Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (11 page)

Again, the key distinction for the Greeks (as well as for other ancient societies) was in the taking and giving. To be the active partner was to embody
male
qualities—powerful, principled, in charge. The partner in the passive role was simply
female
, even if he had a penis. Thus there were no explicit prohibitions against same-sex relations, but, depending on one’s age, class, and position in bed, homosexual sex could be risky indeed. To make the wrong male into a female was a potentially life-threatening gamble, made even more treacherous by the city’s confusing web of laws and customs.

Greek attitudes toward homosexuality resulted in part from a cultural belief in the origins of the sex drive. Plato traced it back to humanity’s initial division into three genders: male, female, and both at once. Originally, humans had two faces, two sets of genitalia, four legs, and four arms each. The original body design of these proto-people worked so well that they grew uppity in the face of the gods, which prompted Zeus to chop them all in two. The result was human beings as we know them: creatures condemned to a lifelong search for their missing halves. Those who came from androgynes craved the opposite sex. Women hewn from double-females sought women, and those cut from double-men were attracted to males. The relief people feel when they conjoin with others in the same lonely condition is a key aspect of what Plato called love.

Plato himself made no secret of his preferences. Those cut from double-males “are the best of their generation,” he said, “bold, brave, and masculine.” Naturally, they had no interest in marrying women, “although they are forced to do this by convention.”

These ideas carried some weight as late as the turn of the twentieth century, when Oscar Wilde referenced
The Symposium
to the jury presiding at his first trial for sodomy. In a packed London courtroom, he intoned Plato in defending the “love that dare not speak its name,” describing it as “the noblest form of affection” and stating that “there is nothing unnatural about it.”
⁷
(See Chapter Eight.)

Not all of Greece agreed with Plato’s ideas, of course, but many Greek communities incorporated male-male sex into their educational systems. In Crete, men symbolically kidnapped boys and took them to the countryside for manly outdoor training. After a few months, the boys were given military kits and welcomed as adults. The process was conducted along strict guidelines, and the boys had a duty to report whether or not their teachers pleased them sexually; if they did not, the boys were permitted to get rid of them.

Spartan boys were entrusted to the care of respected men at the age of twelve. Penalties awaited men who refused to provide such tutelage, or who did so poorly. The relationships were definitely sexual, as attested by the twenty-six-hundred-year-old carved inscriptions still visible on a seaside rock wall in the former Spartan colony of Thera. There, a few dozen meters from the old temple of Apollo, Spartan men brought in expert stone carvers to record their accomplishments: “Here Krimon had anal intercourse with his
pais
[boy], the brother of Bathycles,” reads one inscription.

Cultures that permitted homosexual sex established regulations as to how and when it could occur, especially in Athens, where young males were protected from unauthorized advances. Slaves suffered fifty lashes for courting free boys or even following them around, and death awaited any man who walked into a school without permission. Those allowed to teach boys were required to be older than forty, when their ardor was believed to have diminished. Athletic coaches were trusted least. According to one source:

A wrestling master, taking advantage of the occasion when he was giving a lesson to a smooth boy, forced him to kneel down, and set about working on his middle, stroking the berries with one hand. But by chance the master of the house came, wanting the boy. The teacher threw him quickly on his back, getting astride of him and grasping him by the throat. But the master of the house, who was not unversed in wrestling, said to him, Stop, you are smuggering the boy.

None of this seems to have stopped the likes of Socrates and the orator-statesman Aeschines from passing days at the gymnasium, where they spent much of their time ogling pretty boys. The temptation was evidently too great.
⁸

ONCE A HUSTLER . . .

If the idealized union of Greek males was an exchange of sex for learning and social connections, such arrangements were rare. Far more frequent were men and boys selling their bodies for money. These male
pornai
(prostitutes) hustled the brothels and streets and took all comers, even slaves. Higher-end gigolos were kept by one man or shared among a group. Athenian men, married or not, suffered no penalty or shame for using male prostitutes so long as they were not adults or wellborn. The idea of sex between adult men was especially distasteful, and bachelorhood was avoided.

