Greek Homosexuality

by K J Dover

  88. Cf. GPM 74f., 255-7.

  89. Cf.GPM 175-80, 208f.

  90. We might have expected ‘the more downcast you will be’ or ‘the more you will be pitied’, but a Greek was greatly concerned with the effect of success or failure on his standing in society; cf. GPM 226-9, 235-42.

  91. Cf. Wender 78f.

  92. Among those of us whose orientation is mainly or entirely homosexual, some may see clearly enough through Greek eyes already, and in any case it would not help them to imagine Kharmides a girl; I have made the assumption that the difference of heterosexual stimulus between sight of the female face and sight of the breasts is greater than the difference of homosexual stimulus between sight of the male face and sight of the torso. We may be intended to understand, however, that Socrates glimpsed Kharmides’genitals, not his torso.

  93.I say this not because I have failed to understand the Socratic doctrine of eros, but because I do not share Socrates’ assumptions and therefore reject his doctrine in its entirety. This rejection in no way inclines me to a cynical view of Socrates’ own behaviour. Those who are so much more afraid of being deceived in one particular way than in others as to maintain with a knowing smirk that Socrates buggered Alkibiades can be as amusing unintentionally as Lucian (Philosophies for Sale 15) is intentionally, but their sense of proportion is open to criticism; even if they are right, they have not discovered anything about Socrates which deserves a fraction of the attention deserved by (e.g.) Chrm. 161c, 163e, 166cd, Smp. 201c, Grg. 472ab.

  94. Eur. fr. 358, in which children are commanded to erān their mother, is deliberately daring in language, but is so obviously not a command to feel incestuous desire for one’s mother that there is no risk of misunderstanding.

  95. It was not Plato’s practice to reconcile what he said in a given work with what he had said in a previous work; it is therefore seldom possible to decide when he has changed his mind and when he is exploring different aspects of the same problem in different imagery.

  96. Cf. Robin 220-6.

  97. ‘Diotima’ is a genuine Greek woman’s name (and ‘Diotimos’ a very common man’s name). We have no evidence outside the Symposium for a female Mantineian religious expert called Diotima, and in any case it is unlikely that any such person taught Socrates a doctrine containing elements which, according to Aristotle, were specifically Platonic and not Socratic. Plato’s motive in putting an exposition of eros into the mouth of a woman is uncertain; perhaps he wished to put it beyond doubt that the praise of paiderastiā which that exposition contains is disinterested, unlike its praise in the speech of Pausanias.

  98. Cf.Vlastos 27-33.

  99. In Pl. Lys. 221e-222a it is argued that one’s eros is a response to that which is ‘akin’ to oneself, and cf. Phdr. 252c-253c; but there is an important difference between seeking a unique individual who is complementary to oneself (and thus the right ‘recipe’) and seeking someone who resembles oneself to the extent that both resemble something outside and above them.

  100. Cf. Dover (1966) 47-50; den Boer 48f.

  101. Vlastos 25 n. 76 argues that ‘four-footed beast’ does not refer to heterosexual intercourse at all, but I do not agree with him (despite Laws 841d – where, incidentally, concubines are mentioned in the first instance as recipients of seed, and males are tagged on) that paidosporein was intended by Plato, or understood by his readers, to mean no more than the ejaculation of semen. Given Greek modes of copulation (cf. p. 100), the heterosexual reference of ‘four-footed beast’ is clear enough, and Plato’s point is that the man in whom the vision of Beauty is dim pursues only bodily pleasure.

  102. When Plato refers to the lapsed pair as ‘having exchanged the greatest pledges’ (256d) he does not mean their copulation but the rest of their relationship, in which they resemble those who do not copulate.

  103. These are assumptions, not conclusions for which anything that we could seriously call evidence is offered; and that they are assumptions Plato makes clear enough, not pretending to demonstrate what he has not demonstrated. Cf. p. 11 n. 20.

  104. In Pkdr. 249a the only type of soul which is said to ‘return whence it came’ in less than ten thousand years is that of ‘him who has philosophised or has been a paiderastēs with (= in conjunction with) philosophy’. Whether ‘or’ here means ‘that is to say’ is disputable (cf. T.F. Gould 117 and n. 74), but even if it does not the eschatological status of philosophical paiderastiā is still remarkable.

