Greek Homosexuality

by K J Dover

  This classification certainly applies to R934*, where a man at a sacrifice puts his hand on the shoulder of a passing naked youth, who does not look disposed to stay; in R692, on the other hand, where Hermes puts a hand on the shoulder of Ganymede, Hermes is acting on behalf of Zeus. Extending a hand to the armpit of the eromenos is a more tentative approach, as in R684*, though the boy there takes it badly and brandishes his lyre in self-defence, like Tithonos in R912. The same approach is used to a woman in R35, R628, R682*; in the third of those the woman is naked and the man is perhaps aiming at one of her breasts rather than her armpit. The erastes commits himself less directly by affectionately putting his hand to the head (B262) or face (B166) of the eromenos, as a mother does to her child’s (R741), a master to a good young slave’s (R480),124 a man to a woman’s (R623, where both are seated on a bed; cf. the excited satyr and woman in B566), one woman to another’s (CE34*), a youth to his father’s as the latter departs on military service (B79), or the god Dionysos to his mother Semele’s (B152). The beds on which guests lay at a symposium, commonly two to a bed, were equally adapted for homosexual and heterosexual approaches, with the difference that the eromenos was the fellow-guest of the erastes, whereas the hetaira or female dancer or musician must be got on to the bed before serious embracing and titillating (e.g. B338) could begin. The man’s arm round the youth in C42 (late seventh century B.C.) would be interpreted by any reasonable person as comradely if the erotic pictures of the following two hundred years were not there to influence our interpretation. In R795 and R797 (men and youths at symposia) the apparent touching may be no more than the gestures of intimate conversation, but there is no doubt about the wall-painting at Paestum:125 overcome with desire for the youth who lies on the same bed, the man puts his hand round the back of the youth’s head and tries to bring their faces together for a kiss, while the youth, whose expression gives nothing away as he gazes at the wide eyes and parted lips of the man (the man on the next bed looks more startled), puts out his hand in a gesture of dissuasion. R283* shows a youth at a symposium embraced by a man from behind in an ardent stranglehold while he is handing wine to another man and cannot wriggle free without spilling the wine. In R200* a youth has thrown one leg over the waist of the youth who lies below him, and lays a hand affectionately on his head; as so often, there is a heterosexual analogue (R82*) in which a youth has thrown one leg over a woman piper, one arm embracing her round the neck and the other hand fingering her left breast.

  The most characteristic configuration of homosexual courtship in vase-painting is what Beazley calls the ‘up and down’ position;126 one of the erastes’ hands touches the eromenos’s face, the other moves towards the eromenos’s genitals (e.g. B426, B578). It is interesting to note that the earliest example of this approach, CE33* (seventh century B.C.), is heterosexual; the woman is fully clothed, and she grasps the wrists of the youth to push his hands away. The eromenos in the ‘up and down’ scenes is usually naked, or at least has allowed his cloak to fall aside and expose the front of his body. In B102 one youth offers no resistance to being touched (he holds a spear, butt on ground, in one hand, and a garland in the other), while the youth in the scene on the other side of the vessel grasps the man’s wrist in restraint. Both resistance and non-resistance are attested in the long series of scenes which runs from the second quarter of the sixth century to the second quarter of the fifth.127 Non-resistance seems to predominate among the pairs in B510, and the erastes of R651* (the upper part of the picture is lost) has clearly gained one important objective, for he is handling the penis of the eromenos as if shaking hands with it. One youth in B250* expostulates, but does not protect his genitals from the touch of the man’s fingers or from the man’s (horizontal) erection hovering an inch away; a youth in B271* grasps the man’s left wrist – that is to say, the hand that approaches his face – while permitting his genitals to be touched. The youth in B65* puts his hand over his genitals as a shield, but the normal defence is to hold the erastes by the wrists: B64, B342*, B458, B558. R463 has the inscribed dialogue, ‘Let me!’ – ‘Stop it!’ (cf. p. 6). The pairs of youths and boys in R196* illustrate different stages of seduction admirably. In one pair, the boy tries to restrain the arm of the youth which has stolen tentatively to the back of his head. In another, the boy is close to surrender; he gazes up into the face of the youth and satisfies honour by taking hold of the youth’s right arm above the elbow, which does nothing to interrupt the dandling of his penis by the youth’s fingers. The most dramatic pair stands between those other two; here the youth sags at the knees, looking up in abject entreaty, his penis swollen and the fingers of his right hand spread despairingly, while the boy, chin high in a defiant pose, grips the arm of the youth hard and keeps it from its goal. What gives this picture its peculiar interest is that it is matched on the other side of the vessel by heterosexual pairs, where the atmosphere is quite different, though in an unexpected way: the youths and women do not touch each other at all, but seem immersed in a patient, wary conversation, in which a slight gesture or an inflexion of the voice conveys as much as the straining of an arm in the other scene.128 Compared with its homosexual counterpart, representation of a male hand moving towards the female genitals is not so common: R.62; R627, youths groping; R619, R1079, satyrs crudely molesting women; B610, an ‘up and down’ approach by a man to a naked woman who, like the women in R196*, has a flower and a garland. R295* shows a man at a symposium, on whose head a naked boy is putting a garland, seizing the opportunity to finger the boy’s penis; the boy may be a slave, and in any case the tone of the picture seems to be roguish humour. The word orkhipedizein is used in Ar. Birds 142 of a man’s attempt to seduce a neighbour’s young son; coupled there with ‘speak to ...’and ‘kiss’, it presumably means ‘take by the testicles’ (orkhipeda) and therefore denotes an action very similar to, but not identical with, the penis-tickling of the vase-paintings.

