by K J Dover
Since ‘Achilles’ written against a figure communicates ‘This figure is a representation of Achilles’, we have to consider the possibility of portraiture in vase-painting; not portraiture in the proper sense, for each painter adopted a standard face and figure (cf. p. 71), but in the sense that the attachment of a name to the painting of a youth could communicate ‘This is the most beautiful youth I can portray, and ... is as beautiful as that!’ The labelling of youths at a symposium in R904 as ‘Euaion’, ‘Euainetos’ and ‘Kallias’, all of whom occur in other vase-inscriptions as subjects of the predicate ‘is beautiful’, suggests (despite the late date of the vessel, c. 440 B.C.) that the hypothesis of idealised portraiture as an explanation of many kalos-inscriptions is at least worth exploring. It is not difficult to collect many plausible examples, e.g.: B218 (bride and groom in chariot) ‘Lysippides is beautiful, Rhodon is beautiful’; B222 (women at a fountain) ‘Sime is beautiful’; B434 (women at a fountain) ‘Niko, Kallo, Rhodopis, yes, Myrte (?) is beautiful’; R78 (youthful wrestlers) ‘The boy is beautiful, Leagros’;16 R90 (a boy athlete being crowned as victorious) ‘Epainetos is beautiful’; R164 (youths) ‘The boy is extremely extremely, Le[agros (?)’ (karta karta is presumably a slip for karta kalos); R458* (a pin-up youth dressing) ‘Aristarkhos is beautiful’; R514 (symposia) ‘Diphilos is beautiful, Nikophile is beautiful’ and ‘Philon is beautiful’; R569 (a woman embraces a youth enticingly) ‘Hiketes is beautiful’ (it is characteristic of the genre that in a scene of heterosexual love it should be a male whose beauty is acclaimed); R628 (men and youths courting women) ‘Antiphanes is most beautiful’ and ‘Nauklea is beautiful’; R637* (men and youths courting boys) ‘Hippodamas is beautiful’; R918 (a naked woman) ‘Hediste is beautiful’; R1019 (a youth, a woman and a slave-girl) ‘Timodemos is beautiful’ and ‘The bride is beautiful’; R1031 (a youth kneeling on one knee) ‘Leagros is beautiful’.
It is also easy to make a long list of examples to which the hypothesis of idealised portraiture cannot apply because there is no one in the picture to whom the acclamation can refer: B94 (no picture) ‘Theognis is beautiful, by Zeus!’; B202 (Herakles and a chariot) ‘Mnesila is beautiful’; B214 (Herakles and Triton, horsemen and youths, a chariot fight) ‘Mnesila is beautiful, Khoiros is beautiful’ (there is no female figure to which the name Mnesila can refer, and although Khoiros could conceivably be one of the youths we should remember that khoiros is also a slang word for ‘vulva’);17 B318 (a vine) ‘Xenodoke [...] is beautiful’; B410 (a siren) ‘Andrias is most beautiful’; B422 (Dionysos and satyrs) ‘Sostratos is extremely beautiful’; R35 (a man titillating a woman) ‘Antias is beautiful’ and ‘Eualkides is beautiful’ (even if the man were one of these two, he could not be both); R70 (two naked women washing) ‘Epilyke is beautiful. Helikopa’ – so far so good, but then – ‘Smikros is beautiful’; R132 (a naked woman with two olisboi) ‘Hipparkhos is beautiful’; R438 (a man18 vomiting) ‘Leagros is beautiful’; R476 (a woman singeing her pubic hair) ‘Panaitios is beautiful’; R742 (the birth of Erikhthonios) ‘Oinanthe is beautiful’; R690 (Herakles and Apollo) ‘Alkimakhos is beautiful, (sc. son) of Epikhares’; R691 (the North Wind and Oreithyia) ‘Kleinias is beautiful’; R779 (the goddess Victory) ‘Beautiful is Kharmides’; R887, R890 (a woman and her slave-girl) ‘Diphilos is beautiful, (sc. son) of Melanopos’; R1023 (a satyr and a wineskin) ‘Hiketes is beautiful’.
