by K J Dover
Suspicion that there may have been a certain shift in taste towards effeminate-looking males during the fourth century (perhaps even somewhat earlier) derives some support from a consideration of the history of human shape, stance and movement in vase-painting. Down to the middle of the fifth century the most striking and consistent ingredients of the ‘approved’ male figure (cf. p. 6) are: broad shoulders, a deep chest, big pectoral muscles, big muscles above the hips, a slim waist, jutting buttocks and stout thighs and calves. Examples of this general schema are: B76*, B271*, B342*, B502* (courted youths); B486* (youth copulating with erastes); R12 (young athlete); R55* (Theseus); R305* (victorious boy athlete); R313*, R326, R332 (young athletes with javelin or discus); R336*, R458*, R494* (pinup youths); R340; R701, R783* (Apollo); R348*, R833* (Ganymede); R365 (Herakles); R406* (boy or youth pursued by Poseidon); R716 (youth courting boy); R737 (youth kneeling on one knee). For particular features add: thick thighs in B20 (runner), B526 (youth), R1115 (young athlete); thick thighs and calves in R1067 (running youth); very deep chest in R1047* (boy or youth). Confirmatory negative examples are B80*, satyrs with fat paunches, and R261, in which a fat youth protests against the reproaches and mockery of his fellows. The relative importance of face and body is neatly illustrated by Pl. Chrm. 154cd;
‘What do you think of the young man, Socrates?’ said Khairephon.
‘Doesn’t he have a handsome face?’
‘Marvellously so!’ I said.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘if he’ll only take his cloak off, you’ll forget he has a face at all, he’s so overwhelmingly beautiful to look at’ (lit., ‘all-beautiful as to his form’).
The thighs seem to have been a powerful stimulus, to judge from Sophokles fr. 320 (Ganymede’s thighs ‘set Zeus aflame’) and Aiskhylos fr. 228 (Achilles, bereaved, recalls the thighs of Patroklos); cf. pp.197f.
Naked males greatly outnumber naked females in archaic and early classical vase-painting. In depicting the female figure the painter sometimes observes the differences of configuration of hip, abdomen and groin which are determined by the difference between the male and the female pelvis. Examples of good observation are: R8, R321, R571, R671, R805, R809, R917, R930, R1107, RL2, RS26,* RS81. On many occasions, however, male and female bodies are distinguishable only by the presence or absence of the breasts and the external genitals; R712*, in which we see men and women together, is a good example (note also the women’s massive calves), and very broad shoulders and deep chests are also conspicuous in the women portrayed in R20, R86, R152, R476, R733, R813, R938. In particular, women may be represented as having the characteristically male bulge of muscle above the hip-bone; the girl musician in R309 is the most striking example (note also the steepness of her groin and the aggressiveness of her stance and movement), and compare, in addition to R20 (etc.), cited above, R682* (a girl titillated by a man), R926 and R1135* (this last is only a fragment, but the torso which appears on it combines female breasts with exaggeratedly male hips).
Each painter seems to have adopted a formula for the face and adhered to it consistently so long as he was portraying deities and humans and had no motive for introducing the funny or the fearful. These formulae show remarkably slight variation over a long period and a great number of painters; all approve of a forehead of moderate height and a straight nose, with the lower lip tending to be full but not wide, the chin rather deep and rounded, and the eye commanding but (after the end of the sixth century) of normal size. Satyrs, by contrast, have either a receding hairline or a wrinkled brow under a shaggy mat of hair, bulging eyes, very snub noses and big thick lips (e.g. B80*, R6, R235) while comically ugly men (like comic masks) may have one or more of the features of satyrs (e.g.BB16*, RS163) or, alternatively, heavy hooked noses and bony jaws (e.g. RS159, RS171).
Although some black-figure vase-painters distinguished between female and beardless male faces by giving the latter wider and bolder eyes, it was normal at all periods to give both sexes exactly the same facial contours; see, for example, R659* (Orpheus and maenads), R750* (youth and women), R958* (youths and women). It was also normal practice to make both sexes the same height; R303* is unusual in showing a youth as much taller than the girl whom he embraces (cf.R514). The almost universal absence of hair on the torso of either sex in vase-paintings (exceptions are the youth of R12 and the bearded man of R455*) reflects not so much an assimilation of men to women as a consistent tendency to assimilate adult males to young males; it is apparent also in the virtual absence of pubic hair, understandable enough in pictures of Ganymede (e.g. R348*, R692, R829*) but unrealistic in older youths and youthful heroes (e.g. R55*, R57, R387).
