by K J Dover
Erastes and eromenos clearly found in each other something which they did not find elsewhere. When Plato (Phdr. 255b) said that the eromenos realises that the love offered by his erastes is greater than that of all his family and friends put together, he was speaking of an idealised, ‘philosophical’ eros, and yet he may have been a little closer than he realised to describing the everyday eros which he despised. Indeed, the philosophical paiderastiā which is fundamental to Plato’s expositions in Phaedrus and Symposium is essentially an exaltation, however starved of bodily pleasure, of a consistent Greek tendency to regard homosexual eros as a compound of an educational with a genital relationship. The strength, speed, endurance and masculinity of the eromenos – that is to say, his quality as a potential fighter – were treated (and I offer no opinion on the unexpressed thoughts and feelings of erastai) as the attributes which made him attractive. The Spartans and Cretans went a stage further in professing to have much more regard for qualities of character than for bodily beauty (Ephoros F149; cf Plu. Agis 2.1, on the achievement of Agis, as a lame boy, in becoming the eromenos of Lysander). The erastes was expected to win the love of the eromenos by his value as an exemplar and by the patience, devotion and skill which he displayed in training the eromenos. At Sparta (Plu. Lyc. 22.8) the educational responsibility of the erastes was so interpreted that he bore the blame for a deficiency in courage manifested by his eromenos. ‘Education’ is the key-word in Xenophon’s evaluation of a chaste homosexual relationship (Lac. 2.13, Smp. 8.23), and Spartan terminology (‘breathe into ...’, ‘inspire’ [Aelian Varia Historia iii 12, Hesykhios ε 2475] = ‘fall in love with ...’, and eisprielos or eisprielas [Kallimakhos fr. 68 Pfeiffer, Theokritos 12.13] = ‘breather-into’ = ‘erastes’) points to a notion that the erastes was able to transfer qualities from himself into his eromenos.33 On growing up, in any Greek community, the eromenos graduated from pupil to friend, and the continuance of an erotic relationship was disapproved, as was such a relationship between coevals. Homosexual relationships are not exhaustively divisible, in Greek society or in any other, into those which perform an educational function and those which provoke and relieve genital tension. Most relationships of any kind are complex, and the need for bodily contact and orgasm was one ingredient of the complex of needs met by homosexual eros.34
The modern sentiment which I have heard expressed, more than once, in the words ‘It’s impossible to understand how the Greeks could have tolerated homosexuality’ is the sentiment of a culture which has inherited a religious prohibition of homosexuality and, by reason of that inheritance, has shown (until recently) no salutary curiosity about the variety of sexual stimuli which can arouse the same person or about the difference between fundamental orientation of the personality and episodic behaviour at a superficial level. The Greeks neither inherited nor developed a belief that a divine power had revealed to mankind a code of laws for the regulation of sexual behaviour; they had no religious institution possessed of the authority to enforce sexual prohibitions. Confronted by cultures older and richer and more elaborate than theirs, cultures which none the less differed greatly from each other, the Greeks felt free to select, adapt, develop and – above all – innovate.35 Fragmented as they were into tiny political units, they were constantly aware of the extent to which morals and manners are local. This awareness also disposed them to enjoy the products of their own inventiveness and to attribute a similar enjoyment to their deities and heroes.
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1. No relevant documentary evidence existed; a combination of statements by archaic poets about traditions in their time would constitute evidence worth considering, but we have no reason to suppose that there was a sufficiency of such statements.
2. In this chapter, for all practical purposes, ‘Lakonian’ = ‘Spartan’; and ‘Theban’ virtually = ‘Boiotian’, in so far as Thebes was the dominant partner in the Boiotian federation.
3. So far as our evidence goes, the lost play of Aristophanes entitled Thesmophoriazusae had nothing in common with the extant play of that name.
4. On the type of joke ‘Alkibiades the son of Kusolakon’ (a hit at Alkibiades, not at his actual father Kleinias) cf. Dover (1964) 36.
5. In PI. Grg. 515e Kallikies refers to Athenian ‘Lakonizers’ as ‘the men with cauliflower ears’ (cf. Prt. 342b). The Socratic circle contained some, notably Kritias, who admired Sparta and were prepared to betray Athens, but we do not seem to encounter in Plato people who imitated Spartan austerity and dirt (Ar. Birds 1282f. refers to a ‘craze for Sparta’, but does not associate it with any particular class of the population).