In cases of this kind the vessel is a medium carrying a message which does not appear to refer to anything on the vessel itself. Who composes the message, and to whom does he wish to communicate it? One could imagine that the erastes commissioned a vessel which would include an acclamation of his own eromenos, thus declaring his passion to his guests at a symposion; or that he commissioned it in order to give it to his eromenos. Some inscriptions would suit this hypothesis well, e.g.: B430 (a goddess mounting her chariot) ‘Korone is beautiful, I love (sc. her)’; B442 (a chariot race) ‘Nikon. Mynon. Hiketes seems to me beautiful’; Rl2 (a young athlete) ‘Greetings, boy, you!’ and ‘Beautiful, yes!’; R369 (youthful dancers) ‘Aristeides, you are beautiful’ (or ka, anyway; the syllable los was omitted); R478 (a man and a youth) ‘Aisimides seems beautiful to one who understands’ (this is the probable interpretation of an oddly spelled word); RL16 (youths with javelins) ‘Beautiful, dear’ (philos; sc. ‘to me’?) ‘is Mikion’; cf. BB60 ‘Kleuikha is beautiful and dear (philā) to him who wrote (sc. this)’. The same hypothesis might be invoked to explain the occasional inscription prosagoreuō, ‘I greet’, ‘I address’, ‘I accost’, e.g. B358 (boxers), though in one case (R173), where a youth is masturbating in front of a herm, the word could as well be his jocular greeting to the ithyphallic statue.19
In a very large number of cases the person whose beauty is acclaimed is not named at all, but referred to simply as ‘the boy’ (or ‘the girl’). Some of these inscriptions could be interpreted as referring to an idealised portrait within the picture itself, e.g.: R82* (a youth titillating a woman) and R247 (a youth in bed with a woman) ‘the boy is beautiful’; so too R484 and R494* (pin-up youths) and R498* (a loping youth). However, as in the case of the inscriptions which contain names, portraiture of any kind is often ruled out, e.g.: R507 (a balding man copulating with a woman) ‘the boy is beautiful’; R619 (a satyr and a maenad) ‘the girl is beautiful’; R766 (Dionysos and a maenad) ‘the boy is beautiful, the girl is beautiful’.
It may be an error to think of inscriptions of this kind as commissioned by erastai with particular eromenoi in mind. As we have seen, unsigned graffiti on walls, doors and rocks testified to the admiration felt by an unspecified number of unknown admirers for the beauty of preeminent young males, and we should perhaps think of the vase-painters as themselves choosing whether or not to include in a picture an acclamation suggested to them by the sentiment or gossip of the day. B322, of which the subject is an abstract pattern, constructs a conversation: ‘Beautiful is Nikolas. Dorotheos is beautiful. I too think he is, yes. And another boy, Memnon, is beautiful. To me too he is beautiful (sc. and) dear’ – or perhaps ‘...I too am on good terms with a beautiful (sc. boy)’. ‘Pantoxena is beautiful at Corinth’ on R912 and R913 (the former depicts Dawn and Tithonos, the latter the death of Orpheus) reminds us of the opening words of Aratos 1, ‘Philokles the Argive is beautiful at Argos’, and may be a statement about a well-known hetaira at Corinth, of a kind which would be perfectly acceptable to the participants in an Athenian symposium even if they had little idea who exactly Pantoxena was. We may compare B326 ‘Mys is thought beautiful, yes!’ and R160 ‘Philokomos is loved’ (philein, perhaps referring to his popularity and not to an erotic relationship);20 cf. also IG xii 3.549 (Thera) ‘...]s, I say, is beautiful [in the eyes of (?)] all (?)’. We may reasonably suspect that ‘the boy is beautiful’ was freely added to pictures by vase-painters (when it was regarded as something more than a sequence of letters constituting a decorative motif) because an Athenian host would not want his guests to think that he was unsympathetic to the pursuit of boys.
However, no comprehensive explanation will account for all kalos-inscriptions, for they do not always refer to sexually attractive humans, or even to humans at all. Ina mythological scene, B697, the goddess Aphrodite and the hero Aineias are acclaimed in the ‘... is beautiful’ formula;21 so too the elderly Kadmos and Harmonia in R922; in R310 ‘you are beautiful’ is painted beside the figures of Ajax and Hektor, and beside Apollo in R311. In B283 two different purposes are served by the inscriptions; the Trojan Paris (recognisable from his Asiatic dress) is labelled ‘Paris is beautiful’, but on the shoulders of the vessel we come back to earth with ‘Teles is beautiful’ and ‘Nikias is beautiful’, perhaps making the point ‘the living youths Teles and Nikias are as beautiful as the legendary Paris’.22 When the beauty of divine and heroic figures can be commemorated in this way, it is understandable that the Athenian Leagros should continue to be acclaimed as ‘beautiful’ for the best part of half a century;23 he must have been of st
unning beauty in his adolescence, and the vase-painters’ continued use of the formula ‘Leagros is beautiful’ gave him something like proverbial status.