It is arguable that whereas down to the mid-fifth century women were commonly assimilated to men in vase-painting, thereafter men were increasingly assimilated to women. This reversal of assimilation is particularly noticeable in the relaxed stance in which the weight is off one foot and the torso thus not quite vertical. People can sit and stand and walk as they please, or as the conventions of their time require – I do not suggest that physical differences between the sexes determine a difference of posture – but in considering posture in Greek vase-painting it is not practicable to treat the shape of the hips in one context, the overall impression conveyed by the figure in another, and the distribution of subcutaneous fat in a third. (I leave out of account early red-figure cups in which what may seem to us curiously affected poses should be regarded as experiments in composition within a circular frame [e.g. R454*], though the similarity of treatment of a woman and a youth in R471* and R472* is worth noticing.)78 In R958* a youth, though his feet are planted firmly enough on the ground, thrusts out one hip which is of distinctly female shape, and the painter has shown the line from hip to groin only perfunctorily. Standing or seated male figures, especially youths and youthful deities, become indistinguishable in pose from female: RL4, RL64, RS26* (man and woman), RS56, RS60, RS64 (compare the woman in RS77), RS68 (compare the woman in RS69), RS85 (Dionysos; compare the woman in RS89), RS109. Heroes may stand in ‘effeminate’ poses and yet have strongly male hips, e.g. RS28, RS32 (Herakles), but the hips of the young heroes Orestes and Pylades in RS101 are female, and so too a man in RS27. The male belly may also be rounded, slightly but yet enough to suggest a sheltered and unathletic life, as in the Orestes of RS31 and the youth of RS73; cf. Dionysos and a satyr in RS52. Dionysos may give us an overall impression of soft plumpness (e.g. RL32), and this is a general characteristic of much Italiote depiction of Eros and similar supernatural beings: RS16, RS113, RS129, RS133, RS137. Some of these Erotes tend to hermaphroditism (e.g. RS12*, RS13), and RS20* is unquestionably hermaphrodite, with breasts and external genitals fully developed.79 From the early classical period we may collect sporadic examples of youths whose pectoral muscles are portrayed in such a way as to suggest women’s breasts, e.g. R219* (youth), R1137, R946 (armed youth), R1119 (youth arming with vigorous movement), but given the great difference of pose and action, these examples can hardly be considered forerunners of the general ‘feminisation’ to be observed later. It is in fact the general trend of later vase-painting (cf. p. 151), in which even satyrs become tame and respectable and furies no longer frighten, which forbids us to make too much of the effeminacy of its male figures; technical concern with the portrayal of the body in relaxed poses was common to vase-painting and sculpture, and every art-form has a degree of autonomy which turns the artist in the direction of interesting motifs explored by his competitors or immediate predecessors and absolves him from giving faithful expression to successive changes of taste in the general public. Nevertheless, even if we rule out as irrelevant to the history of homosexuality the shift of interest from vigour and starkness to repose (or to movement within billowing drapery), we must not ignore the anatomical predilections which culminate in the portrayál of hermaphrodites, and we should take into account the possibility that in the fourth century effeminate boys and youths may have stimulated homosexual desire more often than they would hav
e done a century and a half earlier.
3. Masculine and feminine styles
Attic comedy generally assumes that a man who has female bodily characteristics (e.g. sparse facial hair) or behaves in ways categorised by Athenian society as feminine (e.g. wearing pretty clothes) also seeks to play a woman’s part sexually in his relation with other men and is sought by them for this purpose. However, the over-simplifications and stark antitheses of comedy require treatment as ingredients of the comic world (Chapter III C) – a world as conventional, in its own way, as the heroic world of tragedy – and in the present section attention will be paid to the implications of other types of evidence.
When Aiskhines describes Misgolas as having ‘an extraordinary enthusiasm’ for homosexual relationships (§41), he adds, ‘and accustomed always to have around him singers’ (kitharōidoi, ‘singers to the accompaniment of the lyre’) ‘and musicians’ (kitharistai, ‘lyre-players’). Extant citations from fourth-century comedy contain three references to Misgolas. One of them, Timokles fr. 30, tells us only that Misgolas was ‘excited by young men in the flower of their youth’, but Alexis fr. 3 is more interesting:
Mother, I beg you, don’t threaten me with Misgolas! I’m no kitharōidos!
