Greek Homosexuality

by K J Dover

  There is at any rate no doubt that some of Sappho’s poems address women in the language used by male erastai to their eromenoi; in late antiquity Maximus of Tyre (xviii 9) compares her relationship with girls to Socrates’ relationship with handsome youths, and Themistios xiii p. 170d couples Sappho and Anakreon as giving ‘unbounded praise’ to their paidika. A recently published fragment of a commentary (SLG S261A), speaking of Sappho as ‘educating the best’ (feminine plural) ‘not only of her compatriots but also of those from Ionia’, gives an interesting turn to Maximus ‘s analogy. The fragment goes on to say that Sappho was ‘in such high favour with the citizens that Kallias of Mytilene said in [...’, and thereafter there is only part of the name of Aphrodite to afford us any clue to what Kallias said. In what, if anything, did Sappho ‘educate’ Lesbian and Ionian girls? Most obviously, in that in which she herself excelled, poetry and music, establishing a female counterpart to a predominantly male domain; there would be a certain improbability in supposing that Lesbian girls of good family were sent by their parents to a school of sexual technique, but none in supposing a school123 which enhanced their skill and charm (charm is within the province of Aphrodite) as performers in girls’ choruses at festivals. If in the generation after Sappho there were other women poets in the Eastern Aegean, Lesbian tradition will have regarded them as pupils of Sappho; for what it is worth – and that is very little, except as an indication of the form of the Sappho-legend in much later times – Philostratos Life of Apollonios i 30 names a Pamphylian woman Damophyla as a ‘disciple’ of Sappho and as having had girl disciples of her own, like Sappho. Kallias will probably have based his statement about ‘high favour’ on tradition as he knew it, not on evidence giving direct access to the sentiment of the Lesbians in Sappho’s lifetime.

  To return, however, to Sappho’s own language. In fr. 16.15 her delight at the sight of Anaktoria exemplifies the generalisation ‘I say that the most beautiful sight on earth is that which one loves (erātai)’; she declares to Atthis (fr. 49) ‘I was in love (ēramān) with you long ago’, and blames her (fr. 131) for turning against Sappho and ‘flying to Andromeda’ instead. Compare also fr. 96, ‘she remembers gentle Atthis with desire (hīmeros)’; ‘Aphrodite’ and ‘Persuasion’ occur later in the poem, in unintelligible contexts. In fr. 94 Sappho describes her great grief at parting from someone who is female, as feminine pronouns, adjectives and participles show (lines 2, 5, 6f.); she recalls occasions on which the two of them were together, scented and wearing garlands (the usual concomitants of drinking and festivity). Lines 21-3 say:

  And on soft beds tender [...]

  you expelled desire (potho[) [...

  The Homeric expression ‘when they had expelled eros of drink and food’ in the sense ‘when they had satisfied their desire for ...’indicates that to ‘expel’ desire is to satisy it. But whose desire? In Homer the verb is in the middle voice, i.e. ‘expelled from themselves’, ‘satisfied their ...’, and in Sappho fr. 94 it is active, suggesting that it was someone else’s desire which the addressee of the poem satisfied. Yet in another Homeric passage, Il. xxiv 227, ‘when I had expelled (sc. my) eros of lamentation’, the active voice is used although the middle would have scanned as well. However, whether it was Sappho’s desire or the addressee’s which was satisfied (by bodily contact, common sense would suggest)124 on soft beds, in the context of Sappho’s grief-stricken farewell it is more appropriate that she should be speaking of relations between the two of them than of the addressee’s relations with men.

  Two well-preserved poems, frr. 1 and 31, are of the greatest importance. In fr. 1 Sappho appeals to Aphrodite for help, reminding her of a previous occasion on which help was forthcoming. On that occasion (lines 14-24):

  With a smile on your immortal face you asked me what had happened to me this time, why I was calling on you this time, and what I most wished, with heart distracted (‘insane’, mainolās) to be done for me (or ‘to obtain’). ‘Whom this time am I to persuade’ (then an unintelligible phrase) ‘to your’love (philōtēs)? Who wrongs you, Sappho? For even if she125 flees, soon she will pursue; and if she does not accept gifts, yet she will give; and if she does not love (philein), soon she will love even unwilling.’ Come to me now too ...

