Greek Homosexuality
Page 24
It is obvious enough that strict segregation of the wives, daughters, wards and widowed mothers of Athenian citizens was practicable only to the extent to which the head of a household could afford to keep enough slaves for the running of all errands, the performance of all work outside the house, and the execution of his orders for its internal regulation. Among the rich, a young man’s opportunities for love-affairs with girls of his own class were minimal, and if he was to enjoy the triumph of leisurely seduction (rather than the flawed satisfaction of purchase) he must seduce a boy. Among the poor, where women often had to go to market and sell their produce or handiwork (the bread-woman of Wasps 1389-1414 is clearly [1396f.] of citizen status; cf. Thesm, 443-58), or where they had to work in the fields, segregation could not be strict.82 The poor but upright farmer of Eur. Electra, nominally married to Elektra, has no slaves, and though he is naturally disapproving when he finds Elektra talking to two strange men, it is part of the life of such a family that the wife should go out alone to get water (70-6). The girl in Ar. Eccl., waiting for her boyfriend, sings (912-14) ‘I’m left all alone here, because my mother’s gone off somewhere else’. No doubt the poor tended to assume that what the rich did must be worth doing, and the herdsmen in Theokritos 5 boast equally of homosexual and heterosexual success (86-9), but – to put the matter cautiously and beg no questions – it is likely that when sex-objects of types A and B are both available some people will choose A, and certain that when there is only B no one can choose A. The central characters of comedy are not poor men, but they are not notably rich either, and most of the audience whose sentiments and attitudes Aristophanes intended his characters and choruses to voice will have known more than the rich about the possibilities of heterosexual seduction offered by rural or urban life at a comparatively modest social level. Apart from the cost of strict segregation and the cost of winning over a desired person by impressive gifts, leisure too was a prerequisite for courtship, especially if many days of patient watching in the gymnasium and many conversations about art and war and life were needed in order to make oneself admirable and interesting in the eyes of a boy whose sexual arousal could not be counted on as a contributory factor. The personages we meet in Plato virtually all belong to a leisured class, some of them to the richest and noblest families in Athens, whereas in Aristophanic comedy it is a compliment to call a man ergatēs, ‘hard worker’, ‘good worker’ (Ach. 611); the same word is used of the poor farmer in Eur. El. 75. In Peace 632 the countrymen, men of good sense (603) and good morals (556), the salt of the earth, sufferers from war (588-97) and the saviours of peace (508-11), are ‘the ergatēs folk’, and Trygaios himself boasts (190f.) of being ‘a skilled cultivator of vines’ A hard-working man, even a poor man, can marry, because the condition of his marrying is not that a girl should fall in love with him but that he should be chosen by her father (and should not be so repulsive to her that she enlists her mother’s sympathy and frustrates her father’s intentions). But falling in love and pursuing the object of one’s love are a luxury, a diversion of time and effort from profitable work to an activity which, even if successful, will do nothing to feed and clothe the lover. Hence the sentiment of Akhaios fr. 6:
There is no eros of the beautiful in an empty stomach; Aphrodite is a curse to the hungry.
This was later cast into more succinct form (Eur. fr. 895), and it is the basis of the joke in Men. Heros 15-17. Gorgias in Men. Dysk. 341-4 says that he has never fallen in love, and cannot, since the troubles which already beset him leave him no respite, and one of the countrymen in Theokritos 10, who is lagging in his work as a reaper and has left his own vegetable-patch unweeded, is asked by his unfeeling companion (9) ‘What is an ergatēs man doing longing for what is out of reach?’ His desire is for a girl, not a boy, but since the vocabulary and symptoms of eros are the same in both cases it is not difficult to see how the ordinary Athenian citizen, however ready to identify himself as a man of property with his social superiors,83 could also pride himself that he wasted no time on homosexual love-affairs such as occupied idle young men who had more money than was good for them.
