Gregory Curtis (25 page)

The lovers spent the night in the booby-trapped bed and awoke to find themselves entangled in the net. When Hephaestus returned, he called all the gods to come see them lying there, naked and embarrassed. He said he wouldn’t release them until the gifts he had given Zeus in return for Aphrodite were repaid.

Hermes, lusting after her beauty, said he would marry her if Ares would pay back Hephaestus. Of course, in order to get free, Ares promised he would pay. He was released but never had to pay because Hephaestus did not really want to let Aphrodite go—he loved her too much to do without her.

After she was set free, Aphrodite reveled in her voracious sexual appetite. She slept with Hermes, who fathered Hermaphroditus, who was both man and woman. She had two sons by Poseidon, and her union with Dionysus produced Priapus, a horribly ugly son with huge genitals. Despite her frenzied lust, Aphrodite could restore her virginity again and again simply by immersing herself in the sea.

Throughout all this, Zeus, under the influence of her magic girdle, also found himself longing for Aphrodite, although he restrained himself because she was his adopted daughter. In time his suppressed desire made him want to make her suffer. He caused her to fall in love with a mortal, a king named Anchises, who was a member of the royal family of Troy. She visited him one night disguised as a princess. As she left him at dawn, she told him who she really was and made him promise not to reveal her visit.

That promise lasted only a few days. During a drinking bout
a friend asked Anchises if he wouldn’t rather sleep with a certain man’s daughter even than with Aphrodite. Anchises replied, “Since I’ve slept with them both, I find that a silly question.” Zeus heard him bragging and threw a thunderbolt that would have killed him except that Aphrodite used her girdle to deflect it into the ground. Even so the shock waves from the thunderbolt crippled Anchises, which made fickle Aphrodite lose interest in him. She did bear him a son, Aeneas, who escaped after the defeat of Troy carrying his father on his back. After years of wandering, he arrived in Italy and founded the dynasty that came to rule Rome. Among the Romans, worship of Aphrodite, their purported ancestor, became more prevalent than it had been among the Greeks.

When she fell in love with a second mortal, Adonis, in a fit of jealousy Ares changed himself into a boar and gored Adonis to death. His soul went to the netherworld, ruled by Persephone, but Aphrodite pleaded with Zeus to let him spend the spring and summer months with her.

To a modern reader all these stories may have their fascination, but they also seem to be a confusing hodgepodge about a flighty, ill-defined goddess. The stories are indeed a hodgepodge. The Greeks derived Aphrodite from a mother goddess in Asia Minor called Astarte, among other names. Stories about this goddess were mingled with Greek stories and altered as they traveled west across the islands in the Aegean and to the Greek mainland.

Another, more telling reason for our confusion is that we have a different expectation about the nature of a goddess than the Greeks did. To us it seems impossible for as compulsive and unapologetic an adulteress as Aphrodite—and she is the only Greek goddess who is promiscuous—to be, along with Zeus’s faithful wife, Hera, a goddess of marriage and family life. Or if she is both Aphrodite Urania, goddess of sacred love, and Aphrodite Pandemos, goddess of profane love, we assume that some moral value must be part of this dual nature. Sacred love must represent the good side of her nature while profane love
comes from her evil side. But considering any part of Aphrodite or any other immortal god or goddess as representing good or evil never occurred to the Greeks. To them, the gods had no moral dimension at all. They did not necessarily reward you when you were good or punish you when you were bad, although they might choose to do so. They would certainly punish you if you forgot to honor and respect them. The religious rituals and sacrifices intended to gain the favor of this god or that, or at least to prevent the god’s disfavor, had nothing at all to do with sin, redemption, or forgiveness; they were more like elaborate bribes. Nor should mortals draw any moral conclusion from the stories of the gods and their deeds. The gods were immortal and more powerful than humans, but they were not models of conduct. They acted the way they did because they were gods, not because they were perfect humans. They were like the wind or any other force of nature. The wind blows because it is the wind. It may gently waft the sweet perfume of flowers, or it may blow down a house filled with people. Either way, the wind is indifferent. It’s in its nature to do both, and it can’t be blamed.

