Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (10 page)

A man’s honor was a fragile bloom to be pampered and kept on display. Courts in the contemporary United States and United Kingdom often reject what is called “character evidence” on the grounds that a person’s reputation does not indicate how he or she will act. The opposite was true in small, gossipy Athens, where a man’s reputation was always up for review. In many cases, verdicts were based on a jury’s opinion of a man’s whole life, not just on the facts of the case at hand. Given that juries could number in the thousands, a good slice of the citizenry made these calls.

Athens was not a place for rugged individualists. A man of standing lived his life in public, away from his wife. “This is a peculiarity of ours,” said Pericles. “[W]e do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics minds his private business. We say that he has no business at all.”

Women could be sued and put to death, but were not allowed to testify in court. Instead, they testified out of court or their men testified for them. Moreover, too much female company was potentially toxic to a man’s reputation. A man “under the influence of a woman” was classified along with the old, insane, and sick as incompetent to testify in court.

Though men married unschooled ciphers and kept them in seclusion, they could never be too sure about their wives’ loyalty. Women were thought to possess a molten sexuality that required constant vigilance. Rakes and roués lurked everywhere, ready to jump between the legs of hungry wives and wreck a good man’s reputation. Moreover, female fidelity ensured that a man’s children were indeed his own. His honor, in turn, depended on his ability to enforce that purity.

In early Greece, the head of an
oikos
, or extended household, guarded his family’s reputation with his fists. But as the
oikos
became absorbed into larger communities, it was no longer practical for angry patriarchs and their clans to be storming around the countryside attacking every man they suspected of dishonoring them. The rules of urban society prevented blood feuds, but also raised the stakes of some sexual transgressions. No longer was sexual infidelity a private matter of concern; it became everyone’s problem.
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CAUGHT IN THE ACT

Adultery was never far from the minds of Athenian husbands. By the time the city’s earliest legislator, Draco, laid down its first written constitution, in about 620 BC, efforts were being made to reconcile honorable revenge with the prevention of inter-
oikos
warfare. Men could cheat on their wives, but could not take another man’s woman. Doing so brought penalties, depending on where the taking took place. If the sex happened in the street, whether by force or not, the ravisher only paid a fine. If he crossed into the husband’s house, and if the couple was caught in flagrante, he could be killed immediately. Sounds simple enough, but—as shown in the trial of one Euphiletus for the killing of his wife’s lover, Eratosthenes—application of the rule could prove a challenge.

Eratosthenes was a practiced seducer of women. Rather than pluck his quarries from the safe ranks of foreigners, slaves, and prostitutes, he liked risk. That meant hanging around the few places where married women appeared, such as funerals and religious festivals. Indeed, Eratosthenes spotted Euphiletus’s wife at a funeral, and later sent her messages via her maid, expressing his desire for her. She was interested, and the affair began.

Liaisons were made easier by the layout of the married couple’s house. Men and women in Athens typically occupied different floors, which were connected only by a ladder. Euphiletus slept upstairs to allow his wife to care for their baby below. He later told the jury that he had slept peacefully, confident that his wife was “the chastest woman in all the city” and ignorant of the fact that she and Eratosthenes were going at it downstairs. “This went on for a long time,” he said, “and I had not the slightest suspicion.”

The lovers had one close call when Euphiletus returned early from a trip out of town. Eratosthenes hid while the wife gave Euphiletus a warm welcome, a good meal, and a taste of her love. All was peaceful until the baby started to cry downstairs; Euphiletus told his wife to go calm the child. She resisted, saying she was worried he would take the opportunity to violate the upstairs maid. “Once before, too, when you were drunk, you pulled her about,” the wife joked. Euphiletus laughed too, nevertheless insisting that she go downstairs. She followed his instructions, but first “playfully” locked his bedroom door and put away the ladder. The following morning, she returned to him, wearing makeup. He asked what all the nighttime creaking had been about, and was told that she had had to go to a neighbor’s house to rekindle the lamp in the child’s room.

With Euphiletus missing such obvious signs of his wife’s infidelity, the affair could have gone on indefinitely had not one of Eratosthenes’s rejected lovers decided to retaliate against him. She sent her “old hag” of a maid to tell Euphiletus the truth: “[Eratosthenes] has debauched not only your wife,” the maid said, “but many others besides; he makes an art of it.” Euphiletus went to his own maid and told her to tell him the truth or “be whipped and thrown into a mill.” She took the first option.

To the jury, Euphiletus described the ambush he staged a few evenings later:

Eratosthenes made his entry; and the maid wakened me and told me that he was in the house.

I told her to watch the door; and going downstairs, I slipped out noiselessly.

I went to the houses of one man after another. Some I found at home; others, I was told, were out of town. So collecting as many as I could of those who were there, I went back. We procured torches from the shop near by, and entered my house. The door had been left open by arrangement with the maid.

We forced the bedroom door. The first of us to enter saw him still lying beside my wife. Those who followed saw him standing naked on the bed. I knocked him down, members of the jury, with one blow. I then twisted his hands behind his back and tied them. And then I asked him why he was committing this crime against me, of breaking into my house.

He answered that he admitted his guilt; but he begged and besought me not to kill him, to accept a money payment instead. But I replied: “It is not I who shall be killing you, but the law of the state, which you, in transgressing, have valued less highly than your own pleasure. You have preferred to commit this great crime against my wife and my children, rather than to obey the law and be of decent behaviour.”