  105. The mythical inventor of homosexuality; cf, p. 199.

  106. On identification of the self with reason cf. GPM 124-6.

  107. Many of us may think (as I do, for one) that there is nothing to be said in favour of the habitual use of words such as ‘pure’, ‘clean’ or ‘innocent’ to mean ‘non-sexual’ or ‘sexually inactive’, but this usage was not begun by Plato; it is firmly rooted in Greek religious belief and practice.

  108. The formula ‘hosios and dikaios’ is commonplace in oratory; cf. GPM 248.

  109. In Laws 841b it is treated as desirable that we should be ashamed of our sexual activity, whether legitimate or not, and should conceal it, in order that its inevitable reduction will then diminish the power of sexual desire over us.

  110. On the tripartite soul, here and elsewhere, I have over-simplified somewhat (cf. Guthrie iv 422-5); the essential point is that to Plato relaxation of the control of reason within the soul creates a ‘power vacuum’ into which lust and greed will make haste to move.

  111. The principal question in this portion of the Ethics is the nature of the inability to refrain from doing what one believes to be wrong.

  112. Opuiein means ‘marry’ in some dialects, but we need a more down-to-earth translation for it in Attic and Hellenistic Greek, yet not too coarse a word.

  113. Grammatically, ‘sexual intercourse with males’ would be possible; cf. Kühner-Gerth i 427f.

  114. The writer uses the passive aphrodīsiazesthai, which is distinct in meaning from the active aphrodīsiazein. To the best of my belief the only passage in which aphrodīsiazesthai appears to have an active sense is Problemata iv 27, where the writer asks why people who desire aphrodīsiazeslhai are ashamed to admit it, whereas no one minds admitting to a liking for food and drink. The answer he gives, that a desire for food and drink is a necessity if we are to keep alive, whereas ‘desire for sexual intercourse’ is ‘a product of surplus’, i.e. a desire to get rid of something, is strange, for one might have expected him to use the argument of the preceding section and say that people are ashamed to admit to a defect; if, on the other hand, the text is wrong, and we should read the active instead of the passive, so that the question is simply why people are embarrassed at admitting to a liking for sexual activity, everything is plain sailing, If the text is wrong, the cause of the error will be the preoccupation with the passive role in the long preceding section.

  115. Not death, but an obliteration of the characteristic form of the species, in this case the male human. Robinson and Fluck 41 wrongly believe that the writer is referring to injury to the anus through penetration.

  116. Cf.p. 62.

  117. In Eur. Medea 249 Medeia, complaining of the miserable lot of women, says that whenever a husband feels that he has had enough of his home he can go out and recover his spirits ‘turning either to someone philos or to someone of his own age’. Since Wilamowitz’s condemnation of the line it has been customary for editors to delete it as an interpolation by a prudish Byzantine schoolmaster who wished to prevent his pupils from entertaining the idea that a husband might recover his spirits by sexual intercourse with someone other than his wife. This notion, however unrealistic, receives superficial support from the fact that hēlika, ‘of his own age’, does not scan; but the plural hēlikas, conjectured by a Byzantine scholar, does, and with that slight emendation we can keep the line; by ‘someone philos’ (and by implication younger) Medeia means to imply an eromenos.

  118. Philetas HE 1.5 may refer (‘things not to be spoke
n of by a man’); cf. Hopfner 332, and Hesiod’s dictum (Works and Days 753f.) that is baneful for a man to wash in water in which a woman has washed.

  119. On the meaning of this term, often simply ‘good’ when applied to a male citizen, cf. GPM 41-45.

  120. Cf. Guarducci and also Schauenburg (1964).

  121. Cf. Nagy on Sappho’s own treatment of the Phaon myth.

  122. Unless Athenaios 599d ‘and he says that Sappho said ...’ is a careless expression for (cf. 599c) ‘and he says that some say that Sappho said ...’.

  123. The notion of Sappho as a ‘schoolmistress’ now attracts a certain amount of ridicule, a reaction against earlier attempts to play down the sensuality of her poetry, but in the Greek world those who could not only did but also taught.

  124. Fr. 99.5 is tantalising, but perhaps not important; it presents us with olisb[o]dokois[ , in a very badly damaged context. The word, ‘receivers of the olisbos’, recalls the satyr’s name ‘Phlebodokos’ (p. 103), ‘receiver of the vein’, i.e. ‘...of the penis’, and if on the strength of a double-ended olisbos, portrayed in R223* (cf. Pomeroy 88), we assumed that the olisbos was not merely used in female homosexual relations in the archaic and classical periods but used primarily for that purpose, we would naturally treat the passage as relevant to Sappho’s homosexuality. Since, however, the olisbos is associated essentially with solitary female masturbation, Sappho may here be speaking derogatorily, or relating someone else’s derogatory description, of a female enemy who, she alleges, can find no partner.

