1994 Volume 1
University College Dublin, Ireland
In recent decades and particularly in the last ten years,
much valuable work has been done on the theme of sexuality
in the world of Greece and Rome. In a post-Freudian era this
is presumably to be expected, but we should not forget that,
until quite recently, it was virtually impossible to discuss
sexual issues in an open and non-judgmental way; it is
sufficient to point to the bowdlerisation of Aristophanes, and
to Fordyce's scandalous edition of Catullus, which omitted 32
poems on the spurious grounds that 'they do not lend
themselves to comment in English'.
Now, happily, a saner climate of opinion prevails, in
which the present essay on sexuality in fifth century Athens is
not exceptional. Such essays as this have been greatly
facilitated by the appearance of a number of books on ancient
sexuality and, in particular, by the appearance of David
Halperin's great book One Hundred Years of Homosexuality
and Other Essays on Greek Love
follows here is considerably indebted to Halperin.
2
There is now a very considerable body of evidence to
suggest that human sexual behaviour is, to a great extent,
socially constructed. That is to say that the way women and
men conduct their sexual lives is determined to a marked
degree by what a particular society finds acceptable. Before
we come to Athens in the fifth century BC, it is instructive to
consider the case of Ireland in the 19th and 20th centuries.
From 1820 on sexual behaviour in Ireland was
constructed out of the economics of the small farm(2) and had
little to do with the doctrines of Roman Catholicism, and still
less to do with those of Jesus Christ. This highly puritanical
organisation of sexuality obtained, without interruption, until
1960 and caused a great deal of suffering to many women and
men. The Roman Catholic Church has never seen fit to
acknowledge publicly the grave scandal which its enthusiastic
endorsement of this wretched puritanism constituted.
All revolutions are betrayed, but some are betrayed
more spectacularly than others. After 1922 Ireland was
controlled by the emerging Catholic bourgeoisie, whose aim
was independence itself rather than social reform and the
provision of an adequate standard of living for the people.
This bourgeoisie clearly subscribed to De Valera's dictum that
'Labour must wait'; used independence to further their own
interests; and inevitably imposed their value system on the
new State. As Kavanagh said, 'The Revolution created a new
rich class at the expense of the general population'.(3)
That value system was necessarily conservative because
the Irish bourgeoisie consisted of a large number of peasant
proprietors of small and medium-sized farms, and of those in
business, the professions, the civil service and the Catholic
clergy who came from that social background. Permeating
society as a whole, the ethos of this class was socially
regressive, because of the particular economic factors that
shaped it. Having achieved ownership of land after a
considerable struggle in the late 19th century, farmers sought
to preserve their holdings intact, and hand them on to a single
son. The social pattern that usually resulted from this basic
economic fact was that the son who inherited had to marry
late, that one daughter was provided with a dowry to marry,
and that the remaining unmarried children had to emigrate.
Since there was no question of sexual activity outside
marriage, the Irish people from 1820 to 1960 were subjected
to a degree of sexual continence virtually without parallel. As
Kavanagh wrote, 'From the point of view of chastity this must
be the most remarkable country in the world'.(4)
Hence the form of sexual behaviour that seemed to many
Irish people to be immutably determined by the doctrines of
the Roman Catholic Church turns out to be socially
constructed out of the economics of the small farm.
3
Sexuality in fifth century Athens was also socially
constructed. The basic point here is that human sexuality in
Athens was organised to meet the needs of the adult male
citizen, whose body was the locus of all power in the state. All
other human beings - all women, all slaves, all foreigners, and
adolescent aristocratic boys - existed sexually in relation to the
adult male citizen and existed for his sexual gratification.
Aristocratic women existed to provide, after marriage,
legitimate children; all other women were regarded as sexually
available to the male citizen, whether they were prostitutes,
concubines, or high-class courtesans. Slaves, who were
women and boys, the lowest level of society, were similarly
sexually available to male citizens. These citizens also
engaged in homosexual relationships with adolescent boys
between the ages of 12 and 18 from their own class, these
relationships being more complicated in their practice and
ideology.