  As we saw in R196*, the response of the eromenos may be positively affectionate, and several other vases depict such a response. When a youth touches a man’s beard (B12, B594) he might possibly be making a gesture of supplication,129 ‘Leave me alone!’. But touching any part of the face is also affectionate (naturally enough; cf. p. 94), and in B598*, where one side of the vessel shows a boy touching a man’s beard, the other side shows him jumping up to throw his arms round the man’s neck (not a gesture of supplication). In the very early B16* a man and a youth kneel facing each other, the youth holding a bird and the man having one hand round the back of the youth’s neck; the circular interior surface on which the picture is painted encourages the artist to depict kneeling or loping figures, but it hardly compels him to do so, and this artist cannot have been unaware of the impression of affectionate acceptance which the picture conveys. A boy accepts the loving embrace of his erastes in R27*, R59*, R539; in the third of these the boy responds positively by putting his hand round the man’s head, as does the boy in R520*, while the man’s penis approaches his thighs. This affectionate gesture naturally occurs in heterosexual scenes: B302; R569; R630, in which the woman nevertheless coyly pushes the man’s hand away from her lap. We should hardly expect to find a homosexual analogue to RL68, where a naked woman pulls a man down towards her by the arm.

  The penis of the erastes is sometimes erect even before any bodily contact is established (e.g. B107, B250*), but that of the eromenos remains flaccid even in circumstances (e.g. R573) to which one would expect the penis of any healthy adolescent to respond willy-nilly. One youth in B250* looks like an exception to this generalisation, but his penis is perhaps pushed up by the man’s belly;130 in BB20 the crudity of the figure-painting makes interpretation difficult, but it is just possible that the penis of the eromenos in some of the courting pairs has been erected through titillation by the eras tes. The rule is (as we have observed from the literary evidence, pp. 52f.) that the eromenos may in the end decide to grant his erastes a favour, but he himself has no sensual incentive to do so
. This sōphrosunē on the part of the eromenos can be contrasted with its outrageous absence in ugly, earthy, drunken satyrs, amoral creatures who obey their impulses. They masturbate constantly (e.g. B31, B118, B126, B138, B178) if no living being with a suitable orifice is available, but prefer horses, mules or deer (B154, B336, B362, B554, CE20; cf. their purposeful approaches in B24, B122, B158, B287, B366, B378, R762); even the neck of a jar may be pressed into service (R148). By contrast, a youth masturbating (R173)131 or penetrating an animal (B354)132 is a rare subject. There is a certain tendency in comedy to treat masturbation as behaviour characteristic of slaves, who could not expect sexual outlets comparable in number or quality with those of free men. In Ar. Frogs 542-8 Dionysos imagines himself, in the role of a slave, as ‘clutching my chick-pea’ while watching his master ‘on Milesian blankets ... kissing a dancing-girl’, and then being struck in the face by the master. R18, in which a seated youth strikes a slave-boy whose penis is swollen, though not erect, may indicate that the painter (a hundred years earlier) had in mind such an incident.133 The two slaves in Knights 21-9 speak as connoisseurs of masturbation, and in Peace 289-91 the Persian general Datis, immortalised in popular song, is humorously assimilated to barbarian slaves by being depicted as enjoying masturbation in the afternoon siesta. Clouds 734 affords the only example of masturbation by a male citizen, and the performer there is the grossly rustic Strepsiades.134