6. An emendation, virtually certain, of a name which does not make sense.
7. Whether the philosopher Aristotle or his contemporary (?), the historian Aristoteles of Khalkis, we cannot be sure.
8. Cf. n. 7.
9. Lūsimelēs, making a man feel weak at the knees.
10. The plural embraces Khalkidean colonies as well as the mother-city.
11. Cf.Willetts 10.
12. Bethe 456f. discerns analogies to the Cretan ritual in two of Plutarch’s Low Stories: one (no. 2), that Arkhias of Corinth, the reputed founder of Syracuse in the eighth century B.C., tried to kidnap his eromenos Aktaion, who was unfortunately torn to pieces in the resultant fight between his friends and Arkhias’s; the other (no. 3), that the Spartan governor of Oreos in Euboia seized a youth and killed him when he resisted rape. The Aktaion story, however, arises out of the normal habit of brawling over eromenoi (cf. pp. 54-7), and the other story, incorporated in a more detailed story of two young Spartans who raped and murdered the daughters of their host, is intended to illustrate the atrocious oppressiveness of Spartans towards foreigners over whom they had power. Marriage was ritualised at Sparta as a ravishment (harpagē), according to Plu. Lyc. 15.4, but it would be perverse to suppose that this emerged from a homosexual practice of Cretan type, rather than the reverse.
13. Lykourgos was regarded by the Spartans as their legislator; when he lived, and how much of Spartan classical usage went back to his time, are matters.of dispute. It is also of some significance that Xen. Lac. 14 regards the Spartans of his own time as falling far short of what Lykourgos intended.
14. Thuc. vi 54.1 plays down the political importance of the act of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, as arising fortuitously from a love-affair, but he does not say anything derogatory about the love-affair itself.
15. On the chronology cf. Dover (1965) 9-15.
16. The Thessalian (non-Dorian) term for an eromenos was aītās (Theokritos 12.14); Alkman (fr. 34) used aitis in the sense ‘pretty girl’.
17. Cf. the anecdote (Plu. Lyc. 15.17f.) about a Spartan’s denial that any Spartan ever committed adultery.
18. This may be the model for the prescriptions in Pl. Laws 841a-e about the need for shame and secrecy in all sexual relations.
19. Cf. Jeffery 318f.
20. On the date of Theognis cf. p. 10 n. 16; the homosexual poetry in the Theognidean corpus may be its latest ingredient in date. Tyrtaios’s reference (fr. 10.27-30) to the beauty of a young male is modelled on Hom. Il. xxii 71-3, and makes the point that it is shameful to see an old man dying of wounds on the battlefield, but appropriate that the young should suffer wounds and death. It is of particular interest that Tyrtaios describes the beautiful youth as ‘eratos to women’ (cf. p. 43) but as thēētos, i.e. attracting attention as admirable or remarkable, to men.
21. Cf. Sichtermann (n.d.) 15-18, Kunze 38f.
22. Homīliā, ‘association’, ‘intercourse’, ‘dealings’, as in Aristotle, Politics 1272a 23-26, quoted on p.186.Hagnon uses the cognate verb homīlein, of Spartan dealings with virgin girls (I misquoted in Dover [1964)37). On the other hand, the writer of [Dem.] lxi feels able to use these words (e.g. §§ 3,17,20) of ostensibly ‘platonic’converse between a boy and his admirers.
23. Cf. the warning of Kroll (1921) 903 against dating homosexual myths too early. The analysis of homosexual attitudes underlyi
ng the treatment of myths by individual poets is quite a different matter; cf. Devereux (1967) 83 on Bakkhylides 5.155-75 and (1973) 113-47 on Deianeira in Sophokles’ Trachiniae.
24. But cf. Lloyd-Jones 120-4 on the fifth-century antecedents of Euripides’ play; Keydell 146f.
25. Cf. IGD III 3.16-18.
26. Plu. Pelopidas 19.1 mentions (only to reject it) a belief which linked the story of Laios with the exceptional homosexuality of the Thebans. According to Aristotle, Politics 1274a31ff., the Thebans regarded their legislator Philolaos as having been erastes of a young Olympic victor, Diokles; Philolaos was Corinthian (and Corinth was Dorian), but we do not know at what stage, or where, the erotic element entered the tradition.