The result of all this is that 'Democracy at Athens ... was
not what we might call a purely "political" system; it was a
system of sex and gender as well'.(5) This sexual system, in
which the adult male citizen entered into an arranged
marriage, was free to have sexual relationships with other
women, and also courted adolescent boys, does not
correspond to anything in modern Western experience; it was,
as Louis MacNeice says, 'so unimaginably different / And all so
long ago'.(6) Consequently, we have to reckon with the fact
that 'Homosexuality and heterosexuality, as we currently
understand them, are modern, Western bourgeois
productions. Nothing resembling them can be found in
classical antiquity'.(7)
The deep division between Greek and modern attitudes
to sexual matters can be most obviously seen in the way sexual
acts are viewed. For the Greek sexual acts are not mutual,
taking place between two consenting adults, but are deeply
polarising and involve hierarchical domination; in masculine
discourse sex is something that you do to somebody. To be
specific: sex takes place between an active, penetrating actor
who possesses the phallus and a passive, penetrated person.
These active and passive roles in sex precisely correlate with
superior and inferior social status: the superior person is the
adult male citizen who can have sexual relations only with his
inferiors, with women, slaves, foreigners, or boys. The Greeks,
like many Mediterranean peoples, were puritans about virility;
because he is a citizen the man has sexual precedence.
As a result, in fifth century Athens the system of
sexuality is constituted by politics, by the principles on which
Athenian public life is organised. So we must conclude that 'it
is not sexuality which haunts society, but society which haunts
the body's sexuality' (Maurice Godelier).
Indeed we can go so far as to say that for Athenian
citizens there was a single form of sexual experience, in which
they were dominant. There were not, therefore, as we like to
think, two differently structured psychosexual states of
heterosexuality and homosexuality, but a single state available
to adult males, in which the same kind of desire could be
attached to any desirable person, woman or boy. Gender
does not, then, enter into this system at the level of difference
between men and women; rather, gender enters in at the level
sexual subjects are constituted, the system being gendered as a
specifically male form of desire, wide-ranging, acquisitive,
object-directed. As a result, women and boys are considered
sexually inert, with women's desire being passive and
objectless.
4
The feature of Athenian sexual life that may appear most
different from our arrangements is the practice of homosexual
relationships between an adult male and an adolescent boy.
In the past this topic was rigorously avoided, due to the
operation of a specious syllogism: the Greeks are a good thing;
homosexuality is a bad thing; therefore the Greeks could not
have done it. These wretched evasions about 'the love that
dare not speak its name' (Alfred Douglas) led to Mahaffy's
book Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander (1874)
being withdrawn because it treated (and condemned) male
homosexuality; they also led the Dean of a Cambridge college
in E.M. Forster's novel Maurice (published only in 1970) to tell
a student who is translating from an unnamed Greek author:
'Omit: a reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks'.
Now we know better. A crucial moment was the
publication in 1978 of Sir Kenneth Dover's great book Greek
Homosexuality
leave no doubt about the reality of sexual relationships
between Athenian men and adolescent boys. A further
important moment was the publication of Volumes 2 and 3 of
Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality: The Uses of Pleasure
(1984) The Care of the Self (1986). Foucault, who divorced
sexuality from nature and regarded it as cultural production,
raised crucial issues:
(1) how is sexual experience constituted in a given
culture, i.e. what are the actual types of sexual activity?
(2) in what terms - terms of power or equality - is sexual
experience constructed?
(3) how does sexual experience relate to other forms of
experience, to political, social, and economic experience?
(4) is sexual activity different for different members of
society, for men and women, for members of different social
classes?
