Greek Homosexuality

by K J Dover

  In what concerns erotes for male and female paides and of men for women and women for men, which have had innumerable effects on individuals and on whole cities, how can anyone take adequate precautions ?

  After a further reference (on the lines of 635e-636a) to the bad example set by Sparta and Crete (the Athenian’s interlocutors in Laws are a Spartan and a Cretan; cf. p. 186), the speaker passes specifically to homosexual relations (836c-e):

  Anyone who, in conformity with nature, proposes to re-establish the law as it was before Laios,105 declaring that it was right not to join with men and boys in sexual intercourse as with females, adducing as evidence the nature of animals and pointing out that (sc. among them) male does not touch male for sexual purposes, since that is not natural, he could, I think, make a very strong case.

  No one, continues the Athenian, could argue that the law should take a benevolent view of homosexual relations, for they do not implant courage in the soul of the ‘persuaded’ or self-restraint in ‘the persuader’; the latter is open to blame as failing to withstand the temptations of pleasure, and the former as ‘mimicking the female’ (836de). The Athenian’s proposal is that the religious sanctions which already operate against incest, so that ‘not so much as a desire for such intercourse enters most people’s heads’ (838b), should be extended to sexual legislation in general (838e-839b):

  That is precisely what I meant in saying that I had an idea for reinforcing the law about the natural use of the intercourse which procreates children, abstaining from the male, not deliberately killing human progeny or ‘sowing in rocks and stones’, where it (sc. the seed) will never take root and be endowed with growth, abstaining too from all female soil in which you would not want what you have sown to grow. This law ... confers innumerable benefits. In the first place, it has been made according to nature; also, it effects a debarment from erotic fury and insanity, all kinds of adultery and all excesses in drink and food, and it makes men truly affectionate to their own wives.

  Athletes abstain from sex for the sake of the physical fitness which will bring them victory in games (839e-840b); should we not then expect of our young people (asks the Athenian) that they should control their passions for the sake of victory over pleasure?106 The law must declare (840de):

  Our citizens should not be inferior to birds and many other species of animals, which are born in large communities and up to the age of procreation live unmated, pure and unpolluted107 by marriage, but when they have arrived at that age they pair, male with female and female with male, according to their inclination, and for the rest of their time they live in a pious and law-abiding way,108 faithfully adhering to the agreements which were the beginning of their love.

  Eventually the Athenian proposes two alternative laws on ‘sexual intercourse and all that has to do with eros’ (84le), the first alternative more rigorous than the second (841de):

  Either, among those of good citizen stock and free status, no one should touch anyone except his own wedded wife, and should not sow unacceptable and illegitimate seed in concubines, nor unfruitful seed in males, contrary to nature; or we could ban intercourse with males entirely, and if a man had intercourse with any woman except those who have entered his house with the religious rites of marriage ... and failed to conceal this from all men and women,109 by prescribing that he should be debarred from the award of official honours we should, I think, be regarded as making a sound prescription.

  The theme of nature, anticipated by Phdr. 250e, is conspicuous in all these passages, as well as in 636a-c, and Plato appeals to the animal world to establish what is natural and what is not. This argument is weak, if only because Plato knew virtually nothing about animals (the generalisation in Smp. 207b that animals sacrifice themselves for the protection and feeding of their young, true of some species, is untrue of many others), but Plato would not regard it as equally open to adversaries who might wish to argue (e.g.) for aggressive individualism; the ingredient of reason (in his view) differentiates human nature from animal nature, but in respect of an irrational activity such as sexual intercourse humans and animals can be treated together. Plato’s main concern is to reduce to an unavoidable minimum all activity of which the end is physical enjoyment, in order that the irrational and appetitive element of the soul may not be encouraged and strengthened by indulgence, and to this end he is prepared to deploy arguments of different kinds, including a prudential argument (the strengthening of the marital bond, which necessarily contributes to the like-mindedness, and therefore to the strength and stability, of the ideal community) and an appeal to nature which may perhaps exploit a feeling that the processes of the non-human world manifest obedience to commands issued by the gods. While prohibiting homosexual relations because they go beyond what nature shows to be adequate in sexual pleasure, he does not express an opinion on the naturalness or unnaturalness of the desire to perform the prohibited acts; it is to be presumed, in accordance with the sentiment of his time, that he would regard the desire as an indication that the appetitive element of the soul is insufficiently disciplined,110 and would say that such a soul desires homosexual copulation only as one among many pleasurable sensations.