As mortals we are trapped between the power of the gods above and the chaos of nature all around us. The Greeks tried to manage the power of the gods by ritual, sacrifice, and other religious celebrations. But against nature, with its brute forces and beasts with their brute needs, the only defenses mortals had were custom, laws, institutions, art, philosophy, and the other creations of the mind. In other words, civilization itself is our defense. Nature wasn’t beautiful to the Greeks. It was frightening. They had no romantic poets for whom rivers or mountains or the west wind contained great lessons that could sustain our souls. Odysseus, for example, can’t wait to escape from Calypso’s island even though it is a natural Eden of beauty and comfort. “Nature is primal power, coarse and turbulent,”
Camille Paglia wrote, speaking of the Greeks in her book
Sexual Personae
. “Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make
objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.”

But beauty, and even civilization itself, can be fragile, since mortals are part of nature, too. The Greeks worried endlessly about this conundrum. Are we, after all, born to be part of nature with all its chaos and brutality? Or are we meant to be, or can we learn to be, part of a civilized order of our own creation—and if so, what should that order be? Pondering these questions produced virtually the whole of Greek art, philosophy, poetry, and laws. And embedded within those great achievements we find their opinions about sex and the nature and position of Greek women.

Although the Greeks thought a man’s sexual attraction could turn toward a woman or toward another man indiscriminately, sex for them was a union not of equals but of unequals. The lover who was penetrated was the lesser of the two. Since women were subservient to men in every aspect of Greek life, it seemed fitting that nature had made women to be the subservient partner in sex as well as in marriage and society. The kind of homosexuality that Greek society condoned and encouraged was what we would call pederasty. Mature men courted and seduced boys who were just on the verge of puberty. Once boys began to show beards or body hair, their sexual appeal vanished. The sex between the man and the boy was also a meeting between unequals, but one that had an added subtlety. Certainly, the kind of buggery Winckelmann lied about to Casanova did occur; but the implications for a male who was penetrated were so strong that often the boy would refuse and sex would take place between his thighs as the two stood facing each other. Although the boy might happen to enjoy this, there was no expectation that he would. It was a matter of complete indifference to the older male. Homosexuality between two mature men offended Greek scruples. A man who allowed himself to be penetrated lost all status and became an object of ridicule. He had become the worst a man could be: womanly.

Greek men usually didn’t marry until they were about thirty, when as a rule they left boy love behind. The brides were much younger. Fathers married off their daughters soon after they reached puberty because the girl’s awakened sexuality made men uneasy. A woman’s libido, like Aphrodite’s, was a destructive force and needed to be quickly confined by marriage, where it could benefit society by producing legitimate children. Women appeared in public only during certain religious festivals or while doing mundane errands like getting water from the public fountain. Otherwise they remained inside the home (or on its roof), where they ran the household, raised the children, and performed other tasks relegated to women, weaving in particular. Women were so seldom seen, and their appearance was so circumscribed, that a man might not recognize his neighbor’s wife or daughters.

That was the pattern in classical times. Women were given at an early age to a man they had probably never seen and then were expected to spend the rest of their life indoors, subject to his authority, his passion, and his whims. They had secondary status in all things, no political power, no choice in the life they were to lead, not even a forum from which to make anything known about themselves or their discontents or their dreams.

A modern woman in the West, whose culture derives directly from the Greeks, could not and would not endure such a life. But we do not know what Greek women themselves thought about their lives. Nor do we know directly from a woman what life was like in a Greek household or what went on inside a Greek marriage. The diaries and letters that are the best sources for these matters in later ages do not exist for classical Greece. All we can do is draw inferences from what does exist: plays, histories, poetry,
Plato’s dialogues and other philosophical writings, and, perhaps most important, vase painting, since the vases were usually intended for use in the home. All these sources are the work of men, of course, but—without apologizing for the social system that prevailed, without extracting too much meaning or only the rosiest meaning from the sources
that do exist, and while recognizing that we will never know what Greek women might have wanted and could never have—it’s possible to say that Greek women did find ways to create power in their lives and, having gotten it, did know how to use it.

