GREEK HOMOSEXUALITY BlANK PAGE GREEK HOMOSEXUALITY Updated and with a new Postscript K.J. Dover Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts Copyright © 1978, 1989 by K.J. Dover All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dover, Kenneth James. Greek homosexuality I K.J. Dover.-Updated and with a new postcript. p. em. Bibliography: p. Includes indexes. 1. Homosexuality-Greece-History. 2. Homosexuality­ Law and legislation-Greece-History. 3. Homosexuality in art-History. 4. Homosexuality in literature-History. 5. Greece-Civilization-To 146 B.C. I. Title. HQ76.3.G8D68 1989 306.76'6'09495-dc20 89-34289 CIP ISBN 0-674-36261-6 ISBN 0-674-36270-5 (pbk.) Illustrations Thanks are due to the many museums holding vases reproduced in this book (see List of Vases, pp. 205-226), who have been most helpful in providing prints. Special permission is acknowledged from the following: National Museum, Copenhagen for B 16, R 1027; the Director of Antiquities and the Cyprus Museum for B65; Musee du Louvre, Paris, and Chuzeville, Paris., for B 166, B462, B4 70, B494, C19,, R59, R348, R422, R454, R659; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for B342, B598a and b. R223, R456, R577, R603, R651, R783; Antikenmuseum, Staatliche Museum Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin (West) for BB24, R196a, R259, R303, R970, R1127; Musee du Petit l>alais, Paris, and Etablissements Bulloz, Paris, for R414; Mr Walter Bareiss and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York for R462; Tony Raubitschek for R547; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge for R684; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University (David M. Robinson bequest) for R712a and b; Soprintendente aile Antichita, Firenze for R867. Contents Preface Vll Abbreviations lX I PROBLEMS, SOURCES AND METHODS 1 Scale 1 2 The Visual Arts 4 3 Literature 9 4 Vocabulary 15 II THE PROSECUTION OF TIMARKHOS A The Law 1 Male Prostitution 19 2 Penalties 23 3 Status 31 4 Hubris 34 B Manifestations of Eros 1 Defences against a Charge of Prostitution 39 2 Eros and Desire 42 3 Eros and Love 49 4 Following and Fighting 54 5 Homosexual Poetry 57 C Nature and Society 1 Natura/Impulse 60 2 Male and Female Physique 68 3 Masculine and Feminine Styles 73 VI Greek Homosexuality 4 Pursuit and Flight 81 5 Courtship and Copulation 91 6 Dominant and Subordinate Roles 100 III SPECIAL ASPECTS AND DEVELOPMENTS A Publicity 111 B Predilections and Fantasies 124 C Comic Exploitation 135 D Philosophical Exploitation 153 E Women and Homosexuality 171 IV CHANGES A The Dorians 185 B Myth and History 196 Postscript, 1989 204 List of Vases 207 Bibliography 228 Index of Greek Texts and Documents 235 Index of Greek Words 240 General Index 243 I Problems, Sources and Methods 1. Scale For the purpose of this enquiry, homosexuality is defined as the disposition to seek sensory pleasure through bodily contact with persons of one's own sex in preference to contact with the other sex. There may well be other purposes for which this definition would be superficial and inadequate; but Greek culture differed from ours in its readiness to recognise the alternation of homosexual and heterosexual preferences in the same individual, its implicit denial that such alternation or coexistence created peculiar problems for the individual or for society, 1 its sympathetic response to the open expression of homosexual desire in words and behaviour, and its taste for the uninhibited treatment of homosexual subjects in literature and the visual arts. It therefore presents us with a mass of undisguised2 phenomena, and we have little occasion, in considering the work of any Greek writer, artist or philosopher, to construct arguments in favour of a diagnosis of latent or repressed homosexuality. How, when and why overt and unrepressed homosexuality became so conspicuous a feature of Greek life is an interesting subject for speculation, but we are sadly short of evidence, for there is no doubt that overt homosexuality was already widespread by the early part of the sixth century B.C. Analogies from other times and places and the identification of factors commol] to many dissimilar cultures have considerable suggestive· value but still leave many alternatives open; a further complication is that biologists, anthropologists and historians 1. The Greeks were aware (cf. p. 62) that individuals differ in their sexual preferences, but their language has no nouns corresponding to the English nouns 'a homosexual' and 'a heterosexual', since they assumed (cf. pp. 60f.) that (a) virtually everyone responds at different times both to homosexual and to heterosexual stimuli, and (b) virtually no male both penetrates other males and submits to penetration by other ma.les at the same stage of his life (cf. p. 87). Cf. Westwood 100-13. 2. That is not to say that nothing was concealed or suppressed (cf. p. 171 n.2), or that nothing was repressed in the individual consciousness. 