Let us now try and answer these questions in regard to
homosexual behaviour in Athens. Since all power resided in
the body of the adult male citizen, we are not talking about a
relationship between equals, but between a powerful man and
a powerless boy. Nevertheless, since casual social contact
between aristocratic men and women was virtually impossible
and since these men entered into an arranged marriage,
romance was displaced from being between men and women
to being between men and adolescent boys.
The ideology involved here is complex. On the one
hand, it was considered natural for the man to pursue
beautiful boys; as Pindar says, 'I melt when I see the fresh
young limbs of boys'. On the other hand, the boy was
required to yield reluctantly and to do so because of his
respect for the man. Various restrictions - no access before
dawn or after dark - made the courtship tricky and public
decorum was required. To some extent, a double standard
obtained: the man should pursue, the boy should not yield.
In practice, of course, the boy did yield and physical sex
took place. One position that seems to be preferred and
which does not involve phallic penetration is that of
'intercrural' intercourse, in which the adult man puts his erect
phallus between the thighs of the boy. At other times, anal
intercourse will have taken place, in which the man is the
active penetrating actor, the boy the passive penetrated
sufferer.
It must be stressed that the man engaging in this
homosexual activity was or could be married to a woman.
Consequently, the labels we have - homosexual, heterosexual,
even bisexual - are utterly inadequate to what we are talking
about: the man is in an arranged marriage, pursues adolescent
boys, and sleeps with women or boys who are prostitutes.
Furthermore, the male in this system enacts a cycle of sexual
behaviour: at one time he is the sexually pursued adolescent
boy, at a later time he is the sexually pursuing adult male.
5
We move on now to consider the position of women in
this sexual system.(8) To begin with, Athenian women had no
power: they were excluded from politics; from the army, navy,
and war; from the law courts; from the Olympic and other
Games; from agriculture and trade. In short, women were
excluded from the male agonistic world of challenge and
response, from what Athenian males saw as the real world.
They were also uneducated and men had a low opinion of
women's intellectual capacity; Shelley said this led women to
acquire 'the habits and qualities of slaves', and an Athenian
male could be held incompetent at law for being under the
influence of a woman. Indeed Athenian women had to have a
guardian (kurios) in law, a male with authority over her.
The domain of the Athenian aristocratic woman was the
house (oikos). So while men worked in public space, in the
Ecclesia, the law courts, the agora, the streets, women worked
in private space at cooking food, spinning clothes, supervising
slaves. What we are talking about here is a form of
Mediterranean social control; male honour is at risk through
women and women must therefore be confined to the house,
with women who leave the house a lot being morally suspect
(conversely a man who is at home a lot is regarded as
effeminate). As Pericles says in the funeral speech, 'the
greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about, whether
for praise or blame'.
Athenian aristocratic women were defined by the social
significance of their bodies. They entered an arranged
marriage at about the age of 14 to a much older man and the
purpose of the marriage was to produce legitimate children.
As the father of the bride says to the groom: 'I give you this
woman for the ploughing of legitimate children'; and, as the
speaker in Against Neaera says,(9) 'courtesans we love for the
sake of pleasure, and concubines for the daily care of the
body, but wives we love to bear us legitimate children and be
the trusted guardians of our household'.
The implications of this after modern psychoanalysis are
all too clear: a woman is either a wife or a whore. Compare
Victorian England where this classic 'split' is also found: on the
one hand, there is the Angel in the House, on the other
sexually available whores, servants and so on. In Athens this
sexual scenario clearly lends an edge to an idealised
homosexual love for boys, as it does in the male world of
Victorian England (in public schools, the army, the navy).
Adultery with an aristocratic woman was considered a
heinous crime, a more serious crime than rape, because it was
the offence against the man that mattered; his honour was
offended and, besides, how could he know whether his
children were legitimate? The penalties for such adultery
were therefore severe and, technically at least, an adulterous
man caught by a citizen having sex with his wife, mother or
sister could be killed on the spot; in any case, other heavy
penalties could be exacted.