  Pursuit, flight, gifts and love are familiar ingredients. The complaint of the erastes that his eromenos ‘wrongs’ him (adikein) – that is to say, does not requite the love of the erastes in the manner or to the extent desired by the erastes126 – occurs in Theognis 1283 (‘O boy, do not wrong me!’). A notable feature of Sappho’s poem is the inclusion of her own name, which shows that she is not composing a poem both for an imaginary situation and for a fictitious persona.127 A second and more important feature is that a marked degree of mutual eros is assumed: the other person, who now refuses gifts and flees, will not merely yield and ‘grant favours’ but will pursue Sappho and will herself offer gifts. This obliteration of the usual distinction between a dominant .and a subordinate partner is contrary to what the evidence for Greek male homosexuality would have led us to expect. In a heterosexual context Theokritos 6.17 says of the sea-nymph Galateia’s desperate attempts to arouse the sexual interest of the Cyclops ‘she flees one who loves, and when one does not love she pursues’, and Sappho might conceivably have meant by ‘pursue’ no more than ‘try to attract’, but Theokritos’s line has the flavour of a proverb (cf. 11.75, ‘Milk the [sc. ewe] that’s here. Why pursue one who [masculine]128 flees?’) and may not originally have had a sexual reference at all.

  Fr. 31 runs as follows:

  He seems to me to be equal to gods, that man who is sitting129 facing you and hearing your sweet voice close by, and your lovely (hīmeroeis, ‘desire-attracting’) laugh. That, I swear, set my heart fluttering in my breast. For whenever130 I look at you briefly, then it is no longer in my power to speak. My tongue is fixed(?)131 in silence, and straightway a subtle fire has run under my skin, and with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears hum, and cold sweat possesses me, and trembling seizes all of me, and I am paler than grass, and I seem to myself within a little of being dead. But all is to be endured (or ‘has been endured?’),

  since even (?) (the next word is not intelligible’, and the quotation ceases) [ ...

  Occasions on which a man sits facing a (presumably young) woman and talks to her may well have been more numerous and varied in archaic Lesbos than in classical Athens; if the object of Sappho’s emotion is the bride at a wedding, the poem is exceedingly unlikely to be a wedding-song;132 but that by no means precludes the possibility that Sappho is expressing the emotion aroused in someone by the wedding of a girl with whom that person is in love. Whether the man is ‘equal to gods’ because his beauty and strength are superhuman, or because he is unimaginably fortunate to have engaged the sexual interest of the girl, or because he does not (as a mortal might be expected to do) faint when confronted with the girl’s beauty,133 is disputed. Since it is precisely the intonations of speech and laughter which, by appearing to a jealous person to betray an unexpected intimacy between two other people, act as a detonator of intolerable emotional stress, I doubt whether ‘equal to gods’ here connotes imperturbability, and I prefer134 to take it as an indication of fear of loss and despair at the impossibility of competing with the man. ‘Set my heart ...’ is in the aorist tense in accordance with a common Greek idiom: the speaker communicates the fact that he is in an emotional state by saying that it came upon him, sc. a moment before speaking.135 The T of the poem glances frequently and repeatedly at the girl (hence ‘whenever I look ...’) in the wild hope of disproving by sight the inference she drew from sound, but that inference is only confirmed.136 The ancient writers who quote the poem, Plutarch and Pseudo-Longinus, treat the physical symptoms which Sappho describes so fully as a manifestation of her eros for the girl;137 so they are, in the sense that if she had not been in love with the girl she would not have experienced such symptoms, but collectively they amount to an anxiety-attack,138 and the
fact that she feels towards her male rival not a malice which would express itself in depreciation, but the hopeless envy which a mortal feels towards a god, accords with a homosexual orientation.139