Prostitutes carried on their trade legally and paid taxes, but were forever barred from participating in public life, including court cases. Many former male
pornai
presumably kept themselves far enough below the radar to avoid trouble, but not everyone could. In one well-known case, a man rose from a youthful career as a prostitute to the cream of Athenian society, only to have his past return in court decades later and swallow him up. The main issues in
Against Timarchus
, as the case was known, had nothing to do with whoring. Timarchus’s accuser, the aforementioned Aeschines, happily admitted to being a “nuisance” in the gymnasia and getting into fights over boys. He also had no quarrel with male prostitution per se. He did, however, vehemently object to Timarchus’s right to appear in court against him. In one of legal history’s great “gotcha” moments, Aeschines defeated Timarchus in a major case by exploiting his past as a dockside hustler.

The original question was whether or not Aeschines had sold out Athens in negotiating a peace treaty with an aggressive foreign power. In 347 BC, Athens had sent Aeschines and two other prominent citizens to discuss peace with Macedonia’s King Philip II. The irascible king, best remembered as the father of Alexander the Great, had the better strategic position, and forced Athens into a deal that put it at a disadvantage. The agreement was received badly back home, and resulted in finger-pointing between the diplomats.

The result was a series of court clashes between some of Athens’s most outsized personalities. The orator Demosthenes rounded on Aeschines, but his charges against the latter were grave enough to prompt him to seek the prestigious support of Timarchus, who had already authored one hundred pieces of legislation. Timarchus and Demosthenes accused Aeschines of treason, i.e., taking payoffs from Philip. Everyone on the jury knew the players by reputation, so it must have been quite a shock when Aeschines managed to change the subject from his own alleged corruption to Timarchus’s prior sex life.

Aeschines accomplished this by filing his own suit against Timarchus. He had only a few hours to speak, so he delivered his twenty-thousand-word speech at warp speed, steamrolling the jury with details about how Timarchus had, in his youth, bounced from house to house, giving his “well-developed, young” body to hungry men and even to a slave. “This foul wretch here was not disturbed by the fact that he was going to defile himself,” boomed Aeschines, “but thought of one thing only, of getting [the slave] to be paymaster for his own disgusting lusts; to the question of virtue or of shame he never gave a thought.” A man so weak, so willing to turn himself into a “creature with the body of a man defiled with the sins of a woman,” he said, could neither accuse him of treason nor show his face in court.

Undoubtedly it was the seriousness of the treason charge that made Aeschines strike back so hard. He must also have been concerned that because Timarchus’s wrongdoing had occurred so many years earlier, the jury might be prone to making light of the issue. Whatever the reason, he smeared his opponent as one who had not only done wrong but was, in light of his past, incapable of ever doing right.

The strategy worked. Aeschines won by a narrow margin, and Timarchus later hanged himself. In the fray, the critical question of whether Athens had indeed been sold out to a dangerous enemy was subordinated, at least for a while, to the popular fascination with dirty sex. This was not the last time a public figure’s sex life would be hauled out of obscurity to wreck him politically, but in its scope and effect
Against Timarchus
remains a milestone. Prominent men like Timarchus, who lived in the public eye, were probably subject to stricter behavioral standards than the average citizens sitting on the jury. Still, the law forbade all men who “feminized” themselves for money, or who seemed to enjoy it too much, from public life. The defeat of Timarchus was a lesson in caution for all Athenians.
⁹

FINDING A BALANCE

Given this minefield of punishment and shame, how were male-male relationships to be managed? Could anyone ever have passive sex and still have a civic profile? Not likely, if he was an adult. For a boy it was still risky, as
Against Timarchus
shows, but possible, if rigid courtship rules were followed.

“A love affair in itself is neither right nor wrong, but right when it is conducted rightly and wrong when it is conducted wrongly,” said Plato. A good male lover was supposed to be “constant” in his feelings, and love the boy’s character as well as his body. When this noble purpose was matched by the boy’s interest in acquiring wisdom, the union was “heavenly.” “[T]hen and then alone is it right for a boyfriend to gratify his lover.”