One source of a woman’s power in Greece was her position in the home. The Greeks had evolved beyond a strictly tribal society, but the importance of clans and bloodlines still remained. The home was where those bloodlines were both preserved and extended. Its obligations regarding hospitality, order, protection and sustenance, and raising children all made the home the single most important institution for the preservation of the entire community. And the woman, not the man, ran the home.

Greek literature is rich with wives, but the most famous real one is
Xanthippe, wife of
Socrates.
Plato portrays her as a nag, but in her defense Socrates, who was constantly disheveled and preferred his talk and speculations to any real work, was not an ideal husband. Xenophon, who has the misfortune of being the second-greatest author of Socratic dialogues, doesn’t dispute that she was a nag, but he gives her intelligence and competence among other admirable qualities that Socrates both recognized and respected.

The other road to power for a woman was sex. Despite the orthodoxy that cast women in the submissive role, Greek men were terrified of a woman’s sexuality. Sex is an apparently simple and natural yet eternally confusing subject, as the numerous sex manuals in our bookstores attest. But Greek men knew little or nothing about women’s bodies. Since there was never an occasion when women appeared nude, a Greek man may never have seen a naked woman unless he went to prostitutes or was married. This accounts for the frequency of men spying on women in Greek myth and literature. A vase painting from the sixth century
B.C
. shows a nude man sitting on the ground, phallus erect, with a woman, perhaps a prostitute, standing before him. Her lips are frozen in a straight line. He has lifted the hem of her gown above her hips and is blithely peering in just to see
what’s there. The vase painter is ribbing this inept lover, but how else was he to find out? It’s impossible to imagine what terrifying and tantalizing misinformation went around among the soldiers in a camp or the boys in a gymnasium.

Greek medicine was better than that, but only marginally so. Doctors, who were male, did treat women patients, but the patient stayed behind a screen. If any examination was necessary, another woman or the patient herself did the examining and reported to the doctor what she felt or observed. This secondhand research led to frightful mistakes and wrong assumptions, including long lists of fanciful diseases women were prone to suffer. Among these was “wandering womb,” in which, just as the name implies, a woman’s womb was supposed to wander about inside her body, thereby bringing on hysterics among other maladies. Midwives and other women attended to labor and childbirth; men had no role at all.

Nevertheless, Greek men did get one thing right: They understood that a woman’s sex drive could equal their own and that a woman’s pleasure in sex was equal as well. One myth had it that women enjoyed sex not merely as much as men but ten times more. Explicit vase paintings show what must be married couples having sex, and the woman is clearly enjoying herself. In
Lysistrata
by Aristophanes the women of
Athens refuse to have sex with their husbands until the men negotiate peace with
Sparta. This strategy would make no sense, nor would the play make sense to its all-male Greek audience, if men in Athens could just as easily and with no social opprobrium get sex from boys or from prostitutes instead of from their wives. Much is made among the women in the play about how difficult their own lives will be without sex. And the women prevail as the play ends with a peace between the two cities.

Surely not all of this is male fantasy. It must have been common enough for Greek married couples to enjoy their lives together and for the women to find emotionally richer lives than the bare circumstances of their existence might imply. And in some cases, we cannot know whether it was in many or few, the
moment must have arrived when the former frightened fourteen-year-old bride matured and began to understand and use the power that flowed from her sexuality. Aphrodite was the goddess of that power.

F
ROM ITS
distant beginnings and for centuries afterward, Greek sculpture showed men nude and women clothed. Men’s genitals were rendered in accurate detail, their pubes delicately carved in a style that changed from era to era. Even herms had erect phalluses halfway down the otherwise bare pillar. Occasionally a large statue might reveal a woman’s breast, but no statues revealed a woman’s pubic area. We don’t know why. The reasons were so obvious to the Greeks that in the writing that remains to us no one saw any need to comment on it. It could not have been the result of prudery in Greek art. Greek vase painting showed nude women, often in lascivious poses, but vases were used in private, and most statues were displayed in public. Perhaps the reason is simply that male public nudity was common and female public nudity was not. Athletes competed entirely in the nude, whether in the
Olympic games or in friendly contests at local gymnasiums, and all athletes were male, except in
Sparta, where lightly clothed women competed. Outside Sparta even a glimpse of a woman’s leg was rare. A woman who exposed herself would shock and scandalize a community.