘things of Aphrodite’, denotes sexual intercourse, and the verb aphrodīsiazein is ‘have sexual intercourse’, there is some justification for the generalisation that genital activity as a whole is the province of Aphrodite and the obsessive focussing of desire on one person, which we call ‘falling in love’, the province of Eros. Not surprisingly, the distinction, though implicit in much Greek literature, is nowhere made explicit, nor was there a consistent Greek view of the relation between Aphrodite and Eros as personal deities; in the archaic period Eros is regarded as having come into being at a much earlier stage of the world’s history than Aphrodite, the classical period tends to treat him as her minister or agent, and in Hellenistic literature he is often her spoilt and unruly son. Moreover, the notion that the female deity inspires heterosexual passion and the male deity homosexual appears only as a Hellenistic conceit, in Meleagros 18:
Aphrodite, female (sc. deity), ignites the fire that makes one mad for a woman, but Eros himself holds the reins of male desire. Which way am I to incline? To the boy or to his mother? I declare that even Aphrodite herself will say: ‘The bold lad is the winner!’
In Theognis 1304, 1319f. the beauty of the eromenos is a ‘gift of Aphrodite’, and among the Hellenistic epigrams we find several (e.g. Asklepiades 1, Meleagros 119) in which it is Aphrodite who has caused a man to fall in love with a boy.
Aphrodīsia can denote homosexual copulation, as in Xen. Hiero 1.29 (contrasting paidika aphrodīsia with ‘child-begetting aphrodīsia’), 1.36, Mem. i 3.8. Indeed, a general reference, to aphrodīsia may be followed by a homosexual exemplification and by no other. So Xen. Ages. 5.4, speaking of the superhuman self-restraint which characterised the Spartan king Agesilaos in respect of aphrodīsia, chooses as his example an occasion on which the king avoided kissing a certain young Persian, despite the offence given by this failure to comply with Persian custom,67 because he had fallen in love with the youth and feared to take any step which might arouse his emotion further. If Agesilaos thought homosexual relations wrong, evidently Xenophon did not think the impulse to those relations a blemish in a character for which he had an unreserved admiration. Compare Xen. Oec. 12.13f.:
‘In my opinion,’ said Iskhomakhos, ‘those who are distraught over sex, (duserōtes tōn aphrodīsiōn, ‘in love, to their misfortune, with sexual intercourse’) ‘cannot be taught to care about anything more than that. It is not easy to discover any hope or concern more pleasurable than concern for paidika ...’.
So too when sexual activity is considered in conjunction with expenditure and enjoyment,68 as in Xen. Anab. ii 6.6:
Klearkhos was as willing to spend money on war as (sc. others are willing to spend it) on a paidika or some other pleasure.
Xen. Mem. ii 1.21-33 presents a version of a famous allegorical composition in which Prodikos represented Virtue and Vice69 as offering Herakles a choice between two ways of life. In 1.24 Vice says:
You will give no thought to war and action, but will pass your time considering what agreeable food or drink you can find, or what sight or sound would give you delight, or what smell or touch, and what paidika’s company would make you happy.
All three of these passages might have said ‘hetaira’ instead of ‘paidika’; but they do not. A curiosity may be added from a catalogue (inscribed in the late fourth century B.C.) of miraculous cures experienced by sufferers who slept in the sanctuary of Asklepios at Epidauros, IG iv 12.. 121. 104:
A man (sc. had) a stone in his penis. He saw a dream. He thought he was having intercourse with a beautiful boy. Having an ejaculation,70 he expelled the stone, and took it up and went out with it in his hands [sic].
‘Boy or woman’ (in that order, since the Greeks said ‘children and women’ in non-sexual contexts also) sometimes occurs as if difference of orientation in the sexual appetite were not important. Thus in Xen. Anab. iv 1.14, when the commanders have decided that all captives must be turned loose:
The soldiers obeyed, except for individual misappropriations through desire for a boy or a woman amo
ng the beautiful (sc. captives).
In Pl. Laws 840a the argument of the context virtually dictates a reversal of order (cf. p. 166), but the presence of ‘boy’ with ‘woman’is still noteworthy:
Have we not all heard of Ikkos of Taras because of the event he won at Olympia, and his other victories too? Because of his determination to win ..., it is said, he never touched a woman, nor a boy either, in the whole period when he was at the peak of his training.