The case of Kadmos and Harmonia reminds us that kalos is a very general word indeed, applicable to any living being or manufactured object which is aesthetically attractive, and we have to consider the possibility that in some instances the painter uses it in praise of his own work (‘This is a beautiful picture of ...’) or to mean ‘If you saw in real life the scene which I have portrayed, you would exclaim at the beauty of the persons concerned’. This seems likely in cases such as the following: B358 (boxers on one side, boys on the other) ‘two beautiful men boxers’ and ‘two boy boxers’; R196* (youths, boys and women) ‘beautiful’, in the appropriate gender, beside nearly every figure. So too R251 (athletes); R778 (Paris’s judgment between the goddesses who claimed each to be the most beautiful); R861 (a woman and youths); R926 (a naked woman); R946 (an old man, a youth and two women); R999 (a warrior and an Amazon). R1005, R1006 and R1007 show a male infant, and beside him ‘Mikion is beautiful’; since mīk- means ‘small’, it is a very suitable nickname for him, but since ‘Mikion’ is also the name of a young athlete on RL16 (and cf. IG i2. 924) we cannot be sure whether the inscription refers to the infant at all. Kalos could certainly be used of vessels themselves; explicitly in B650 ‘beautiful is the (i.e. this) jar’; B98 ‘I am a beautiful cup. Eukhros (sic) made me’; BB48 ‘I am the beautiful cup of the beautiful Gorgis’. Occasionally the word seems to be applied to some object which is part of the scene portrayed: R86 (woman and wineskin) kalos on the wineskin and ‘kalos, yes!’ round the figure of the woman; R243* (youths in homosexual group-activity) kala (neuter plural) on a wineskin on the other side of the vessel – an approving comment on the good things of life, perhaps;24 R465 kalos on an amphora on which a satyr is sitting, but also ‘beautiful is the boy’; R474 Khironeia (the title of a poem) on a papyrus roll which a youth is reading, and kalē on the box from which he has taken it;25 R1023 kalos on a wineskin carried by a satyr, but also ‘Hiketes is beautiful’.26 Since the Attic alphabet did not distinguish between omikron (short o) and omega (long ō) until the end of the fifth century,27 the possibility that the letters KALOS sometimes mean the adverb kalōs, ‘well’, has to be considered (a self-satisfied comment by the artist on his own work),28 but it is not demonstrable except when accompanied by a verb, as in R377, ‘I pour well’, beside the figure of a woman pouring from a jug into a cup.
It has become obvious that there is no single and simple explanation of the kalos-inscriptions which will account for all the data; the use of lettering as a decorative motif, the adoption of clichés from male conversation, the acclamation of persons widely-known at any given time for their beauty, and comment on the content or artistic quality of a picture or any part thereof, are all moments in the history of the phenomenon, and every instance has to be considered on its merits. Caprice and arbitrariness on the part of the painter must be allowed to have played some part;29 so must humour, as when an ugly satyr (‘Stusippos’ ~ stūein, ‘erect the penis’) is called ‘beautiful’ (R110) or the lame god Hephaistos (who bitterly contrasts himself with the handsome Ares in Horn. Od. viii 308-311; cf. Il. i 599f.) is acclaimed as beautiful on a Dionysiac scene (R950).30 The compliment becomes empty when Socrates in Pl. Phdr. 235c refers to ‘the beautiful Sappho’ – he could not have known whether Sappho had been beautiful or not31 – and the man who set ‘Aphrodite is beautiful’ and ‘Good Fortune is beautiful’ into a mosaic at Olynthos in the fourth century (there is no picture) was using ‘beautiful’ simply as an ingratiating word. Meleagros 66.5 does much the same in apostrophising ‘You beautiful ships’. We would not, in my view, be justified in supposing that a vessel bearing a kalos-inscription, whether it names a youth or woman or leaves them nameless, was normally or even commonly a gift from erastes to eromenos or a conventionally recognised form of declaration by the erastes that at the time of purchase he was in love with a specific person. We are, however, justified in treating the quantity of the material as evidence of Greek male society’s preoccupation with the beauty of boys and youths, and the ubiquity of ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ – not ‘youth’, ‘man’32 or’woman’ – in the formulae reminds us (cf. p. 84) of the characteristic Greek conception of sexuality as a relationship between a senior and a junior partner. The repeated acclamations of named persons and the echo of ancient gossip which comes to our ears when we bring the iconographic and the literary evidence together (p. 8) should, if we reflect a little and use our imagination, tell us what it felt like to be a handsome boy in ancient Athens – or a boy not quite as handsome as the son of his father’s enemy, or a boy with a snub nose, knobbly knees and a half-retracted foreskin.