  Condemnation of homosexual acts as contrary to nature was destined to have a profound effect on the history of morality, but it should be noted that Plato’s most distinguished pupil treated the question cautiously. In Nicomachean Ethics 1148b15-9a20 Aristotle distinguishes what is naturally pleasurable (divisible into ‘pleasurable without qualification’ and ‘pleasurable to some animal species or some human races, but not to others’) from what is pleasurable without being naturally so. In this latter category he puts (a) things which are pleasurable because of ‘deficiencies’ or ‘impairments’ in those who find them so, (b) things which become pleasurable through habit, and (c) things which are found pleasurable by bad natures. Corresponding to each of these three sub-categories is a ‘disposition’: (a) ‘bestial’ (i.e. ‘sub-human’) dispositions, exemplified by a woman who cut open pregnant women and devoured the foetuses; (b) dispositions which result from disease, including insanity; (c) dispositions which are ‘disease-like or as a result of habituation’. These include pulling out one’s hair, eating earth, and (literally):

  moreover, the (sc. disposition?) of sexual intercourse for males; for they come about (i.e. the pleasure in such actions comes about) for some by nature and for others through habituation, as, for example, for those who were first outraged (hubrizein) when they were boys. No one could describe as ‘lacking in self-control’ those for whom nature is the cause,111 any more than (sc. we so describe) women (lit.) because they do not mount sexually but are mounted.112

  Perhaps distaste for the subject has prevented translators and commentators from discussing the curious words ‘the of sexual intercourse for males’ and has induced them to translate it as ‘pederasty’, ‘faire l’amour avec les mâles’, etc. If that translation were correct,113 Aristotle would be saying that subjection to a passive role in homosexuality when young disposes one to take an active role when older. This would be a strange thing for a Greek to say; it would also be strange for a Greek to suggest that pleasure in an active homosexual role is ‘disease-like’ or unlikely to be experienced except in consequence of involuntary habituation; the example of the passive sexual role of women as naturally-determined behaviour which cannot be reproached as a lack of control over bodily pleasure indicates that Aristotle’s mind is running on the moral evaluation of sexual passivity; and – a near-decisive consideration – if we assume that Aristotle is speaking of passive homosexuality only, the exclusive preoccupation of the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata iv 26 with the passive role is more readily intelligible. The writer asks:

  why some men enjoy being subjected to sexual intercourse,114 some of them while at the same time performing it, and others not.

  The writer explains that seminal fluid does not always and necessarily form in the genital system, but may be secreted – though not in
great quantity, and not under pressure – in the rectum; wherever it is secreted, that is the part whose friction creates sexual enjoyment.

  Those who are effeminate by nature ... are constituted contrary to nature; for, though male, they are so disposed that this part of them (sc. the rectum) is necessarily defective. Defect, if complete, causes destruction,115 but if not, perversion (sc. of one’s nature). The former does not occur (sc. in the matter which we are considering), for (sc. if it did) the man would have been a woman. It therefore follows that they must be distorted and have an urge in another location of seminal secretion. For that reason they are insatiable, like women; for the liquid is small in quantity, does not force its way out, and quickly cools down.

  Having offered this bizarre physiological explanation, the writer continues in language which recalls the elliptical statement of Aristotle:

  Some undergo this experience also as a result of habituation. For whatever they do, it comes about that they take pleasure in that and ejaculate their semen in that way. So they desire to do the things through which this happens, and the habit becomes increasingly like nature. For that reason those who have been accustomed to be subjected to sexual intercourse not before puberty, but at the time of puberty, in consequence of recollection arising in them when they are so dealt with, and pleasure with the recollection, and because (sc. they become) as if naturally (sc. so disposed) through the habit, desire to undergo (sc. intercourse); for the most part, however, the habit arises in those who are as if naturally (sc. so disposed). If (sc. a man) is lustful and soft, all these developments come about more quickly.