In reality, therefore, Athenian aristocratic women led
extremely restricted lives; in Greek literature, on the other
hand, and particularly in tragedy and comedy, women play a
very prominent role. This paradox struck Virginia Woolfe
forcefully in 1929:
'If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by
men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost
importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and
sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as
great as a man, some think even greater. But this woman is
in fiction. In fact .. she was locked up, beaten and flung
about the rooms. A very queer, composite being thus
emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance;
practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades
poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from
history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors
in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose
parents fixed a ring upon her finger. Some of the most
inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in
literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly
read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her
husband.'(10)
The classicist Helene Foley has remarked on the same
paradox in regard to Athenian women:
'Although women in fact play virtually no public role other
than a religious one in the political and social life of ancient
Greece, they dominate the imaginative life of Greek men to
a degree almost unparalleled in the Western tradition ...
Greek writers used the female - in a fashion that bore little
relation to the lives of actual women - to understand,
express, criticize, and experiment with the problems and
contradictions of their culture.'(11)
Halperin(12) explains this paradox by claiming that the
silence of actual women in Greek public life and the volubility
of fictional 'women', who are invented by male authors, are
connected by strict logical necessity: Greek men effectively
silenced women by speaking for them on those occasions when
men chose to address significant words to each other in public,
in the drama, and they required the silence of women in
public in order to make themselves heard and impersonate
women without impediment. As 'Agathon' says in
Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae (155-56), 'whatever we
don't have, we capture by imitation (mimesis)'.
These impersonated women have been described as
'female intruders', who go into the male world and disrupt
it.(13) Two examples must suffice here, one from tragedy and
one from comedy. In Euripides' Medea(14) Medea champions
the value system of sexual love and of the house (oikos), which
have been trampled on by Jason, who champions the value
system of a royal marriage and of the state (polis); Medea
enters the polis, becomes male and destroys Jason's world by
killing first his new wife Glauke and her father Creon, and
then her own two children. Medea is then given sanctuary in
Athens by King Aegeus, brought there from Corinth in the
chariot of her grandfather, the Sun-god. So this quadruple
murderess is endorsed by the gods and by the City of Athens -
surely one of the most shocking statements ever made in the
history of Athenian drama, something to send shivers down
every male back during this intensely civic occasion in the
theatre of Dionysus in 431 BC.
In Aristophanes' Lysistratra Lysistrata, whose name
means 'disbander of armies', champions the value system of
the oikos as represented by sex and attacks the value system
of the polis which privileges war ('Make love, not war').
Because of the sex strike that Lysistrata engineers, the male
world is forced to capitulate and end the war, and Lysistrata is
therefore another example of a woman who enters the world
of men and successfully conquers it.
6
The fact that Athenian aristocratic women were not
sexually available, except in arranged marriages, led inevitably
to widespread prostitution in Athens.(15) Indeed prostitution
flourished because sexual pleasure had to be democratic, in
the sense of being there for all the male citizens and there
cheaply. Whether the story that Solon instituted brothels is
historically accurate or not, the story clearly articulates the
ideology: the state must ensure that citizens' sexual needs are
catered for. Prostitution was therefore an ordinary feature of
daily life in Athens and there was no shame attached to using
prostitutes; indeed prostitution was not merely legal, but the
city taxed it.
Prostitutes, who frequented certain areas of the city - the
Lycabettos hill, the Piraeus, the Ceramicus - were both women
and boys. Boy prostitutes were usually below the age of 18
and were disbarred from functioning as a citizen later in life,
because the body of a male citizen was sacrosanct and could
not be subjected to phallic penetration, a form of hybris.
Women prostitutes were socially stratified into five
categories: (1) slaves in brothels; (2) street walkers (slaves,
foreigners, poor women); (3) dancers and flute players at
symposia, who offered music and sex; (4) concubines, who
were involved in long-term relationships that constituted an
alternative to marriage for the poor and were exempt from the
tax on prostitution; (5) courtesans (hetairai), the forerunners
of all high-class tarts, educated women who were the nearest
thing perhaps to liberated women (Pericles' companion
Aspasia is an obvious example).