2 I Problems~ Sources and Methods differ in their axiomatic beliefs about the vulnerability of sexual behaviour and sexual emotion to initially trivial changes of fashion. 3 Why the Athenians of the fourth century B.C. accepted homosexuality so readily and conformed so happily to the homosexual ethos is a question which can be answered instantly at a superficial level: they accepted it because it was acceptable to their fathers and uncles and grandfathers. The interesting and important question in resp,ect of the fourth century is: how did homosexuality really work? How was it integrated with heterosexuality, and how was the moral and aesthetic evaluation of good and bad homosexual behaviour related to the values of classical Greek society in general? The subject is richly documented, though it has one important deficiency: all Greek art, literature and archival material, with the exception of a little poetry surviving only in fragments and citations, was the work of males, and the evidence bearing upon female sexuality of any kind is exiguous by comparison with the superab<undant evidence for male homosexuality. 'Male' must therefore be understood with the words 'homosexual' and 'homosexuality' throughout this book, unless 'female' is specified. The evidence covers a long period of time and is of very many kinds; it includes, for example, primitive graffiti on the rocks of Thera, a wall-painting in a tomb at Paestum, scurrilous political jokes and slanders, Plato's formulation of an ideal philosophical education, and the products of ancient research into the institutions of Crete. Readers who do not know much about the Greeks and approach the subject of Greek homosexuality out of an interest in psychology or sociology- or out of ordinary· human curiosity about other people's sexual behaviour - may wish for brief guidance on the compartments into which it is both customary and useful to divide Greek history and on the salient differences between those compartments. The earliest extant words inscribed in the Greek alphabet are datable to the eighth century B.C.; it is probable that the earliest known Greek work of literature, Homer's Iliad, took shape in that same century; and the close of the century saw the beginnings of representation (as opposed to decoration) in the visual arts. It is therefore between 800 ·and 700 B.C. that the Greeks become articulate for us. 4 The lower terminus of the ancient Greek world is the sixth century A.D., in which the overt 3. Cf. D.J. West 45-7, 114 on the power of culture and society to determine sexual behaviour, and Devereux (1967) 69-73 on the important distinction between behavioural patterns and fundamental orientations of the personality. 4. In saying this I ignore the M ycenean documents, partly because they are not the sort of material from which we learn much about people's thoughts and feelings, but mainly because of the cultural discontinuity created by the half-millennium of illiteracy which separated the M ycenean world from the invention of the alphabet. Scale 3 expression of explicitly pagan thought and feeling was extinguished. In this period of one thousand three hundred years there are four critical moments. The first is the decisive defeat of the Persian attempt in 480 B.C. to bring the Greek mainland into the Persian Empire; this is the boundary between the 'archaic' and 'classical' periods. The second crisis is the latter half of the fourth century B.C., in which the Greek mainland and the Aegean islands became subordinated to the kingdom of Macedon, the Macedonian king Alexander conquered the Persian Empire, and Greek-speakers and Greek culture and institutions were thereby disseminated throughout the Middle East. The third crisis is the second century B.C., when increasing Roman intervention in the Balkans and the Aegean culminated in the incorporation of the Greek mainland into the Roman Empire as a province ( 146 B.C.). The last crisis was the progressive disintegration of the western half of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., from which the Greek-speaking eastern half, with its capital at Byzantium (Constantinople), emerged as the enduring link between the ancient Greek world and later ages. In the archaic and classical periods the sovereign state was the city, often ludicrously small by modern standards but making its own laws, observing its own institutions and rituals and fighting wars or making treaties with its neighbours. Big cities drew many small cities into 'alliances' which were often empires rather than associations of equals; but imperial power of this kind ebbed and flowed, and it is vital to remember, whenever one is tempted to generalise about the Greeks, that in the archaic and classical periods the term 'the Greeks' covers hundreds of sovereign city-states, distributed throughout Greece, the Aegean and coastal areas of (mainly) Turkey, the Black Sea, Sicily and South Italy, constituting a linguistic and cultural continuum but nevertheless admitting of striking differences in political structure and social ideals.