Discretion is a more conspicuous feature of the vase-inscriptions than it may have seemed to be at first sight. The addition of ‘Agasikrates is beautiful’ to a scene of intercrural copulation in R31 is abnormally tactless in depicting explicitly what someone somewhere would like to do to Agasikrates, and it could even be taken to suggest that Agasikrates is easily caught (a similar scene in R1123 has the inscription ‘loving-cup’)33. B108 ‘Andokides seems beautiful to Timagoras’ and (heterosexual) R426 ‘Aphrodisia is beautiful, in the opinion of Eukhiros’ are acceptable enough compliments, particularly since Timagoras was the potter himself and thus professionally concerned with male beauty. ‘Give me that promised between-the-thighs’, painted on the bottom of B406,34 is depersonalised (perhaps a coarse joke) by the fact that three different youths are acclaimed in the inscriptions on the main body of the vessel. RL40 ‘Gorgias loves Tamynis and Tamynis loves Gorgias’ uses philein, and without knowing Gorgias and Tamynis no one could know whether their relationship was erotic or not.35
The early graffiti on Thera are less reticent; in IG xii.3.541 ‘ ...] is in love with [Ph]anokles’ the subject of the verb must have been named. Ibid. 537 and 538b (1411) go a stage further; the former says ‘By (sc. Apollo) Delphinios, Krimon here copulated with a boy, brother of Bathykles’, and the latter ‘Krimon copulated with Amotion here’. The word used is oiphein, which is neither as slangy as ‘screw’ nor as coarse as ‘fuck’, for it occurs in the laws of the Cretan city of Gortyn (‘oiphein by force’ = ‘rape’), but it is a very blunt word for sexual intercourse. The sex of the object, if it was stated at all, is not apparent from the surviving words of ibid. 536 ‘Pheidippidas copulated, Timagoras and Empheres and I copulated [...’. These utterances should not be regarded as solemn declarations of sanctified erotic relationships,36 but as boasts, effusions and slanders of a kind familiar to us, seven centuries later, from the walls of Pompeii; recalling Athenian graffiti (p. 113), we should not imagine that Krimon, or whoever wrote no. 537, was on very friendly terms with the Bathykles over whose brother he triumphed.37 A comparable spirit of malice underlies an Athenian graffito (IG i2. 922) ‘I do not krēn Lysanias (sc. son) of Khairephon’. The inscription is complete, and to whom ‘I’ refers is unknown; krēn is ‘scratch’, ‘grate’, ‘tickle’, and since Socrates in Xen. Mem. i 2.30 compares Kritias’s homosexual desire for Euthydemos to a pig’s desire to scratch itself against a stone38 the graffito probably means ‘I don’t let Lysanias use me as he wishes to’ – a hard-hearted joke against a lovesick Lysanias?
Exceptionally, we hear there the voice of the eromenos, even if the whole utterance is fictitious; it may be that we hear it also in IG i 924:
Lysitheos says that he loves Mikion more than anyone in the city, for he is brave.
‘Love’ here is philein, certainly a possible word on the lips of an erastes, but also the appropriate word for the affection felt by an admiring eromenos (cf. p. 53); and andreios, ‘brave’, cognate with anēr·, ‘(adult) man’, suits the senior partner in the relationship rather than the junior. The inscription would be a very striking declaration on the part of an eromenos if we could be sure that it was composed by Lysitheos himself and incised with his knowledge and consent; but
of course we cannot be sure of that, nor indeed can be sure that the relationship between Lysitheos and Mikion was erotic rather than (for example) a deep sense of obligation and gratitude in consequence of a battle in which Mikion courageously saved the life of Lysitheos. If that is the explanation of the inscription, it loses its unusual character as an inscribed memorial, readable by passers-by for all time, of a homosexual relationship between two individuals who name themselves. There is no such indiscretion, in respect of the name of the eromenos, in a famous inscription (partly in verse) from late sixth-century Attica (IG i2. 920):
Here a man in love with a boy swore an oath to join in strife and woeful war.
I (sc. the tombstone) am sacred to Gnathios of Eroiadai, who perished in battle (?).
On the other side someone has inscribed: ...]thie (?) aiei speude[is (?), i.e. ‘Gnathios, you are always too hasty’ (or ‘... you always try too hard’). The picture given by the relative or friend of the dead Gnathios who put these high-sounding words on the stone, a picture of a man going off to war to throw away his life or to win a glory which might evoke a response from the unnamed boy, reminds us of the flamboyant Episthenes in Xen. Anab. vii 4.7 (p. 51). There could be more to a homosexual relationship than ‘scratching’.
B. Predilections and Fantasies.
We have seen that the vase-painters often represented the erastes as fingering the genitals of the eromenos, and that a passage of Aristophanes makes a clear reference to this act (p. 96). Some other passages of Aristophanes reveal the importance attached by older males to the genitals of their juniors. In the contest between Right and Wrong in Clouds, Right laments the passing of the good old days when boys were hardy, disciplined and modest, and (973-8):