Homoerotic love was almost a zero-sum equation in which a man’s honor in winning a boy was equaled, potentially, by the boy’s dishonor in being taken. If the boy submitted too readily, he risked being viewed as woman-like or even bestial. If he resisted too much, he stood to lose the sponsorship of an elder who could help him get ahead in the world. His ambition was, in a sense, achieved at the potential cost of his status.

That said, adolescent boys were the main objects of desire for Athenian men, and they did submit. Greek boys (at least those belonging to the elite) were taught to accept sexual intercourse in the same way that respectable Victorian ladies were taught to put up with it: not as a pleasure, but as a duty. It was wrong to be caught quickly, and boys were supposed to maximize their advantages by playing suitors off one another. The cat-and-mouse process bestowed honor on the successful pursuer, and protected the boy.

In almost all other cases, it was ruinous to play the passive role. One vase painting shows a happy Greek soldier, erection in hand, about to sodomize his Persian counterpart—this was not an erotic image; rather, it expressed Persia’s humiliating defeat by the Greeks in easy-to-understand terms. On the home front, comic poets and playwrights had a large reserve of humorous epithets for men who took it from behind. Aristophanes was the peerless leader of those who enjoyed baiting passive homosexuals, repeatedly calling attention to the supposed elasticity of their sphincter muscles and effeminate mannerisms.

Those men who took the laboring oar in anal sex suffered no opprobrium and saw no need to hide their desires. Indeed, the anuses ridiculed with such glee by Aristophanes were also celebrated in poetry as delectable “buds” and “figs.” In a poem by Rhianus, a sweetly oiled “backside” is asked by an anxious lover whom it loves best. The answer—“Menecrates, darling”—is not what the lover wants to hear.
¹⁰

DO ASK, DO TELL

One type of homoerotic relationship, praised by Aeschines in
Against Timarchus
, was the love between soldiers. He celebrated the intense bond between the Trojan War hero Achilles and the younger warrior Patroclus. Theirs was a love that “had its source in passion,” Aeschines argued, and represented everything admirable. Honoring Achilles in a public speech was an easy shot, like extolling the virtues of motherhood today or the valor of a nation’s own troops in battle. It surely came off well, despite its irrelevance to the case. Aeschines was a pompous blowhard, but his references to Achilles and Patroclus underlined the general belief that love and sex among soldiers was something to be emulated, not punished.

Far from barring homosexuality in the military, as the United States famously did in 1942, or embracing a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy as it did fifty-one years later, Greek societies saw no incompatibility between male-male love and military discipline. As we have seen, pederastic coming-of-age rituals in Crete and Sparta served mainly as preparation for military service. In Thebes, however, the ideal of homosexual warriors reached its apotheosis.

In 378 BC, the Theban army organized an elite unit of 150 pairs of “young men attached to each other by personal affection,” which formed the core of its famed military machine. The group became known as the Sacred Band of Thebes, the descriptor “sacred” most likely deriving from Plato’s
Symposium
, in which he refers to a male lover as a divine friend; but Plutarch makes it clear that the Sacred Band was organized for tactical reasons:

For men of the same tribe or family little value one another when dangers press; but a band cemented by friendship grounded upon love is never to be broken, and invincible; since the lovers, ashamed to be base in sight of their beloved, and the beloved before their lovers, willingly rush into danger for the relief of one another.

The pairs of lover-soldiers were, at first, distributed throughout the Theban infantry, but later consolidated into a single fearsome unit. They were undefeated until they and their Athenian allies met up with Philip II and his son Alexander at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC. The Athenians were routed, which left the Thebans alone, surrounded, and overwhelmed. Despite certain death, they refused to surrender, and kept fighting until they were annihilated. Rather than cheer his victory by taunting the vanquished soldiers or abusing their bodies, Philip had only respect for them: