Greek Homosexuality

by K J Dover

  The most widely accepted generalisation about Greek homosexuality at the present time is that it originated in the military organisation of Dorian states (so that its diffusion throughout the Greek world was a product of Dorian influence) and that in the classical period overt homosexual behaviour was more acceptable in certain Dorian regions (notably Sparta and Crete) than elsewhere. The first part of this generalisation is not refutable and may be true, but the evidence for it is not as cogent as is commonly believed and asserted. The second part of the generalisation might possibly be true, but it has to contend with a significant body of contrary evidence; the difficulty of assessing the evidence lies in the fact that Greeks, like other people, passed judgments in accordance with the emotion engendered by examples present to their minds at the moment of speaking, and in the notorious disparity between professed attitudes and actual behaviour.

  The generalisation is largely founded on two passages of Plato’s Laws, where the three speakers are an Athenian, a Cretan and Spartan. In 636ab, responding to the Spartan’s claim that the military organisation of communal messes and physical training contribute to sōphrosunē, the Athenian says;

  These gymnasia and messes ... seem also to have undermined a law which is old and in accordance with nature: I mean the pleasure which man and beast alike have in sexual intercourse. For this your cities above all should be blamed, and all such cities as make use of gymnasia. ... We must reflect that when the natural forms of female and male come together for procreation, the pleasure in this act seems to have been granted them in accordance with nature, but that enjoyed by males in intercourse with males or by females in intercourse with females seems to be contrary to nature, a crime of the first order, committed through inability to control the desire for pleasure. We all blame the Cretans for having made up the myth of Ganymede ...

  The Spartan is embarrassed, and turns the conversation on to the restraints imposed upon drunkenness at Sparta. When in due course the Athenian comes back to sexual legislation in detail (cf. p. 165) he says (836b):

  In many other respects Crete as a whole and Sparta give us a good deal of solid support in our attempt to make laws differing from the way most things are, but in the matter of eros – we’re by ourselves (sc. and can therefore speak in confidence) – they are completely opposed to us.

  It must be said at once that Plato was not a historian either by trade or by temperament, and even if he intended to imply that homosexuality began in Crete and Sparta and spread thence over the Greek world, we are not obliged to respect his authority; neither he nor any other Greek of the classical period was in a strong position to discover how a social usage was diffused two or three centuries earlier.1 The belief that the Cretans invented paiderastiā was certainly held and expressed by Timaios (F144) not long after Plato’s time, and Ekhemenes, a Cretan historian of uncertain date, argued (F1) that it was not Zeus who carried off the beautiful Ganymede, but Minos, the legendary king of Crete. In implying that at the time of writing Laws Sparta and Crete were exceptional in the degree of approval which they extended to homosexuality, Plato deserves a hearing; so far as concerns Crete, he is supported by Aristotle, Politics 1272a 23-26, where Cretan ‘intercourse with males’ is treated as a practice designed to prevent over-population. It will be advisable to consider first the evidence for regional variation in homosexuality during the classical period and only then (taking into account the uncertainties inherent in extrapolation from later to earlier periods) theorise about the origins of the homosexual ethos.

  (i) Linguistic usage.

  Among interesting entries in lexica of late antiquity and the early medieval period we find: Hesykhios κ 4080 ‘in the Cretan way: to use paidika’; λ 224 ‘lakonize:2 use paidika’ (cf. Suda A 62); λ 226 ‘in the Lakonian way: penetrate; paiderastein; offer themselves (feminine plural) to visitors, since the Lakonians guard their women less than any other people’; μ 4735 ‘kusolakōn: Aristarkhos says that Kleinias was so called because he lakonized with the kusos, and they called using paidika “lakonizing” ’ (cf. κ 4738 ‘kusos: buttocks or vulva’, and cf. Photios s.v. kusolakōn);χ 85 Schmidt ‘khalkidize: used of those who paiderastein’; cf. Suda χ 42 ‘khalkidize: paiderastein, since among them (sc. the inhabitants of Khalkis) the eros of males was practised’. A fairly high proportion of such words come from Attic comedy, but Hesykhios only rarely names the sources of what he (following Hellenistic commentators) lists and explains. Suda λ 62 adds ‘Aristophanes in the second3 Thesmophoriazusae’ to the explanation of ‘lakonize’, and there could be no doubt in any case (even without the name of Aristarkhos, who commented on some plays of Aristophanes) that kusolakōn as an epithet of Alkibiades’ father Kleinias4 came from a comedy. As we can easily see by taking passages from extant Aristophanic plays and imagining them reduced to bare phrases without a context, there is room for disagreement on what a given humorous term means. Against the simple inference that the Athenians of the central classical period applied ‘lakonize’ not only (as they did) to imitation of Spartan dress and routine and adoption of pro-Spartan policies5 but also to participation in homosexual copulation, and the further inference that they were right in believing such conduct to be specially characteristic of Sparta, one must set two quite important considerations. One is that, as we have seen, an allegation of ready submission to homosexual penetration was always derogatory, the kind of thing one says of an enemy, and Sparta and Athens were enemies, with only brief interludes of peace, in the lifetime of Aristophanes and his contemporaries. The second is that Photios adds to his explanation of kusolakōn ‘for that is how Theseus used Helen,6 according to Aristotle’.7 Coupled with the statement of Hagnon of Tarsos ap. Athenaios 602d that ‘before marriage it is customary for the Spartans to associate with virgin girls as with paidika’, it seems that Aristotle mentioned the idea that Theseus and Helen (abducted by Theseus as a child) ‘invented’ anal intercourse, and since Helen was a Spartan heroine the original sexual meaning of ‘lakonize’ will have been ‘have anal intercourse’, irrespective of the sex of the person penetrated. ‘Khalkidize’, so far as the evidence goes, associates the Ionian city of Khalkis in Euboia with homosexuality less ambiguously than ‘lakonize’ associates Dorian Sparta. A source not named by Athenaios (601d; Athenaios thinks of the people of Khalkis as daimoniōs enthusiastic about paiderastiā, like Misgolas in Aiskhines i 41) claimed that Ganymede himself had been a Khalkidean and snatched up by Zeus in the neighbourhood of Khalkis; and Plu. Dial. 761ab cites from Aristotle (fr. 98)8 a song popular at Khalkis:

  O boys, you who possess charm and noble lineage, do not begrudge good men converse with your beauty! For together with courage Eros who dissolves the limbs9 flourishes in the cities10 of the Khalkideans.

  (ii) Extant comedy.

  In the reconciliation scene of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, when Athenian and Spartan representatives, reduced to a miserable condition by the sex-strike of their wives, are impatient for a settlement, the Athenian says (1103) ‘Why don’t we summon Lysistrata, who alone can reconcile us?’ and the Spartan replies ‘By the twin gods, summon Lysistratos too, if you like!’ When negotiations are completed, the Athenian says (1173) ‘Now I want to strip off and work the land!’ – a clear enough sexual allusion, given the context – and the Spartan chimes in ‘And I want to do the manuring first!’ Before drawing the conclusion that Athenians and Spartans are here contrasted as heterosexual vs. homosexual, we should reflect that Aristophanes could perfectly well have put both these jokes into the mouth of a speaker of Athenian or any other nationality, given that the Athenian in 109If. has said ‘If someone doesn’t reconcile us pretty quick we shall have to fuck Kleisthenes!’, and that heterosexual anal intercourse was common (to judge from the vase-paintings; cf. p. 100) at Athens. The second joke, however, has an additional point if the Spartans were regarded as the ‘inventors’ of anal penetration (cf. above).

  (iii) Ritualisation in Crete.

  Ephoros, writing in the mid-f
ourth century, gives a remarkable account (F149) of ritualised homosexual rape in Crete. The erastes gave notice of his intention, and the family and friends of the eromenos did not attempt to hide the boy away, for that would have been an admission that he was not worthy of the honour offered him by the erastes. If they believed that the erastes was unworthy, they prevented the rape by force; otherwise they put up a good-humoured and half-hearted resistance, which ended with the erastes carrying off the eromenos to a hide-out for two months. At the end of that period the two of them returned to the city (the eromenos was known, during this relationship, as parastatheis, ‘posted beside ...’or ‘brought over to the side of ...’) and the erastes gave the eromenos expensive presents, including clothing which would thereafter testify to the achievement of the eromenos in being chosen; he was kleinos, ‘celebrated’, thanks to his philētōr, ‘lover’. We do not know how general this usage was in the cities of Crete; we look in vain for the relevant terms, or for any other indication of the ritual, in the Law-code of Gortyn, where the prohibition of ordinary rape (II 1-17) is similar to that of Athenian law in not differentiating between male and female victims, though the penalty is financial only.11 Nor, of course, do we know how old the Cretan ritual was in Ephoros’s time. Cretan convention agreed with Spartan (cf. p. 202) in regarding courage and moral character, not good looks, as the attributes which attracted the erastes, but there is no evidence from any other Dorian area for the procedure described by Ephoros,12 and it would be prudent to treat it as a special local development irrelevant to the problem of the origins of the homosexual ethos.

  (iv) Elis and Boiotia.

  The most striking feature of the Athenian’s criticism of Crete and Sparta in Plato’s Laws is negative: it is contradicted not merely by what some people thought about Khalkis but by what Plato puts into the mouth of Pausanias in Symposium, and Plato’s contemporary Xenophon, very well acquainted with Sparta and having experience of commanding troops drawn from many different parts of the Greek world, agrees with Pausanias, not with the anonymous Athenian of Laws, Pausanias says (Smp. 182ab) that homosexual eros meets with unqualified approval in Elis and Boiotia – neither of which, incidentally, was Dorian – and with unqualified disapproval in ‘many parts of Ionia and elsewhere’, but at Athens and Sparta public attitudes are ‘complicated’. Xenophon in Smp. 8.32f. makes Socrates, with explicit reference to Pausanias, accept the prevalence of overt homosexuality in Elis and Boiotia as a fact (‘it is their custom, but at Athens disgraceful’), and in Lac. 2.12f. he himself differentiates Sparta both from Elis and Boiotia and, at the other extreme, from places where ‘they absolutely prevent erastai from talking to boys’. The Spartan practice is indeed ‘complicated’ as Xenophon describes it (2.13):

  If a man who was himself what a man should be admired the soul of a boy and tried to make a perfect friend of him and associate with him, he (sc. the original legislator, Lykourgos13) commended that man and regarded this (sc. association) as the best kind of education; but if anyone clearly had an appetite for the boy’s body, he laid it down that this was utterly shameful, and he brought it about that at Sparta erastai abstained from sexual relations with their paidika no less than parents from their children .and siblings from one another. That some people do not believe this does not surprise me, for in many cities the law does not oppose desire for boys.

  A system which encourages something called ‘eros’ but treats its bodily consummation as incest is all very well as a philosophical construction, such as we encounter in the picture of ideal eros in Plato’s Phaedrus, but its operation is likely to open a gulf between what is said and what is done. Whether this gulf was in fact opened at Sparta will be considered later (p. 193).

  In any Greek state, when an ero menos was old enough to serve as a soldier (and at Athens this liability began at 18, though only within the frontiers of Attica for the age-group 18-19) erastes and eromenos could find themselves fighting the same battle; the desire of the erastes to excel in the eyes of his eromenos was a spur to his courage (cf. Pl. Smp. 178e-179a). If the eromenos responded to the sentiment of the erastes with love and admiration, the eromenos, for his part, wished to live up to the example set by the erastes; that was his spur to courage. As we saw in the case of Harmodios and Aristogeiton (p. 41), who killed the brother of the Athenian tyrant Hippias in 514 B.C. and passed into Athenian tradition as a supreme example of devotion to liberty at the price of life,14 erastes and eromenos could dedicate themselves to a joint enterprise requiring the utmost heroism. Anecdotes illustrative of this accumulated, some of them mythological in character, e.g. (Neanthes of Kyzikos F1) the story that when an oracle demanded a human sacrifice of Athens Kratinos, a beautiful youth, offered himself as the victim, and his erastes Aristodemos sacrificed himself as well (possibly Pl. Smp. 179e-180a contributed to this story). We cannot however dismiss all anecdotes of this type as romantic fictions of the post-classical period. Some were contained in a work on eros written by Herakleides Ponticus in the late fourth century B.C., e.g. (fr. 65) the plot of Khariton and his paidika Melanippos against Phalaris, tyrant of Akragas, and the pardon they received because the tyrant’s heart was moved by their courage under torture (cf. the tradition that Aristogeiton withstood fearful torture [Aristotle Constitution of Athens 18.5f.]). Plutarch’s story (Dial. 760e-la) that the high regard of the men of Khalkis for homosexual eros arose from the encouragement and inspiration given to their ally, Kleomakhos of Pharsalos, by his eromenos in the preparation for battle (Kleomakhos lost his life) was drawn, though the names of the protagonists were not the same, either from Aristotle or from Aristoteles of Khalkis.

  In Elis and Boiotia erastes and eromenos were posted beside each other in battle (Xen. Smp. 8.32). Both states, that is, exploited an aspect of the homosexual ethos for military purposes. About Elean military organisation we know no more, but the ‘Sacred Band’ of Thebes, formed c. 378, was composed entirely of pairs of homosexual lovers;15 it was the hard core of the Boiotian army, a formidable army at all times, throughout the middle period of the fourth century, and at Khaironeia in 338, where Philip II of Macedon crushed Greek opposition, it died to a man. A certain Pammenes, a Theban military commander, advocated this type of pairing as a principle of military organisation (Plu. Dial. 761a), and it was a practice at Thebes (ibid.), when an eromenos came of age, for his erastes to make him a present of armour. When Epameinondas fell in battle at Mantineia in 362, his current eromenos Asopikhos died beside him; an earlier eromenos, Kaphisodoros, was destined to become the most formidable Theban fighter of his day (ibid 761d). Xenophon’s passing reference (Anab. vii 4.8) to the valour displayed by Episthenes in a company selected on the criterion of beauty (cf. p. 51) shows that the Thebans of the 370s were not the first to exploit the anxiety of men to show off their prowess to the young and handsome. Here we seem to catch a historical development actually in process, and it is in a non-Dorian ambience. A Spartan erastes and eromenos might find themselves close together in the battle-line, and it might even be contrived that they should do so – when the Spartan commander Anaxibios sought death in battle to atone for his military carelessness, his paidika stayed with him to the end (Xen. Hell. iv 8.39) – but it was not part of Spartan military organisation that they should deliberately be posted side by side (Xen. Smp. 8.35).

  (v) Social and military organisation.

  The peculiarity of Spartan and Cretan society was the segregation of the male citizen population into messes and barracks (Aristotle Politics 1271a 40-2b4, Xen, Lac. 5.2, Plu. Lyc. 12.1), and – certainly at Sparta; cf. Xen. Lac. 6.1, Plu. Lyc. 15-17 – the quite deliberate withdrawal of authority from fathers of families and its transference to the oldest male age-group and those to whom responsibility for the various age-groups of boys, adolescents, youths and men was delegated. Spartan society as a whole was permanently organised like an army in training (cf. Plu. Lyc. 24.1). Since it has been observed in our own day (to say nothing of Euboulos fr. 120 [p. 135]) that segregati
on of males into armies, ships or prisons promotes homosexual behaviour, there is an a priori argument for an exceptional degree of such behaviour in Sparta and Crete Yet the behaviour of the inhabitants of a barracks in the middle of a town is not the same as that of an expeditionary force in a desert, and one of the variables upon which the validity of the argument turns is the attitude of a given military society towards women. The Spartans valued any individual of either sex to the extent to which he or she contributed to the maintenance of Spartan power over a subject population and in confrontation with other states, and this meant that in their eyes the best woman was the healthiest mother of the healthiest children. With this attitude, which affected men and women alike, went a much greater public exposure and freedom of movement for women than was normal in the Greek world (Plu. Lyc. 14-15.1; cf. Ar. Lys. 79-84); it entailed physical training and athletic and musical contests, from which male spectators were not excluded, so that the ‘shamelessness’ of Spartan women was a matter for adverse comment at Athens (Eur. Andromache 595-601). The young Spartan was not involved, as he grew up, in a simple opposition between sexual love for women and sexual loyalty to the males of his own unit. A Spartan could in fact enter into four relationships: first, loyalty to the males of his age-group, with whom he competed for recognition of his male virtues and with whom he may (for all we know) have had frequent and casual homosexual relations; secondly, the much more intense erastes-eromenos relationship, as elsewhere in the Greek world; thirdly, marriage; and fourthly, if there is anything in the evidence of Hagnon (p. 188), an erastes-eromenē relationship with an unmarried girl, consummated anally.16 Overt recognition of the fourth of these relationships constitutes an element in which Sparta seems to have differed from other states.