The ‘comic hero’ of Aristophanes does not fall in love; Opora and Basileia are not the goal of the ambitious schemes of Trygaios and Peisetairos respectively, but the unexpected bonus of political triumph, and however passionate and enduring the eros which we may expect the hero to feel towards his prize henceforward, it will be the product of sexual relations, not their cause.84 Young men in New Comedy, on the other hand, do fall in love – indeed, the happy outcome of love-affairs which are assisted by good fortune to win through against serious odds is a mainstay of the genre – but only with young women, and we have to consider the possibility that the sentiment of audiences in the late fourth century, receptive towards heterosexual eros and tolerant even of its excesses, was beginning to sweep homosexuality under the carpet. Many considerations tend against this supposition; certainly explicit allegations of homosexual prostitution were by no means unknown in the comedy of Menander’s time (cf. p. 99). Menander’s preoccupation is with families and the relations between generations, not with the activities of young men which, having no relevance to marriage and inheritance, belong outside a familial context. It is however observable that a general inhibiting respectability becomes the norm in different art-forms at different times, and we do not always know why it operates when and where it does.85 In vase-painting, for example, the physique of satyrs, except for their faces, becomes humanised at the beginning of the fifth century; in the fourth, even their faces are affected, so that only horse’s ears and a modest tail distinguish a satyr from a human youth (RL20, RL56, RS97). Fearsome legendary beings become disappointingly tame quite early in the classical period (cf. p. 7), indistinguishable from comely humans in face and identifiable only by schematised attributes: Harpies (R774), Raving Madness (R902), the Furies (R932, RS179). Yet in caricature and burlesque the hideousness becomes exaggerated, not diminished, in later vase-painting; it is as if the demarcation of genres were being sharpened. This is just as well; the participants in the threesome of R898, who should be afire with lust and jollity, all wear the doleful and soppy expressions with which the later vase-painters attempted to convey spiritual depth, and this mixture of genres is not impressive.86
Down to the early fifth century the painters sometimes chose to portray disgusting subjects: a man wiping his anus (R291), an explosion of diarrhoea at a party (B120), copious drunken vomiting (R519); in R265 a squatting youth simultaneously urinates and defecates on the ground, and the painter has made his penis loll to one side lest our view of the faeces be obscured. Vomiting and urination have obvious enough associations with drunken festivity, and urination also has anatomical associations with sex. Defecation, on the other hand, is rather forced upon us in connection with drink, dancing and sex in black-figure vase-painting, e.g.: B90, a man on each side of the vessel reclines, happily masturbating, while under each handle a dog defecates (a satirical comment on masturbation?); B330, a participant in a komos defecates; B394 (cf. B346), a satyr in a squatting position, defecating and masturbating; BB8, one comast masturbating while another defecates; C70, a satyr on the ground at a drunken party drinks from a wineskin and defecates; CP16, a row of figures which includes two dancers and a hairy satyr with an immense pendulous penis contains also a man defecating and a man penetrating a woman from behind. This is the coarse language of the archaic iambic poets and of Attic Old Comedy translated into visual terms, but it ceased to be fashionable in vase-painting well before Aristophanes was born, and by the time he brought the constipated Blepyros on stage in Eccl. 311-72 the area of the arts which was licensed to portray any or all of the bodily activities which people enjoy performing had already become severely restricted. Irredeemably disagreeable subjects, such as mutilated and decomposing flesh, were always eschewed, though what was not only disagreeable but powerful and frightening enough to be part of the fabric of great events – the horrible Furies of Ai
skhylos’s Eumenides, the wound of Philoktetes, the death-agony of Herakles – was used by the tragic poets to good theatrical effect. The irregular pattern in which inhibition crept over the arts between the latter part of the sixth century and the end of the fourth suggests a multiplicity of causes, among which we should reckon the dissemination of attitudes which were popularly regarded as philosophical and the tendency of stable cultures to develop canons of refinement which can be defined and applied without too much intellectual effort; the consequence of both was a disinclination to acknowledge openly the true status of the uncompromisingly physical element in our lives. The treatment of homosexuality by Hellenistic poets, grafting a new sensual gusto on to the ‘romantic’ tradition inherited from earlier poetry, suggests that the suppression of homosexual affairs in Menander should not be considered in itself sufficient evidence for a significant general change of direction in public tolerance of them.