  Strong and apparently erotic response by a woman to the beauty of another woman is not confined to the poetry of Sappho;140 it exists also in some partheneia, ‘songs for choruses of virgins’, composed (by male poets) and performed at a variety of festivals in many parts of the Greek world. Pindar in the first half of the fifth century composed some, of which we have two sizable fragments and some scraps, but the genre is especially associated in our own day with the early141 Spartan poet Alkman, thanks to the survival of nearly seventy legible lines of one of his partheneia, fragments of others, and interesting fragments of ancient comments on them. His fr. 3 says (61-81):

  ] with desire that weakens the limbs, and her look melts (sc. me?) more than sleep and death. And not without reason is she (i.e. ‘her effect?) sweet (?). But Astymeloisa does not give me any answer. Holding a garland, like a star falling through the glittering sky, or a golden shoot or soft down [ ] she passed with long steps [ ] moist beauty of the lovely (?) locks of Kinyras, which dwells upon the hair of girls. [ ] Astyrneloisa in the host [ ] darling to the people [ ] having won honour(?) [

  in the hope that [ ] might come (third person) close and take (sc. her? me?) by the tender hand; quickly would I become her suppliant [

  It is possible for a chorus of girls to sing verses composed from a standpoint other than their own, or to sing a narrative in which they report the direct speech of some other person, and caution is required in interpreting a passage such as the above, where the context is missing. Unfortunately we may find ourselves in deeper trouble when we do have the context. The extant portion of the great partheneion of Alkman (fr. 1) follows a portion in which a myth was related and a summary moral drawn; the chorus then goes on to sing of itself and of a number of individual girls by name. It is not easy to make any statement about the interpretation of the poem which will be both useful and non-controversial, and anyone who reads it will see why.142 It is composed for a chorus of ten girls (98f.); it refers to a certain Hagesikhora as ‘my cousin’ (52f.); it praises her hair (51) face (55) and ankles (78; a conventional epithet); it also praises Agido (39-49), who is ‘like the sun’; and it rounds off a list of names with (73-7):

  Nor will you go (feminine participle) to (sc. the house) of Ainesimbrota and say ‘Would that I could have Astaphis’, and ‘would that Philylla would look at me!’ and ‘Damareta’ and ‘lovely Vianthemis’.143 It is Hagesikhora who distresses (teirein) me.

  The language is erotic; even teirein, though it often denotes the action of pain and suffering, is used by Hesiod (fr. 298) of the effect upon Theseus of his eros for Aigle, and in any case it is not easy to see in what other sense a girl so praised for her beauty could ‘distress’ those who praise her.

  Whether the girls for whom Alkman composed this partheneion came all from one family depends on how we interpret the fact that, singing collectively, they call Hagesikhora ‘my cousin’; one of the unknown factors is the degree of kinship denoted by the word ‘cousin’ (anepsios) in the Spartan dialect.144 There were many cults in which functions were restricted to sections of the community regarded as having each a common ancestor more recent in date than the legendary ancestor of the community as a whole. But since it was also very common for the size of a chorus in any part of any festival to be specified, the formation of a chorus for a given occasion entailed selection, whether all the participants came from the same kinship-unit or not. The Greeks naturally wished any performance at a festival to sound good and look good, and in selecting a chorus the ostensible purpose (no matter how often frustrated by favour, enmity and intrigue) would be to pick those who combined to the highest practicable degree beauty, grace and skill. This fact forms an interesting link between Sappho and Alkman. We know that in Sappho’s time there were beauty contests of women on Lesbos, for Alkaios fr. 130.32 says:

  ... where the Lesbians (feminine) go, with trailing dresses, having their bodily form (phuā, ‘growth’) judged (or ‘trying to get a decision on ...’ or ‘trying to have ... chosen’), and all around resounds the wondrous noise of the sacred cry of women each year.