There is also an amusing play on words in Antiphanes fr. 26.12-18:
And who’ll be the first to buy this conger-eel, that’s grown a backbone thicker than Sinope’s? Misgolas doesn’t eat them at all. But here’s a dab (kitharos) – if he sees that, he won’t be able to keep his hands off it. People don’t realise how extraordinarily stuck he is on kitharōidoi.
These comic poets were still alive and active at the time of the prosecution of Timarkhos, but the dates of the three plays from which the citations are drawn are not precisely known; it may be, therefore, that we have to do not with independent confirmation of what Aiskhines says, but with comic exploitation of his allegations. Two generations earlier, Euripides represented in Antiope (a famous play in antiquity, but known to us only from fragments and citations) an argument between two legendary brothers, Amphion and Zethos. Amphion (the supreme kitharōidos of legend) is devoted to the arts and intellectual pursuits, while Zethos is a hard, tough farmer and warrior. Zethos reproaches Amphion (frr. 184, 185, 187):
This Muse of yours is disturbing, useless, idle, drunken, spendthrift.
…
Nature gave you a stout heart, yet you flaunt an outward appearance that mimics a woman ... Give you a shield, and you would not know what to do with it, nor could you defend others by bold and manly counsel80
…
If a man possessed of wealth takes no thought for his house but leaves it neglected, and delights in music and pursues that always, he will achieve nothing for his family and city and will be no good to his friends. Inborn qualities are lost when a man is worsted by the delights of pleasure.81
Amphion in his reply (frr. 190, 192, 198, 200) praises music and song, decries a philistine absorption in the management of an estate, and declares that brain does more to save a city than brawn.82 The opposition between toil, combined with athletic and military training, and artistic or intellectual pursuits is a thread that runs through the history of Greek literature; obviously it is always open to people like Zethos to reproach their adversaries for effeminacy, since music and singing do little to develop the muscles of the legs, and their indulgence does not help to accumulate wealth.83 Phaidros in Pl. Smp. 179d is scornful of Orpheus, who according to the legend was not willing to die himself in order to be with his dead wife in the underworld; he was ‘faint-hearted, as you’d expect of a kitharōidos’. Misgolas’s predilection for musicians may imply a distaste on his part for young athletes and warriors of the kind portrayed in earlier vase-painting.
The association of the lyre with youthful male beauty is not uncommon in painting. The youth in the wall-painting at Paestum has one, and so has Eros himself in (e.g.) R527, R667, R1143. Compare: R27*, where a boy with a lyre is cuddled by a youth; R603* and R847, where Hyakinthos, holding a lyre, is pursued and grasped by Zephyros; R634, a man in pursuit of a boy with a lyre; R684*, a man putting out his hand to touch the armpit of a youth who brandishes a lyre in self-defence; R716; R875, a man offering a strigil to a youth with a lyre; R912, Tithonos brandishing his lyre to beat off Dawn. It must however be remembered that instruction in playing the lyre and singing to its accompaniment was one of the main ingredients in the secondary education of boys at Athens; that is clear from Ar. Clouds 964-72 and Pl. Prt. 326a, and in Pl. Lys. 209b it is assumed that the young Lysis is asked by his parents to take up his lyre and sing to them (cf. Clouds 1354-6). We should therefore expect as a matter of course to find adolescent males often portrayed with lyres, and at the same time to find that men of homosexual propensities would sometimes be specially attracted to musicians because of the strong association between music and adolescence.84
One further passage of the Timarkhos speech is relevant. Demosthenes, it appears, laboured under the disadvantage of the nickname ‘Batalos’, which was interpreted by Hellenistic commentators as ‘arse’ in a passage of Eupolis (fr. 82; context unknown). He claimed (says Aiskhines i 126) that it was a nickname given him by his nurse when he was a boy (‘sit-upon’? ‘bumsy’?); if the name was originally ‘Battalos’, and was distorted maliciously by his enemies, it will have meant ‘babbler’, ‘prattler’. Anyway, Aiskhines attributes it (§131) to Demosthenes’ ‘unmanliness and kinaidiā’ as a boy (cf. ii 99, ‘certain shameful practices [aiskhrourgiā] and kinaidiā’). ‘Unmanliness’ is a charge repeatedly brought against Demosthenes by Aiskhines in later speeches, with particular reference to lack of courage: ‘unmanly and womanish in temper’ (ii 179), ‘unmanly deserter from the ranks’ (iii 155); cf. ii 139, iii 160, 209, 247. Vague as kinaidiā may be, there is little doubt that Aiskhines means in i 131 and ii 99 to accuse Demosthenes of homosexual submission, and his argument in the former passage is that present facts justify the rumours about Demosthenes’past:
If anyone took those dainty little coats and soft shirts off you ... and took them round for the jurors to handle, I think they’d be quite unable to say, if they hadn’t been told in advance, whether they had hold of a man’s clothing or a woman’s.