27. Cf. Kleingünther, especially 25,143f. on Pindar and 45-65 on Herodotos.
28. Equally, there must have been a moment at which a chimpanzee for the first time put a sliver of wood into an ants’ nest to extract ants; observers in Japan a few years ago came very close to seeing the first moment at which a monkey washed a potato in sea-water before eating it and so established a habit in a community of monkeys (cf. Wilson 170).
29. Cf. Hdt. i 135 on the readiness of the Persians to adopt eupatheiai, ‘enjoyments’, ‘comforts’, almost ‘good-time activities’, from other peoples; ‘and indeed they have sexual intercourse with boys, having learned this from the Greeks’. Xen. Cyr. ii 2.28, a joke put into the mouth of the Persian Kyros, presupposes that acquisition of an eromenos is ‘the Greek way’. Phanokles fr. 1.7-10 attributes the death df the legendary Orpheus at the hands of Thracian women to his having been the first to preach in Thrace the superiority of homosexual to heterosexual eros.
30. Cf. the words of the Cretan in Pl. Laws 626a on the ‘undeclared war’ which exists between every city and every other city, and the totally illusory nature of what is called ‘peace’. Marrou 26-33 treats homosexual eros as evolving (and, in the classical period, already degenerating) from the ethos of a warrior-community; I would prefer to say that the warrior-community provided one favourable condition for the evolution.
31. Cf.GPM 156-60, 288-310.
32. Cf. Devereux (1967) 78f., Slater 53-64 (questioned in part by Pomeroy 95f.).
33. Cf. Ruppersberg. Bethe 465-74 (cf. Devereux [1967] 80) considers the possibility that injection of semen by the erastes into the eromenos was believed to transfer virtue; there are anthropological parallels, and some striking evidence from clinical psychology (Karlen 420, 424, 435, 482).
34. The story (Plu. Dial. 762c and Alcibiades 4.5f.) that an erastes of Alkibiades, insolently robbed of half his gold and silver drinking-vessels by his drunken eromenos in front of guests, exclaimed at the kindness of Alkibiades in leaving him the other half, suggests the possibility that on occasion eros satisfied an eromenos’s need to be cruel and a kind of religious need on the part of the erastes (a blend of Job with Pollyanna) to grovel and insist that bad fortune is good.
35. Cf. Devereux (1967) 72-7 on the strikingly ‘adolescent’ character of Greek culture. The prolongation of undifferentiated sexual exuberance into adult life was one aspect of this.
Postscript, 1989
When I wrote this book I considered that my task was to give an account, as accurate and complete as I could make it, of the representation of homosexuality in Greek art and literature of the archaic, classical and early Hellenistic periods. I was (and remain) well aware that there may have been considerable differences between representation and reality, and I infer from some comments of reviewers that I should have made this awareness more obvious than I did. For example, the fact that comedy assumes anal penetration to be the normal mode of homosexual intercourse suggests that the vase-painters’ overwhelming preference for the intercrural mode is highly conventional, and I would not resist such a suggestion. A similar point arises from the assumption of Plato and Xenophon that the eromenos does not derive pleasure from copulation (pp. 52f.), and here, I think, I underrated the evidence against the assumption. Two passages of comedy suggest that the erastes stimulated the penis of the eromenos. In one of these, Ar. Ach. 59If., Dikaiopolis, mocking the fully-armed Lamakhos, says, ‘If you’re such a mighty man, come on, bare my knob! You’re well enough armed!’ In the other, Knights 963f., Kleon and the Sausage-seller are competing for the confidence of Demos: ‘If you believe him’, says Kleon, ‘it’s your fate to become a bag’ (cf. Henderson 212), which the Sausage-seller caps by saying, ‘And if you believe him, to have your foreskin pulled right back to your bush!’ The passages are intelligible in the light of Straton (Palatine Anthology xii 7), comparing girls unfavourably with boys: ‘They’re so dull from behind, and the main thing is, you’ve nowhere to put a roaming hand’. For those reasons I withdraw my view (pp. 96f.) that the penis of the youth in the centre of B250 is not erect but ‘perhaps pushed up by the man’s belly’. It remains, however, exceptional.