  When courtship has been successful, the erastes and eromenos stand facing one another; the erastes grasps the eromenos round the torso, bows his head on to or even below the shoulder of the eromenos, bends his knees and thrusts his penis between the eromenos’s thighs just below the scrotum. Examples are: B114*, B130, B250*, B482, B486*, B534, R502*, R573*, in all of which the erastes is a man and the eromenos a youth.135 B458 is unusual in that the man looks up into the face of the youth, but perhaps the youth has not yet wholly surrendered (the vessel is damaged at a vital place) and the man is still at the stage of entreaty. In R520* the eromenos is a boy, and the man’s gaze is fixed on his throat, but the final position is not yet reached; the difference of stature is considerable, and the man has to put his half-crouching legs outside the boy’s. Gods favour the same method as men; in R603*, where Zephyros is flying off with Hyakinthos, both figures are clothed, but the painter has superimposed the god’s penis somehow thrusting its way between the thighs of Hyakinthos. The original specific word for this type of copulation was almost certainly diamērizein, i.e. ‘do ... between the thighs (mēroiy)’. When we first encounter the word in Aristophanes’ Birds it takes an object of either sex (male in 706, female in 669), and in 1254, where Peisetairos threatens Iris that he will ‘stick [her] legs in the air’ and diamērizein her, the reference is most naturally to any one of several modes of vaginal copulation from the front (cf. p. 101). The inscription on the bottom of B406, from the richest period of homosexual iconography, says apodos to diamērion, which is to be interpreted as ‘grant me’ (or ‘pay me back’) ‘the act of diamērizein’ (or ‘payment for diamerizein’) ‘which you promised’ (or ‘which is my due’).136

  In B538* a man and a youth, facing each other, are wrapped in a single cloak, and it may have been customary to veil homosexual copulation, standing or lying, in this way; cf. Asklepiades 1.3f., ‘when lovers are hidden by one cloak’, and Alkibiades’ desperate attempt (cf. p. 158) to seduce Socrates by creeping under his cloak. Action concealed is a dull subject for vase-painters, who prefer to show the erastes as inviting the eromenos into a cloak (e.g. B592) or to treat the cloak as a backcloth.137

  Homosexual anal copulation, by contrast with the intercrural mode, is portrayed by vase-painters only when it involves people of the same age-group (CW16, R223*, R954*; cf. p. 86), comasts (C74) or satyrs (R1127*). It is commonly believed at the present time to be the characteristic mode of homosexual consummation;138 in Greek comedy it is assumed, save in Birds 706 (see above), to be the only mode (cf. p. 145); and when Hellenistic poetry makes a sufficiently unambiguous reference to what actually happens on the bodily plane, we encounter only anal, never intercrural, copulation. So Dioskorides 7 recommends a friend to ‘delight in the rosy bum’ of his wife when she is pregnant, ‘treating her as male Aphrodite’, and Rhianos 1 rapturously apostrophises the ‘glorious bum’ of a boy, so beautiful that even old men itch for it. Meleagros 90 is addressed to a boy whose beauty has faded with maturity; a ‘hairy pelt’ now ‘declares war on those who mount from behind’, and Meleagros 94, expressing love for a woman, abjures his former eromenoi and ‘the squeeze of a hairy arse’. Homosexual fellation seems, so far as vase-painting is concerned, peculiar to satyrs (B271*, R1127*), though it appears from Polybios xii 13 that at the end of the fourth century Demokhares, a prominent figure in Athenian politics, was accused by a comic poet139 of ‘being hētairēkōs with the upper parts of his body, so that he was not a fit person to blow the sacred flame’. Aiskhines ii 88 imputes to Demosthenes ‘bodily impurity – even of the organs of speech’, and Krates of Thebes 1 is a learned joke about activity of this type. Masturbation of one male by another, envisaged by Meleagros 77, a fantasy in which eight eromenoi are simultaneously engaged with one erastes, is suggested – but not very clearly – by a black-figure fragment, B702.

  As we have seen, homosexual and heterosexual courting sequences, as portrayed by the vase-painters, are virtually identical; consummation, however, is radically different in so far as the intercrural mode is normal when the sexual object is male but unknown when it is female.140 Consideration of the modes of heterosexual copulation, and of the circumstances in which homosexual anal copulation is practised, threatened or symbolised, may throw some light on the terms in which the important distinction between prostitution and ‘legitimate eros’ was conventionally drawn.