  Beauty contests of women, and of men too, were held also in Elis (Theophrastos fr. 111).145 Who judged? To praise someone’s beauty is (whether we like it or not) a sexual act, and for that reason it is unlikely that in any Greek community women of citizen status were displayed for the appraisal of men and the award of prizes to named individuals on the citerion of sexual arousal; Plu. Lyc. 14.4 regards Sparta as unusual in even permitting young men to be present as spectators at the performance of partheneia. If, however, girls were praised by women and other girls in extravagant and uninhibited terms, they could enjoy the reassurance which their male counterparts received unstintingly. The relations between participants in a female chorus or between teacher and pupils146 in music and poetry may thus have constituted an overt ‘sub-culture’, or rather ‘counter-culture’ in which women and girls received from their own sex what segregation and monogamy denied them from men.147 The language in which these relationships were expressed hardly suffices to tell us whether Sappho, the girls of Lesbos and the members of Alkman’s choruses sought to induce orgasms in one another by bodily contact. Sappho fr. 94 (p. 175) and Plu. Lyc. 18.9 suggest that they did, and that the male population of Lesbos and Sparta in the archaic period knew very well that they did; outside the Socratic circle it cannot have been very common for a Greek to hear erotic language and not suppose that those who used it took pleasure in genital acts when the opportunity presented itself. If I am right in suggesting that in Attic art and literature female homosexuality was, for all practical purposes, a taboo subject (p. 173), an important variation between regions and periods becomes apparent; variation of this kind will be discussed in Chapter IV Part A. The late date at which adverse comment was passed on Sappho’s homosexuality may be explicable by reference to the part played by Athenian social, moral and cultural attitudes (not forgetting the increasing importance of philosophical preoccupations in educated Athenian society of the fourth century) in determining Hellenistic moral criteria.148

  One other consideration is relevant to this question. In discussing Greek female homosexuality I have avoided the words ‘lesbian’ and ‘lesbianism’, and for a good reason.149 In antiquity Lesbian women’ could connote sexual initiative and shamelessness (cf. Pherekrates fr. 149, where it is taken in the sense laikastriai);150 Hesykhios λ 692 defines lesbiazein as ‘fellate’ (cf. Suda 306), and when Philokleon in Ar. Wasps 1345f. says to the girl whom he has brought home from a party ‘I got you away pretty smartly when you were just going to lesbiazein the guests’ he is obviously not referring to any conceivable homosexual propensities on the girl’s part but simply translating ‘flirt with the guests’ into the coarse and extreme terms regularly adopted in comedy.151 In Lucian’s Dialogues of Prostitutes 5 (written in the third century A.D.) we hear of a very masculine homosexual woman from Lesbos (she has a shaven head under a wig), but her equally homosexual companion, with whom she sets on a girl, is from Corinth, and if there is significance in Lucian’s choice of cities it is probably that both Lesbos and Corinth (cf. p. 135) had a reputation for sexual enterprise. The only ancient text in which there is a prima facie association between Lesbos and homosexuality is Anakreon fr. 358. The poet sings of his desire for a girl who

  since she is from the noble island of Lesbos, finds fault with my hair – it is white – and gapes after another (feminine).

  Since ‘hair’ (komē) is a feminine noun, this may be understood with ‘another’, whether it means ‘(sc. someone’s black hair) other (sc. than mine)’ or, with a reference to the Lesbians’ reputation for fellation, ‘(sc. someone else’s black pubic hair) other (sc. than the white hair on my head)’.152 It is however possible both that Anakreon means to represent the girl as homosexually interested
in another girl153 and also that ‘Lesbian’ did not, in his time or at any other time in antiquity, have a primary connotation of homosexuality. So long as we think of the world as divided into homosexuals and heterosexuals and regard the commission of a homosexual act, or even the entertaining of a homosexual desire, as an irrevocable step across a frontier which divides the normal, healthy, sane, natural and good from the abnormal, morbid, insane, unnatural and evil, we shall not get very far in understanding Greek attitudes to homosexuality. If Lesbian women had a reputation (perhaps the creation of Athenian humorists at the time of the wars between Athens and Mytilene in the sixth century) for shameless and uninhibited sexuality,154 they are likely to have been credited with all such genital acts as the inventive pursuit of a piquant variety of pleasure can devise, including homosexual practices together with fellation, cunnilinctus, threesomes, copulation in unusual positions and the use of olisboi.