What I said on pp. 113 and 142f. about the words laikazein, laikastēs, laihastria, is wrong. H.D. Jocelyn, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society ccvi (1980) 12-66, following up an idea of Heraeus and Housman in the light of new evidence produced by G.P. Shipp, Antichthon xi (1977) If., has demonstrated that these words denote fellation. The papyrus of Roman date to which Shipp drew attention is a spell which seeks to restrain a woman from ‘being fucked’ (bīnēthēi, passive) ‘or being buggered’ (pūgisthēi, passive) ‘or leikasēi’ (sic, active) ‘or doing anything for the pleasure of any man but me’. A graffito of the fourth century B.C. (Mabel Lang, Graffiti and Dipinti = The Athenian Agora xxi [Princeton 1976] no. c33) shows that laikazein is something a woman can do, for it declares that a certain Theodosia does it well. In addition to laikastria, the forms laikastera and laikas occur in a fifth-century inscription (L. Robert, Collection Froehner: Inscriptions Grecques [Paris 1936] 17f.), attached to the names of women. In Straton CGFP 219.36 the colloquial imprecation ou laikasei?, ‘Won’t you suck a cock?’, is plainly the equivalent of our ‘Get fucked!’ (cf. Degani 364f.), and in Kephisophon fr. 3.5 laikasomai ara, ‘Then I’ll suck a cock’, means ‘Well, I’m fucked!’ or ‘I’m fucked if I will!’ Many verbs which have an active form in the present have a middle form in the future, so that there is no need to take laikasei and laikasomai as passive in sense. In Ar. Knights 167, ‘You’ll imprison (sc. anyone you like), you’ll laikazein in the Town Hall’, there is an unexpected, violent insult at the end of the verse, fully in accord with Aristophanes’ comic technique. The role of the fellator is essentially subordinate, and that fits the linking of laikastēs with katapūgōn in Ach. 79. So far we have no evidence that an erastes fellated his eromenos. On the alleged evidence for fellation at Sparta see my The Greeks and Their Legacy (Oxford 1989) 123f.
As for the origins of Greek homosexuality, I still consider that to say ‘it began with the Dorians and spread from them to the rest of the Greek world’ is no answer at all, because it does nothing to explain the speed and enthusiasm with which non-Dorians adopted it. It should however be said that the earliest representation of homosexual ‘courting’ is from Crete: a bronze plaque of the period 650-625 B.C., in which a man carrying a bow faces a youth who has a wild goat over his shoulders, and the man grasps the forearm of the youth (Boardman [1973] fig. 49). The genitals of the youth are exposed by the shortness of his tunic, whereas the man’s genitals, though his tunic seems equally short, are not exposed. This early example of the Greek artist’s interest in youthful genitals may be compared with the emphasis given to the genitals by the use of inlay for the pubic hair on an ivory statuette of a youth, also of seventh-century date, from (non-Dorian) Samos (ibid. fig. 32).
In the last few years considerable attention has been given to the possibility that homosexual copulation played an important part in Greek prehistoric initiation rituals, as it does in many cultures of the Pacific: H. Patzer, Die griechische Knabenliebe (Wiesbaden 1982), B. Sergent, L’Homosexualité dans la mythologie grecque (Paris 1984), J. Bremmer, ‘An Enigmatic Indo-European Rite: Paederasty�
��, Arethusa xiii (1980) 279-98. On this hypothesis the ethos survived after the ritual which had generated it faded away. In The Greeks and Their Legacy, chapter 12, I have offered a number of reasons for rejecting the hypothesis. I content myself here with emphasizing that there are no overt references to homosexual desire in poetry (including Archilochos, who is often violently obscene) before the end of the seventh century B.C., and it makes little sense to suppose that the ethos of a prehistoric ritual should become stronger rather than weaker in late archaic and classical times. W.M. Clarke, Hermes cvi (1978) 389-96, treats (like Aiskhines) the relation between Akhilles and Patroklos as erotic and discerns other oblique and decorous allusions to homosexuality in Homer, but that does nothing to reduce the crucial difference between the overt and the covert.
One last point. I have been taken to task for what I said in my Preface about the usage of the terms ‘sexual’, ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ and my inclination to treat homosexuality as ‘quasi-sexuality’ or ‘pseudo-sexuality’. My reasoning was simple: we have the word ‘sex’ because there is more than one sex, definable in terms of reproductive function, and I accordingly use ‘sexual’ to mean ‘having to do with (difference of) sex’.