The readiness of a man to turn in either direction can hardly be more plainly expressed than by Meleagros 18, cited above, and other epigrammatists speak of their own or others’ experience as varied, e.g. Kallimakhos 11 :
Kallignotos swore to Ionis that no one, man or woman, would ever be dearer to him than she ... But now he is heated by male fire, and the poor girl ... isn’t in the picture any more.
Compare: Asklepiades 37, lamenting that the ‘male fires’ which now torment him are as much stronger than ‘female eros’ as men are stronger than women; Meleagros 94, dismissing Theron and Apollodotos now that it is ‘female eros’ which finds favour with him (the ‘squeeze of a hairy arse’ he leaves to ‘herdsmen who mount their goats’); Anon. HE 1, the despair of a man who has had one love-affair with a hetaira, one with a virgin girl, and now one with a youth, from which he has only ‘looks and empty hopes’.
References to ‘desire for the beautiful’ are necessarily ambiguous, since the genitive plural has the same form for both genders, and in some other circumstances a masculine can do duty for both. We find the masculine nominative plural used even in contexts such as Xen. Cyr. v 1.14, ‘hoi kaloi do not compel others to fall in love with them’, where the occasion of the statement is heterosexual and its exemplification is:
Good men desire gold and good horses and beautiful women, but are nevertheless able to restrain themselves and not lay hands on any of these wrongfully.
Since the segregation of women was a feature of most Greek communities, so that women and girls of citizen family would not very often be seen in public by men, and hetairai who knew their business would tend to imitate this discretion in order not to cheapen themselves (cf. p. 88), the publicity associated with modern ‘pin-ups’ belonged to males rather than females. Anon. HE 33, addressing a male whose figure and charm are said (line 5) to ‘subdue bachelors’ might be interpreted (if we wished, even now, to try to play down the extent of Greek homosexuality) as referring to his effect on some bachelors, but Anon. 17, imploring a Persian called Aribazos (‘more beautiful than Beauty’ in 18) not to’melt the whole (sc. city) of Knidos’, takes no account of such limitation. In Asklepiades 20 a girl called Dorkion, who is philephēbos, ‘fond of young men’ (ephēbos, strictly speaking, is a male of 18 or 19), is described as exploiting homosexual tastes:
Dorkion ... knows, like a young boy, how to launch the swift shaft of Aphrodite who welcomes all, flashing desire upon71 the (sc. beholder’s) eye; with a hat slung over her shoulder, her (sc. young man’s) cloak revealed a naked thigh.
A male who has one or more erastai and is accustomed to the attentions and admiration of older males may himself fall in love with a girl, and there is no suggestion in such a connection that he suffers an internal conflict greater than that of someone operating entirely within the heterosexual field or entirely within the homosexual. Compare Meleagros 61:
The exquisite Diodoros, casting flame into bachelors, has been caught by the coquettish eyes of Timarion, and the bitter-sweet shaft72 of Eros is in him. This is a miracle that I see: fire is consumed by fire and blazes.
In Theokritos 2.44f. a girl deserted by her young lover casts a spell to bring him back, declaring to Artemis:
Whether a woman lies beside him, or a man, may he be as forgetful of them as, they say, Theseus was ... of Ariadne.
She says ‘man’ (anēr), not ‘youth’ or ‘boy’, and we are probably meant to understand (cf. however, p. 86 n.44) that he may have passed from an active role in relation to her either to another active role with a woman or to a passive role with a man. Timarkhos, according to Aiskhines (§§42, 75), was in just such a position while supported as an expensive male prostitute by Misgolas; his money went on luxurious food, gambling, hetairai and girl-musicians, and later in life he allegedly displayed a highly-developed heterosexual appetite, pursuing other men’s wives during a term of office on Andros (§107) and squandering dishonestly acquired money on a famous hetaira (§115).