D. Philosophical Exploitation
To ask whether Plato responded homosexually to the stimulus of male beauty more intensely than most Athenians of his social class in the late fifth and early fourth centuries is to ask a question of very limited relevance to the history of philosophy or the history of homosexuality; the cogency of a philosophical argument, its power over the imagination, its moral and social value and its influence over subsequent thought do not depend on the sexual orientation of its proponent, and when (as in classical Athens) anyone is free to declare the intensity of his own homosexual response the homosexuality of a philosopher is not even a biographical datum of importance. To ask the same question about Socrates is much more useful, so far as concerns the history of philosophy, for if we could answer the question we would know more than we do at present about the relation between the teaching and influence of Socrates and the portrait of Socrates presented by the only philosophical writers of the period whose work survives intact, Plato and Xenophon. Apart from a curious remark by Aristoxenos (fr. 55) that Socrates had a strong heterosexual appetite and indulged it (but ‘without injustice’, i.e. without adultery or violence), we are virtually deprived of independent evidence bearing upon the sexuality of Socrates (it is an aspect of his life on which Aristophanes’ Clouds is silent), and in what is said below about the relationship between homosexuality and Socratic philosophy ‘Socrates’ means the Socrates portrayed in Plato and Xenophon. In Plato’s Laws, the last work he wrote, Socrates is replaced by an anonymous Athenian, and the doctrines and arguments propounded by that character will be designated Plato’s without more ado. In the context of the present enquiry the most important aspect of Socrates is his exploitation of the Athenian homosexual ethos as a basis of metaphysical doctrine and philosophical method. Condemnation (explicit in Laws, foreshadowed in Phaedrus) of the consummation of homosexual desire as ‘unnatural’ is not quite as important historically as might appear at first sight,87 since the contrast between ‘nature’ and the laws and conventions of society had been discussed – in general terms, without specific reference to homosexuality – before Plato was born,88 and in praising the ability to resist temptation to bodily pleasure Plato was fully in accord with Greek moral tradition.89
We encounter Socrates in a strongly homosexual ambience; some of Plato’s earlier dialogues are set in the gymnasium, Socrates’ youthful friends are commonly – one might say, normally – in love with boys, and he fully accepts these relationships: Ktesippos and Kleinias in Euthydemos, Hippothales and Lysis in Lysis, the allusion in Meno 70b to Menon’s erastes Aristippos, the teasing of Glaukon as erōtikos in Rep. 474d-475a, and compare the report in Parmenides 127b that Zenon has been the paidika of Parmenides. In his sympathetic conversation with the lovesick Hippothales Socrates uses the language to which we became accustomed (pp. 44f.) in reading between the lines of the Lysianic ‘speech of the non-lover’ and Pausanias’s speech in Plato’s Symposium. On hearing that Hippothales writes poems in praise of the family of Lysis, Socrates asks him (Lys. 205d-206a);
Are you composing and singing an encomium on yourself before you’ve won?
It’s not in my honour, Socrates, he said, that I’m composing and singing.
You don’t think so, I said ... If you catch a paidika of such quality, what you have said and sung will do you great honour and will in reality by encomia on a victor, because you will have got (tunkhanein) such a paidika. But if he gets away from you, the greater the encomia you have pronounced on your paidika, the greater the blessings which you will be seen to have lost, and you will be despised.90 So, my friend, anyone who knows what he is doing in ta erōtika refrains from praising his eromenos until he has caught him, because he is apprehensive about how things may turn out. What is more, beautiful boys are filled with pride and conceit when they are praised and glorified. Don’t you think so?
Yes I do, he said.
And the more conceited they are, the harder they are to catch?
That is likely.
Well, what sort of hunter would you think a man who in hunting roused his prey and made it harder to catch?
Obviously, a poor sort.
The unnamed friend who meets Socrates at the opening of Plato’s Protagoras asks him (309a):
Where have you come from, Socrates? Well, I suppose it’s obvious: from chasing (lit., ‘hunting with hounds’) around after Alkibiades’ beauty?
– to which, indeed, Socrates takes no exception; but (cf. p. 159) the conversation is due to take an unexpected turn. When it is proposed at Agathon’s party that all the guests should make speeches in praise of Eros, Socrates welcomes it in so far as (Smp. 177d) ‘ta erōtika are the only subject I claim to understand’. Compare Xen. Smp. 8.2, ‘I can’t think of a time when I wasn’t in love’; he is described in Pl. Smp. 216das ‘always excited by the beautiful’, and his reaction in Phdr. 227c, on hearing that Lysias has composed a speech urging a boy to favour a non-erastes, is ‘I wish he’d said “favour ordinary older people” like me and most of us!’ In Chrm. 154b he qualifies his description of the beauty of Kharmides by saying, ‘I’m nothing to go by ... because pretty well all youths of that age seem beautiful to me, but ...’, and we see the force of the ‘but’ when Kharmides has sat down between Socrates and Kritias (155c-e):
Then I just didn’t know what to do, and all the confidence that I’d previously felt, in the belief that I’d find it easy to talk to him, was knocked out of me. When Kritias told him that I was the man who knew the cure (sc. for headache), and he looked me in the eye – oh, what a look! – and made as if to ask me, and everyone in the wrestling-school crowded close all round us, that was the moment when I saw inside his cloak, and I was on fire, absolutely beside myself ... All the same, when he asked me if I knew the cure for his head, I did somehow manage to answer that I knew it.
If we translate this scene into heterosexual terms, so that Socrates’ glimpse inside the cloak of Kharmides becomes a glimpse of the breasts of a young woman of extraordinary beauty, as she leans forward to ask an unaffected question,91 we come as close to seeing through ancient Greek eyes as we are likely to come.92
There is nothing in these utterances of Socrates, as quoted – and all the quotations have been terminated short of the developments which require the reader to think again about any premature conclusions he may have drawn – at variance with the language and sentiments of males who desired and sought orgasm in bodily contact with younger males. But Socrates does not go on to disguise copulation under layers of metaphysical flannel; from the experience which he shares with his contemporaries he draws different conclusions, and he is so far from calling eros by other names that he calls many other things93 by the name of eros. It was never difficult in Greek to use ‘eros’ and cognate words figuratively when their object was not an individual human; one may, for instance, erān victory, power, money, one’s homeland, or a homecoming.94 Socrates uses ‘erastes’ figuratively (e.g. Rep. 501 d), but sometimes couples this with literal usage, as in Gorgias 481d, where he calls himself ‘erastes of Alkibiades
and of philosophy’ and his interlocutor Kallikles erastes of ‘two (se. dēmoi), the Athenian dēmos (‘people’, ‘assembly’) and (sc. Demos, son) of Pyrilampes’ (cf. p. 111); he compares Kallikles’ inability to contradict or thwart the Athenian people with his inability to oppose Demos, and he finds philosophy, ‘my paidika’, much less capricious and unstable than his human paidika, Alkibiades (481d-482a). Again, when he says (Xen. Smp. 8.41) that he is consistently ‘fellow-erastes with the city’ of those who are ‘of good quality by nature and zealous in the pursuit of virtue’ he so blends personal eros with the public’s affection and admiration for the brave and wise and upright as to call in question the extent to which sensual response to bodily beauty plays any part in his own eros. He does not hesitate, in fact, to use ‘erastes’ of a devoted admirer of an older person’s wisdom or skill; hence an aristocratic family of Thessaly are ‘erastai’ of the sophist Gorgias (Meno 70b), the ‘fans’ of the sophists Euthydemos and Dionysodoros are their ‘erastai’ (Euthd. 276d), and when he introduces Hippokrates to the eminent Protagoras (Prt. 317cd):
Suspecting that Protagoras wanted to show off to Prodikos and Hippias that erastai of his had come to the house, I said, ‘Well, why don’t we invite Prodikos and Hippias and those with them to come and listen to our discussion?’
These passages may be jocular, in a way familiar to us throughout the literary presentation of Socrates (cf. Pl. Smp. 216e and the joke about ‘procuring’ pupils for philosophers in Xen. Smp. 4.62), but when a certain Aristodemos is described in the opening scene of Plato’s Symposium (173b) as ‘erastes of Socrates more than anyone at that time’ we may well feel that ‘erastes’ is so freely used in the Socratic circle that the boundary between the serious and the playful or between the literal and the figurative is overrun. This is possible if, and only if, it is very well understood within that circle that eros is not a desire for bodily contact but a love of moral and intellectual excellence.