  The writer’s concept of nature is not difficult to understand: a male who is physically constituted in such a way that he lacks something of the positive characteristics which distinguish male from female, and possesses instead a positively female characteristic, suffers from a constitutional defect contrary to nature, and a male who through habituation behaves in a way which is a positive differentia of females behaves as if he had such a defect. There is no sign in the sexual discussions which make up Book IV of the Problemata, or in Aristotle, or indeed in Plato, that a genital response to the bodily beauty of a younger male was regarded as a defect or impairment of male nature, no matter what view was taken of the duty of the law to prevent gratification of the desire aroused by this response.

  E. Women and Homosexuality

  That female homosexuality and the attitude of women to male homosexuality can both be discussed within one part of one chapter reflects the paucity of women writers and artists in the Greek world and the virtual silence of male writers and artists on these topics.

  People in love are jealous of rivals, and people who are not in love but whose security depends on their retention of someone else’s sexual interest have equally strong grounds for anxiety and jealousy when this security is threatened by a diversion of sexual interest. Whether Greek women had a special animosity against male eromenoi, we do not know. We should expect that hetairai and would-be hetairai did, and in individual cases resentment, contempt and mortification may have given an extra dimension to the jealousy felt by a woman (let us put ourselves in the place of Ionis in Kallimakhos 11 [p.65] or imagine the feelings of either of the girls in R62 if she saw the young man’s eyes fixed on a passing boy), but in general the pursuit of eromenoi was characteristic of the years before marriage (cf. Anon. HE 33.5 [p. 66], Meleagros 84, 87:5), so that wives will comparatively seldom116 have had grounds for fearing that their husbands were forming enduring homosexual attachments.117 Yet Kritoboulos’s hyperbolic praise of his eromenos Kleinias (Xen. Smp. 4. 12-16) is uttered by a young man who is newly married (ibid. 2.3). In Theokritos 7.120f., where Simikhidas prays that the young Philinos, by whose attractions his friend Aratos is tormented, may himself suffer the torment of unrequited love for another, we hear a rare and interesting note of malice:

  Can’t you see? He’s riper than a pear (i.e. past the eromenos stage, and no use to you any more), and the women say, ‘O dear, Philinos, your pretty flowers are dropping!’

  Xen. Hell, vi 4.37 relates an incident of unusual type: Alexander, tyrant of Pherai, had quarreled with his paidika and had imprisoned him; his wife begged for the release of the youth, whereupon Alexander executed him, and was subsequently murdered by his aggrieved wife. It sounds as though Alexander suspected a love-affair between his paidika and his wife, and he may have been right. The attributes which made a young male attractive to erastai were assumed to make him no less attractive to women; Pentheus, sneering at Dionysos in Eur. Bacchae 453-9, treats his good looks, long hair (‘full of desire’) and fair skin as particularly captivating to women. When goddesses fall in love with mortal males, as Aphrodite did with Adonis., Dawn with Tithonos or the Moon with Endymion, they react like older males; vase-paintings which depict Dawn and Tithonos assimilate Tithonos to Ganymede or to anonymous eromenoi courted by men, and the portrayal of Adonis described in Theokritos 15.84-6 gives him ‘the first down spreading from his temples’, so that he resembles a youth at the age which some erastai found most seductive (cf. PI. Prt. 309a, Smp. 181d). Hylas, the eromenos of Herakles, captivates the water-nymphs and is pulled down into the water by them (Theokritos 13,43-54).

  Plato refers once in general terms (Laws 636c) to female homosexuality. ‘Aristophanes’ in Pl. Smp. 19le derives hetairistriai from that category of original double beings who were all female. The word is not attested elsewhere, any more than its masculine analogue hetairistēs, though Pollux (vi 188) found the latter in an Attic source (unspecified); it clearly means a woman who stands in a relationship to another woman comparable to a male relationship of hetairēsis (cf. p. 20), and it may acquire a derogatory nuance from laikastria, ‘whore’, though that is by no means certain, since Pl. Euthd. 297c introduces us to sophistria as the feminine of sophistēs in the sense ‘ingenious’, ‘resourceful’. We have a Hellenistic epigram (Asklepiades 7) on two Samian women who

  are not willing to enter upon the (sc. practice?) of Aphrodite according to her rules, but desert to other things which are not seemly (‘not kalos’). Mistress Aphrodite, be an enemy to these fugitives from the couch in your domain!