Thus, members of the jury, this man met the fate which the laws prescribe to wrongdoers of his kind.

Eratosthenes’s fate was death on the spot at the hands of Euphiletus. A murder prosecution by the dead man’s family followed.

At trial, the jury would judge Eratosthenes as either a guilty murderer or an innocent wronged husband, nothing in between. Draco’s laws could allow Euphiletus to beat a murder rap
if
he could prove he caught his rival
while
having sex with his wife. If Euphiletus had only found them lying in bed relaxing after making love, it would have been too late. Euphiletus’s recruitment of his neighbors to accompany him as he burst in on the couple and his statement that Eratosthenes was “still lying next to” his wife and that others saw him “standing naked on the bed” were meant to fit the case into the law. Whether it was true is impossible to say, and we do not know the jury’s decision, but Euphiletus had done a good job of maximizing his chances of walking free.

Draco’s laws only limited punishments against men who killed their rivals. Other laws set out the consequences for unauthorized sex by females. Unmarried virgins would see their marriage value diminish in the event of illicit sex, and to recover the loss their fathers were allowed to sell them into slavery—even if the sex had in fact been rape. Married women who committed adultery put their husbands in the position of being required to divorce them or lose their own civic rights. This stipulation was intended to prevent couples from trapping men and extorting payoffs. Women caught in the act were barred from wearing ornaments and participating in religious life: Any citizen had the right to slap around adulteresses who later showed up to sacred ceremonies. Such sanctions were harsh, but far less severe than the death and mutilations faced by adulterous wives under Babylonian, biblical, and Roman law.
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FISH, VEGETABLES, AND HOT PITCH

Euphiletus took a big chance by killing Eratosthenes. All trials are gambles, and in the rowdy Athenian courts the judgment could well have gone against him. He had other options in considering revenge against Eratosthenes while retaining his honor, such as imprisoning the seducer in his house and ransoming him to his family. He could also have taken Eratosthenes to the authorities for prosecution. Had Eratosthenes denied the charge and been found guilty, he would not have faced execution. Instead, Euphiletus would have been allowed to beat him up in public and ram foreign objects such as spiky scorpion fish and large radishes into his anus. Euphiletus also could have removed Eratosthenes’s pubic hair with hot pitch, or even plucked it out. (One comic poet asked how men “ever manage to fuck married women when, while making their move, they remember the laws of Draco.”)

Severe though the pain might be, the emphasis would have been on degrading Eratosthenes and others like him by making them take on “womanly” characteristics. Depilation was a female practice, so forcing it on a man was to feminize him. It was acceptable for women to submit to anal penetration, but deplorable in the case of freeborn men. These punishments not only bruised the adulterer’s reputation, but also gave the aggrieved husband the pleasure of reciprocating a vicarious sexual attack to settle the matter.

Sparta had no such preoccupations with adultery. Because men there spent so much time with their military units, it was impossible to expect women to remain faithful and still guarantee a steady supply of babies. Marriage was an institution meant to deliver warriors to the state, not heirs to the father. The Spartan government couldn’t care less where a woman’s child came from, so long as the father was a citizen. With that objective in mind, an elderly man was free to ask a young one to deposit “good seed” in his wife, and a healthy man in a barren marriage could impregnate another man’s spouse if the woman’s husband agreed. (Nevertheless, Spartan law encouraged passionate marriages. Husbands and wives were kept apart for long periods to increase desire and make children as energetic as their parents’ lovemaking.)
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AN INSTRUMENT OF PUNISHMENT

In ancient Greece and Rome, the husbands of adulterous women had several options for revenge. Most of the punishments allowed a husband to shame his rival by inserting foreign objects, such as spiky fish and radishes, into his anus.
©WELLCOME LIBRARY, LONDON

HOMOSEXUAL LOVE—AND BERRIES

Sex was more of a contest for Athenians than an expression of affection. The partner in the active role prevailed to his masculine glory, while the penetrated one played the woman and was thereby defeated. Somewhere in this harsh exchange was what Plato saw as the highest form of love.

Much of the Greek world was dazzlingly permissive in its attitudes toward homoeroticism and sex between men. From a modern perspective, Greece was an Eden of homosexuality, where male-male affection was prized. Athens’s venerated lawgiver Solon wrote erotic poetry to boys, and the city’s great men openly sought the company of male youths. Taking this view one step further, the United States would only match the tolerance of Athens about three thousand years later, in 2003, when the Supreme Court nullified most American antisodomy laws.

Can we say, then, that the United States has finally begun to follow the ancient Greek example, allowing its millions of gay citizens to take their rightful place as social equals to heterosexuals? Not at all. Even now, a man caught engaging in the type of homosexual sex admired in ancient Greece (i.e., older men taking adolescent boys) will do extensive jail time. If he manages to serve his sentence without being killed by other prisoners, he faces a lifetime of ankle bracelets, residence restrictions, and inclusion on public lists of sex offenders. No one but the most strident of civil libertarians would defend him, much less talk to him. He would be known forever as a pedophile, the worst sort of social deviant.

By contrast, the same-gender conduct decriminalized in the twentieth century by Western courts, that of two adults engaging in “sexual practices common to a homosexual lifestyle,” would have been revolting to most ancient Greeks. “Homosexual lifestyles” as such did not exist, nor did the concept.