Athenian prostitutes were regarded as cheap (those at
Corinth were thought dear), with one drachma, the daily wage
of a labourer, being the standard charge. Dancers and flute
players at the symposia could charge two drachmas.
Presumably concubines and courtesans made more
satisfactory and more long-term arrangements.
7
The system of sexuality outlined in this essay has
considerable implications for the understanding of the Lesbos
of Sappho about 600 BC. Mutatis mutandis, the sexual system
of Lesbian society, both male and female, was similar to that
obtaining in fifth century Athens. Members of aristocratic
bands of male hetairoi will have contracted arranged
marriages and engaged in homosexual relationships with
adolescent boys. Similarly, Sappho will have entered an
arranged marriage - she had a daughter named Kleis - and
engaged in lesbian relationships with adolescent girls. So the
answer to the age-old question Was Sappho a lesbian? is yes
and no; she was, if you like, bisexual (though that term does
not adequately describe an arranged marriage and lesbian
relationships not with women of her own age, but with
adolescent girls).
If in sexual terms Sappho simply replicates the male
system from a women's angle, in cultural terms she offers
something radically different. The male hetairoi will have
been devoted to war and to dining in the Great Hall (as in
Homer), but Sappho and her friends will have been devoted to
the worship of the goddess of love, Aphrodite and to the
cultural pursuits of dance and song. In that limited sense,
Sappho must be viewed as providing a woman's view and as
counter-cultural.
8
The argument of this essay has been that human sexual
behaviour is socially constructed. We are so used to our own
Western bourgeois system of sexuality that it requires a very
great effort to step back and imagine systems of sexuality that
are completely different. Fifth century Athens and Lesbos
about 600 BC provide us with such a radically different
organisation of sexuality and suggest that what we take as a
universal norm is, au contraire, socially constructed and time-
bound. As I write these words, in Nepal a system of fraternal
polyandry obtains, where one woman marries several brothers
simultaneously (the reasons are economic), while in Muslim
countries a man is allowed to have four wives. There is
therefore no human sexual norm; rather, each society
constructs a system of sexuality that seems to meet its own
special requirements, and which may be changed as these
requirements change.
FOOTNOTES
1. For an important review of Halperin's book and of two
other related works - J.J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire:
The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece
and Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in
the Ancient Greek World
Zeitlin (1990) - see D. Cohen, CPh (1992), 145-60.
2. K.H. Connell, Irish Peasant Society (Oxford, 1968), pp. 113-
61; T. Brown, Ireland - A Social and Cultural History 1922-
1979 (London 1981), pp. 17-26.
3. Kavanagh's Weekly, June 7, 1952.
4. Ibid.
5. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, p. 104.
6. Louis MacNeice, 'Autumn Journal', section ix.
7. Halperin (note 5), p. 8.
8. See R. Just, Women in Athenian Law and Life (London,
1991).
9. Demosthenes, Against Neaera, 59.122.
10. Virginia Woolfe, A Room of One's Own (London 1929), pp.
45-46.
11. Helene Foley in M. Grant and R. Kitzinger eds. Civilization
of the Ancient Mediterranean: Greece and Rome
1988), pp.1301-02.
12. Halperin (note 5), p. 146.
13. For the concept of 'female intruder' see M. Shaw, CPh 70
(1975), 255-66 and H.P. Foley, CPh 77 (1982), 1-21.
14. For a new Irish translation of Medea see Euripides -
Medea, translated by Desmond Egan, with an Introduction by
Brian Arkins (St. Andrews Press, U.S.A./Kavanagh Press,
Ireland, 1991).
15. For prostitution see Halperin (note 5), pp.88-112.
.
Last Updated 22 March, 1996