  125. In the Greek text the phrase kai ouk etheloisa, ‘even unwilling’, using the feminine participle, is the only indication of the sex of the person whom Aphrodite is asked to influence. The metre requires –uu– x (–ai and ou– coalesce); unfortunately, ‘be willing’ in Lesbian dialect is always thelein, never ethelein, and the disyllabic negatives oukhi and ouki are not as yet attested in that dialect, which has only ou and ouk. Among emendations designed to restore linguistic normality, some (e.g. Knox 194, Beattie 183) have the effect of removing the only indication that the desired person is female.

  126. Cf. Gentili (1972) 63-6; but however one applies the Greek concept of equilibrium and reciprocity to erotic relationships, it must also be remembered that evaluative words such as ‘wrong’ are instruments by which we try to make other people do what we wish, justly or unjustly (cf. GPM 50-6, 181 f., 217).

  127. Cf. Dover (1963b) 201-12 on the danger of treating Greek lyric poetry as autobiography, and Leflcowitz on fr. 31.

  128. In generalisations masculine forms stand for masculine and feminine together; cf. p. 66.

  129. Literally, ‘whoever is sitting’; the indicative mood precludes ‘whoever (sc. at any time) sits’ and points to ‘inasmuch as he is sitting ...’, ‘because he ...’, a possible meaning for ‘whoever’ in Greek.

  130. ‘When’, Page (1955) 19 (cf. ibid. 29 n.1 and Devereux (1970) 24), which to the English-speaking reader suggests ‘now that ...’; but cf. n. 21 below.

  131. Cf. Devereux (1970) 23f.

  132. Cf. Page (1955) 30-3.

  133. So Marcovich 20f., 29; cf. Anon. HE 13.3f. ‘If upon looking at him you were not subdued by the flames of desire, you must be a god or a stone’; but the connotations of ‘equal to a god’ in archaic and classical literature are not indifference and immunity but size, beauty, majesty, strength and exultation.

  134. Subjectivity is not easily excluded in the interpretation of Greek lyric poetry, and the reader is warned that in my eventual decision between alternative treatments of this poem there is a larger element of subjectivity than I usually (if I perceive it in time) allow myself. Cf. n. 21 below.

  135. Cf. Kühner-Gerth i 164.

  136. Marcovich’s interpretation of the sequence is: (a) ‘your voice and laugh originally excited my heart with love for you’, (b) ‘subsequently, whenever I look at you, I faint (etc.)’; ‘for whenever ...’justifies by expansion the fact communicated in ‘excited my heart’. The strength of Marcovich’s case (and the weakness of Devereux’s and mine) is: (i) the verb which I have translated ‘excited’ is almost certainly used by Alkaios fr. 283.3f. of the effect of desire for Paris on Helen’s heart, even though it is used elsewhere in early Greek poetry of the effects of fear, and (ii) ‘whenever ...’, or ‘every time that ...’ is certainly a correct translation, and I do not feel entirely confident that a Greek hearer would understand ‘whenever (sc. during this temporary situation) I glance at you’. I do, however, feel (and here I avoid the word ‘think’) that ‘That, I swear ...’describes the shock-wave which hit the speaker when she heard the tone of voice in which the girl spoke to the man, and ‘for whenever ...’ explains why ‘Heseems tome ...’.

  137. Plutarch Dial. 763a describes Sappho’s emotion as recurring ‘when her erōmenē’ (feminine) ‘has appeared to her’; Beattie (1956) 110f. adopts an alternative emendation of line 7 which gives ‘when I look upon (sc. this situation)’ and opens the possibility that Sappho is in love with the man and jealous of the girl.

  138. Cf. Devereux (1970)18f.

  139. Devereux’s reference (22f.) to ‘phallic awe’ is treated by Marcovich 20 as ‘pushing’ the hypothesis of Sappho’s jealousy ‘ad absurdum’; but there is an important difference between statements which are absurd because they are irreconcilable with facts and facts which are absurd but are the subject of truthful statements. Experience has compelled me to believe that some elements in Freud’s psychodynamics are true and the common-sense assumptions which conflict with them untrue. On the subject of ‘phallic awe’ and ‘penis envy’ (cf. Slater 45-9) I am not in a position to contribute an opinion of my own, but I beg the reader to distinguish between (a) the truth or falsity of a statement, (b) the goodness or badness of the fact, or the hypothetical goodness or badness of the factoid, communicated by that statement, and (c) the goodness or badness of the consequences of believing the statement. ‘Earthquakes are common in Turkey’ suffices to illustrate the difference between (a) and (b), and the difference between (a) and (c) is thrust upon us by developments in ‘genetic engineering’.