  6. Dominant and subordinate roles

  When heterosexual intercourse is portrayed in vase-painting, we very commonly see the woman bending over (sometimes with her hands on the ground) while the man stands and penetrates her from behind and below: B134; B450; B518 (the man kneels); B666; B676; C78; CE36; CE37; R361; R434; R545* (the woman almost standing on her head); cf. B60 and B586, in which the man is closing up but has not yet penetrated. In some cases there can be no room for doubt that it is the woman’s anus, not her vagina, which is being penetrated;141 the clearest case is B51*, where the vulva, carefully depicted, is nowhere near the point of penetration, and in R543* the painter cannot have been unaware of the distance he has put between the woman’s pubic hair and the point of entry of the penis. In many other cases (e.g. B670, CP16, R577*) the point of entry is so high that is is reasonable to suppose that the painter had anal penetration in mind; unambiguous portrayal of vaginal penetration from the rear (e.g. B516, R490) is less common.142 The characteristic configuration – the woman bent over, the man standing behind her – is described in the late fifth century by a passage of Aristophanes (Thesm. 479-89), where the speaker is a man disguised as a woman and ‘confessing’ to a woman’s tricks:

  My husband was asleep beside me. I had a friend who’d popped me when I was seven, and he missed me so much he came and scratched on the door. I knew at once who it was, so I tiptoed down. My husband asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Why, I’ve got an awful pain in my stomach, so I’m going to the loo’. So he mixed me juniper and dill and sage, and I put a bit of water on the hinge (sc. of the outer door) and went out to my lover, and I was screwed bending over next to the statue, holding on to the bay-tree.

  In Ar. Wealth 149-52 it is said of hetairai at Corinth that when a rich customer arrives, they ‘turn their anus (prōktos) to him straight away’, which suggests that hetairai may commonly have insisted on anal intercourse as a simple contraceptive measure. This explanation will hardly do for the wedding preparations in Ar. Peace 869, where a slave announces, ‘The bride (lit., ‘girl’) has had a bath, and her bum (pūgē) is lovely!’ The passage seems rather to show an indifference to the actual point at which the ‘bottom end’ of Tr
ygaios’s bride will be penetrated; and ibid. 876 the anus of Theoria seems to be the focus of admiration.

  Vaginal penetration from the front, the woman lying supine, is shown in R247 (a youth and a woman under one blanket). The woman may put her legs in the air and rest them on the man’s shoulders, as in B662, R192, R506, R507 (in R490 a youth is forcing a woman’s legs up); Ar. Birds 1254, ‘I’ll stick your legs in the air!’ and Lys. 229, ‘I won’t stick my slippers up towards the ceiling!’ refer to this mode. Sometimes the man stands, and the woman locks her legs round him; this is essentially the position shown in B694, where, however, the women are provided with mushroom-like stools for their support. In R970* a youth sits on a chair and the woman mounts the chair so that she may lower herself on to his penis by squatting. The ‘political victory’ of a woman prone or seated on a supine man seems to be unexampled in vase-painting, though perhaps imminent in one part of the complicated orgy of R1151; Ar. Wasps 501 and Thesm. 153 refer nevertheless to the ‘racehorse’ position, in which the woman sat like a jockey astride the man.

  An interesting contrast between heterosexual intercourse and the intercrural activity ascribed to erastes and eromenos by the vase-painters suggests itself. The woman is almost invariably in a ‘subordinate’ position, the man ‘dominant’; the woman bent over or lying back or supported, the man upright or on top. In intercrural copulation, on the other hand, the eromenos stands bolt upright, and it is the erastes who bows his head and shoulders. The contrast exists also in respect of what one might call ‘general penetrability’; against the absence of scenes of human homosexual fellation, we must set scenes in which a youth is cramming his penis into a woman’s mouth (R156, R223*) or a man threatening a woman with a stick and forcing her to ‘go down on’ him (R518). The compliment is not returned; R192, a naked woman cavorting over a collapsing youth so that his face is within a few inches of her vulva, hardly qualifies as cunnilinctus, and a certain Ariphrades, reputed to enjoy it, is attacked in Ar. Knights 1280-9 and Wasps 1280-3 in terms of hatred and disgust developed so explicitly as to suggest that the topic put Aristophanes’ sense of humour under strain (a year after Wasps, in Peace 883-5, the tone of reference to Ariphrades is more urbane).143 Double penetration is the game in R156 and R223*; in the former, a man parts the legs of a woman who is taking the penis of a youth in her mouth, and in the latter a woman similarly occupied is about to have an olisbos (artificial penis) pushed into her by a youth. It is possible that the threesome in R898 is meant to end in the simultaneous penetration of the woman’s vagina by one man and of her anus by another.144