Here ‘unmanliness’ and feminine clothes are unmistakably linked with passive homosexuality, and indirectly with feminine physique, in so far as one would expect below-average muscular development and abnormal sensitivity to discomfort and privation, expressible in gesture and movement, to characterise a man of the type described by Aiskhines.
The superficial implication of Aiskhines iii 162 (sixteen years after the Timarkhos case) is that an active homosexual role was combined in Demosthenes with effeminate tastes in clothing and with various kinds of ‘unmanliness’:
There is a certain Aristion, a Plataean ..., who as a youth was outstandingly good-looking and lived for a long time in Demosthenes’ house. Allegations about the part he was playing (lit., ‘undergoing or doing what’) there vary, and it would be most unseemly for me to talk about it.
That Aristion should be a Plataean, not an Athenian, is interesting (cf. Part A Section 3); the alternatives on which Aiskhines incites the jury to prurient speculation (of the kind, ‘Who did what to whom?’)85 are first, that Demosthenes himself was sometimes the passive partner, and second, that if Demosthenes was active, he was exploiting the readiness of a shameless youth to prostitute himself as Misgolas exploited Timarkhos. That Demosthenes was actually an erastes of the youth in the sense in which Aiskhines himself claimed to be erōtikos (§136) would not have been an allegation by which Aiskhines could expect to damage the reputation of an opponent (cf. §171 and ii 166, discussed on p. 46). Ridicule and vilification in the lawcourts were very close in technique to what we find in comedy, and did not exclude malevolent fictions,86 but the passages quoted above are significant for popular opinion in their exploitation, for the purposes of practical politics, of an association of effeminacy with passive homosexuality.<
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Since males and females are not born different colours, the colour of their skin from childhood onwards depends on their exposure to the sun, and that in turn is determined by the activities encouraged or discouraged by the society to which they belong. It is noteworthy that in the Tomb of the Diver at Paestum, painted in the early fifth century, the youth whose beauty has proved too much for the man lying on the couch with him is as dark-skinned as the man;87 and the painter had a freedom to choose his colours which was denied to the maker of decorated pottery. In conformity with the Greek insistence that young males should exercise out of doors and females stay out of the sun (the women in Ar. Ecclesiazusae, intending, to disguise themselves as men and pack the assembly, have to do their best to turn brown [62-4]), it was normal practice in archaic black-figure vase-painting to make men and youths black but women white; in red-figure (with few exceptions, notably in the fourth century) males and females alike are reddish-brown. The black-figure contrast is particularly striking in B634*, where ten pairs of copulating men and women exemplify the differentiation of males and females as black and white respectively, but are accompanied by a man and a youth engaged in intercrural copulation, both painted black. Exceptions are sporadic in black-figure, and no doubt variously motivated: an Attic geometric (seventh century) depiction of Odysseus and his companions blinding the Cyclops has the faces of all three light-coloured, the bodies of the companion and the Cyclops black, and the body of Odysseus light within a heavy black outline;88 a white-painted youth runs with black-painted men in B686.89 In some cases the figure-painting leaves some room for doubt about the sex of the persons depicted (e.g. B382), and in others (e.g. B518) uncertainties can be created by patchy loss of the white surface. Archaic and early classical vase-painting thus does not offer adequate grounds for supposing that a pale skin, held to be desirable in women, was also desirable in young males. The evidence from the red-figure vase-painting of the fourth century, in which white was freely used for the figures of women, is more equivocal.90 The boy Eros himself, with whom (as a supreme compliment) a poet may compare a very desirable human boy (e.g. Alkaios of Messene 9, Asklepiades 21, 38, Meleagros 82, 83, 89), is white in RL35 (Thetis too is white, but the other female figures and, of course, Peleus are brown) and RL41 (so too Pompe, but Dionysos is brown). Dionysos, a bearded god in the earlier period, is later conceived as youthful and beardless,91 and seems to be painted white in RL52.