All these considerations suggest that Aiskhines’ antithesis (§185) between ‘according to nature’ and ‘contrary to nature’ cannot rest upon a simple assignation of homosexuality to the category of the unnatural, and a different explanation must be sought. One is ready to hand: the common Greek belief that women lack the moral insight and firmness of purpose which enable men to resist the temptations of safety, comfort and pleasure,73 coupled with a belief that women enjoy sexual intercourse more intensely than man. Given also the assumption that the passive role in male homosexuality is not physically enjoyable (cf. p. 52), it was deducible that while women have a natural inclination to adultery (indeed, this deduction was an important rationalisation of the sexual segregation which prevented women from coming into contact with potential lovers), males have no such natural inclination to homosexual submission. Equally, the prostitution of women could be seen as conforming with a ‘naturally’ subordinate and dependent role of women vis-à-vis men, whereas the man who chooses a prostitute’s role subordinates himself ‘unnaturally’ to other men. All the evidence which tends to support the hypothesis that the Greeks regarded male homosexual desire as natural concerns the active partner, and we have yet to consider the abundant evidence that for them the differentiation between the active and the passive role in homosexuality was of profound importance.
2. Male and female physique
The Athenian Kritias, who was killed in 403 B.C., is quoted by a writer of Roman date as having said (B48) that
in males, the most beautiful appearance (eidos, ‘shape’, ‘form’, ‘type’) is that which is female; but in females, the opposite.
The context of his statement is unknown, and it is by no means certain that he was speaking of human beings rather than of horses or dogs, animals in which Greeks of good family were much interested. If his reference was primarily or exclusively to humans, or if he intended a generalisation which could be extended to humans, he may have meant only that human males were most admired for their beauty before their beards were grown and that tallness was an admired attribute in women.74 What is perhaps more important is that Kritias, whose standpoint in politics, morals and religion separated him from the majority of his fellow-citizens,75 cannot be treated as the spokesman for any city, period or class, and his statement cannot be used, unless it is firmly supported by independent evidence, to show that female characteristics in a youth or boy were a stimulus to homosexual desire.
In modern popular humour, despite much of the evidence furnished by our everyday acquaintance with homosexual men,76 the homosexual stereotype is extremely persistent: a man of delicate features and slight physique, imitating women in his stance, gestures, movements and voice, and therefore appropriately denoted by such terms as ‘fairy’ or ‘pansy’. Timarkhos is nowhere described in Aiskhines’ vilification as effeminate in appearance or manner, but as ‘excelling others in appearance’ (§75), hōraios (§42; cf. §126) and eusarkos (§41). ‘Excelling ...’ is a phrase used also of a youth with whom (iii 162) Demosthenes had a homosexual relationship. Hōraios, ‘at the right stage of growth (for ...)’, applicable to any living thing (animal or vegetable), denotes, when applied to humans, the age at which one is most attractive and desirable, and in modern Greek has replaced kalos in the sense ‘beautiful’, ‘pretty’, ‘fine’ (kalos having become a general word for ‘good’).77 Eusarkos, analysable as ‘having good flesh’, is an uncommon word, coupled by Xen. Lac. 5.8 with ‘of good colour’ and ‘physically strong’, contrasted with ‘bloated and ugly and feeble’ (cf. the verb eus
ōmatein, lit., ‘be in a good state of body’, i.e. ‘be big and strong’). Later in life (§26) Timarkhos, when he threw back his cloak in the course of a passionate speech in the assembly, revealed a figure ‘in bad condition and ugly, through drunkenness and his disgusting way of life’; the latter phrase most naturally refers to his gluttony and heterosexual over-indulgence (cf. §§42, 75). Speaking in general terms, Aiskhines takes it for granted that the boys with whom men fall in love, and over whom they fight in rivalry (even when the boys themselves are disinclined to ‘grant favours’ to the winner), are those who would be regarded by the public at large, of either sex and any age or ‘inclination’, as exceptionally good-looking (§§136, 155-7); they include outstanding athletes (§§156f.), and since erastai are attracted to the gymnasia (§§135, 138; cf. p. 54) it seems that a sun-tanned skin and good muscular development must have been regarded as attractive attributes. This hypothesis is supported by particular cases at periods earlier and later than Aiskhines: the young Autolykos, whose beauty, ‘like a light in the dark’, dumbfounded all the guests at the party described in Xen. Smp. 1.8-10, had just won the pankration (a ferocious blend of boxing and wrestling) at the Panathenaic Games (ibid. 1.2); Alkaios of Messene 9 prays for the Olympic victory of a certain Peithanor, described hyperbolically as ‘a second son of Aphrodite’, expresses the wish that Zeus may not be tempted to take him up to Olympos in place of Ganymede, and prays also that the poet may be rewarded by ‘like-mindedness’ on the part of the ‘divine boy’; and the author of Anon. HE 30 boasts of kissing a boy ‘smeared all over with blood ‘ after a victory in boxing.