  140. Cf. Diels 352-6.

  141. Late seventh and early sixth century; cf. M.L. West (1965) 188-94.

  142. Translations are available in Page (1951) 21f. and Bowra (1961) 45f.

  143. I have adopted the punctuation of M.L. West (1965) 199f.

  144. Cf. Bowra (1961) 47.

  145. I think Nilsson 1674 is right in connecting such contests with selection for ritual purposes. Athenian contests in ‘manliness’ (euandriā) involved adult soldiers, not good-looking youths.

  146. Sappho fr. 213 seems (to judge from an ancient commentator’s paraphrase) to have said that ‘Pleistodika will share with Gongyla the title of “yoke-fellow of Gorgo” ’; the word used is found in poetry both in the sense ‘spouse’ and in the sense ‘comrade’. The names of Gongyla and Gorgo occur elsewhere in Sappho. What is implied by ‘yoke-fellow’ we do not know, but it suggests a nexus within Sappho’s circle rather than a convergence upon her.

  147. For this suggestion I am entirely indebted to an unpublished paper of Dr Judith Hallett. On parallelism of male and female social groups cf. Merkelbach.

  148. On the growth of inhibition and sexual respectability in the fourth and third centuries B.C. cf. p. 151.

  149. Cf. Kroll (1924) 2100. Symonds 71 misstates the facts about the term ‘Lesbian’.

  150. In imagining that the speaker comments on a proffered gift of Lesbian women ‘with satisfaction’ Gentili (1973) 126 overlooks the sarcasm of’That’s a fine gift!’ (cf. Eur. Cyclops 551 and Denniston 128).

  151. To say, as Giangrande does (131 f.), that ‘Lesbian’ necessarily implied fellation to the exclusion of other sexual modes goes a little beyond the evidence; some references to ‘Lesbian’ behaviour in comedy were so interpreted by later commentators on comedy, and I am sure they were right in some of these cases, but the comic passages themselves do not justify so narrow an interpretati
on (cf. in particular Ar. Eccl. 920, with Ussher’s note ad loc.). It is also misleading to say (Giangrande 132) that the verb khaskein, ‘applied to girls in amatory contexts, is the terminus technicus denoting eagerness to fellare’. It means ‘open the mouth’, and fellation is impossible without opening the mouth, but that is not the kind of thing that ‘technical term’ normally implies. Figuratively, ‘khaskein to ...’ or ‘... at ...’ denotes besotted admiration, desire or expectation of any kind.

  152. Giangrande 132 wishes the antithesis to be between ‘my head-hair’ and ‘my other hair’, but the antithesis offered us by the Greek, using the emphatic possessive adjective emos, is between ‘my hair’ and ‘other’ (M. Campbell, Mus. Crit. viii/ix [1973/4] 168).

  153. I would be very surprised indeed if M.L. West (1970) 209 is right in thinking that the girl is ‘deep in trivial conversation with her friend’ rather than sexually interested in a direction which makes it impossible for Anakreon to arouse her sexual interest in him.

  154. When Didymos discussed (Seneca Epistles 88.37) ‘whether Sappho was a whore (publica)’ he did not mean ‘Could she have been a heterosexual whore as well as, or rather than, a homosexual lover?’ but ‘Was she a shameless woman ready for any kind of sexual behaviour?’

  IV

  Changes

  A. The Dorians

  Some Greek communities which spoke closely related dialects believed themselves to share a common ancestry, and the three most important groupings of this kind were the ‘Dorians’ (e.g. Sparta, Argos, Corinth and the cities of Crete), the ‘Aeolians’ (Boiotia, Lesbos) and the ‘Ionians’ (Athens and most of the Aegean islands and cities of the Aegean coast of Asia Minor). A colony planted near or far naturally belonged to the same grouping as its mother-city; hence, for example, Syracuse was Dorian because its mother-city was Corinth. The three groups do not constitute an exhaustive division of the Greek world, for substantial regions – such as Phokis, Elis and Arcadia – were neither Dorian nor Aeolian nor Ionian.