  This hostility, on the part of a poet who elsewhere (37) declares the strength of his own homosexual desire, is striking; that he treats a woman who rejects male lovers as a ‘deserter’ and ‘fugitive’ and as disobedient to the ‘rules’ (nomoi) of Aphrodite suggests the possibility that the complete silence of comedy on the subject of female homosexuality is a reflex of male anxiety. There are such things as ‘taboo’ subjects which the comic poets did not try to exploit for humorous purposes; the plague of 430 B.C. is one, and menstruation118 is another. At Sparta, on the other hand, according to Plu. Lyc. 18.9, ‘women of good repute’ (kalos kai agathos)119 ‘were in love with girls’, i.e. had a female counterpart of the male erastes/eromenos relationship. CE34*, an archaic plate from Thera, shows two women apparently courting; one puts her hand to the face of the other, and both hold garlands. Vase-paintings in which two women are wrapped in one cloak should probably be associated not with two males similarly wrapped (or partially veiled by a ‘backcloth’; cf. p. 98) but with scenes in which the number of women may exceed two and they may not be facing each other but facing all in one direction.120 An exceptional Attic red-figure vase (R207*) shows a kneeling woman fingering the genital region of another woman.

  The strongest expression of female homosexual emotion in Greek literature is to be found in the poetry of Sappho, earliest and most famous of the few female Greek poets. She was a native of the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, and active in the first quarter of the sixth century B.C.; like her equally famous contemporary and compatriot, Alkaios, she composed lyric poetry predominantly for solo performance. The evidence for her homosexuality is fragmentary in the literal sense: only one of her poems survives complete (quoted by a literary critic of the Roman period), the rest being represented by scraps of ancient copies, in which a complete line
is a rarity, and by later writers’ quotations of short passages, individual lines or phrases. The evidence is also fragile and ambiguous: Sappho’s Lesbian dialect created problems in transmission which are reflected in corruption of the text, understanding of crucial passages is often frustrated by the absence, unintelligibility or doubtful interpretation of the words needed for resolution of problems, and although biographical statements made about her by commentators of Hellenistic or Roman times were founded ultimately on what is denied to us, access to her work in its entirety, we do not know the processes of inference which underlie a given statement – and we do know the horror vacui which led ancient biographers to treat mere possibilities as established facts.

  Comment on Sappho’s erotic relationships with women does not begin, so far as the extant evidence goes, until Hellenistic times. At least six comedies entitled Sappho were produced in classical Athens, and in one of these Diphilos (fr. 69f.) made the Ionian poets Arkhilokhos and Hipponax her erastai. In Antiphanes’ play (fr. 196) she propounded riddles (like the legendary Kleobouline, or the Sphinx). We do not know anything about the Sappho-plays of Ameipsias (fr. 16), Ephippos (fr. 24), Amphis (fr. 32) and Timokles (fr. 30), but Epikrates fr. 4 names her, together with some minor poets, as an author of erōtika (sc. songs). Menander (fr. 258) spoke of her as falling in love with Phaon, the legendary ferryman of great beauty (cf. Plato Comicus fr. 174 and Servius on Vergil Aeneid iii 279), ‘hunting’ him, and committing suicide in despair.121 Hermesianax at the end of the fourth century referred (fr. 7.47-50) to Alkaios and Anakreon as rival erastai of Sappho; Dioskorides 18, associating her with eros of the young in general, imagines her honoured by the Muses, Hymen (the god of marriage) and Aphrodite (as – in particular – the lover of Adonis). Although no one who speaks of Sappho’s eros for her own sex can be dated with complete certainty before the Augustan period (Horace Odes ii 13.5 and Ovid Tristia ii 365), a fragment of a biography (Oxyrhynchus Papyri 1800 fr. 1 col.i 16f.) which remarks that ‘she is criticised by some as being licentious (ataktos, ‘disorderly’, ‘undisciplined’) and gunaikerastria’, i.e. ‘(female) erastes of women’, may well be using early Hellenistic material. Certainly it refers a few lines later to Khamaileon, who wrote a monograph on Sappho, in which, incidentally, he mentioned (fr. 26) the idea that Anakreon fr. 358 (cf. p. 183) expresses desire for Sappho, and he apparently lent his authority122 to an interpretation of a stanza in Sapphic style (PMG 953) as a reference to Anakreon. Klearkhos (frr. 33 and 41) said something about Sappho, and a certain Kallias of Mitylene, perhaps as early as the third century B.C., is also known to have written a commentary on her poems.