Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (9 page)

As the “good man” in one of sex law’s most powerful fables, Lot was still a rather dodgy character. His readiness to offer up his virgin daughters for rape showed badly misplaced priorities, even by ancient standards. But all of that is now beside the point. For at least two thousand years, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah has been enough for lawmakers to justify the monstrous treatment of same-gender sex. Had Jewish law not become the cornerstone of Christian morality, the myth of the Cities of the Plain would have remained confined to a small, gay-bashing Near Eastern religion. But that was not how matters turned out. The ancient Hebrews’ antihomosexuality mania became the foundation for generations of intolerance.

But before that would take place, another set of cultural traditions would take hold in the Mediterranean, going on to shape Western culture no less than early Judaism. Just across the water from Palestine, the Greeks were organizing themselves under a set of assumptions that had nothing to do with God or Hebrew law. No one disagrees that Greek arts and culture reached the limits of the sublime, but few Greeks thought much about such things. Most were simply trying to get through the day, and many were involved in a lesser-known Greek obsession: litigation. Greek law was played out in public, in trials that involved thousands of people—and the Greeks loved nothing more than a good sex trial.

2

HONOR AMONG (MOSTLY) MEN: CASES FROM ANCIENT GREECE

N
EITHER THE SEX slave nor the wife ever had a chance. On every Athens street corner, every statue of the god Hermes, his penis erect, pointed to female powerlessness. The slave could not hope for loyalty from her owner, Philoneos—not when he could sell or torture her on a whim. Nor did the wife of Philoneos’s friend have any right to demand fidelity from her husband. The dust of the city’s streets was stamped everywhere with the prints of prostitutes’ studded sandals, beckoning with messages like “Follow Me,” and nothing prevented men from pursuing these trails directly to the city’s houses of pleasure. So when Philoneos decided to sell his slave to a brothel, and when his friend began to lose interest in his wife, the two women were left with few options to keep their men. They were desperate.

One evening, when the two men were drinking together at the husband’s house, the wife called the slave over. In whispers, she told the girl that she had obtained a potion that would turn their men’s attention back to them. The only question was how the women would slip it to them. The men dined habitually with concubines and prostitutes, not their slave or wife. Nevertheless, the wife suggested that the slave do it, and this was agreed.

The opportunity came when Philoneos and the husband were together in Piraeus, the port of Athens. Philoneos was there to offer a sacrifice to Zeus; the husband was preparing to embark on a sea journey. The two friends set about eating a good meal and getting drunk. Afterward, they burned frankincense and poured libations “to secure the favor of heaven.” While they offered up their prayers, the slave poured the philter the wife had given her into their wine, pouring the lion’s share of the potion in her master’s cup.

The concoction was not the “happy inspiration” the women had hoped for: It killed Philoneos that night. The husband died from the poison a few weeks later.

These were some of the accusations made by the husband’s son at the murder trial of the wife, his stepmother—hence the case was referred to as
Against the Stepmother
. The young man had not been present during any of the critical events; his evidence came from the sex slave’s agonized confession as she was being broken on a wheel. The stepson accused his stepmother of tricking the slave into poisoning his father to death, but the slave couldn’t confirm this. Nevertheless, all trials are about stories more than realities, and the stepson’s tale was compelling. The jury, which numbered up to 2,501 men, was unlikely to give the wife a break in any event. The mere fact that she would
try
to mold her husband’s emotions, even with a substance she might have believed harmless, was bad enough.

A well-known orator named Lysias had been hired by the stepson to write his trial speech. Lysias well knew the whoring habits and misogyny of Athenian men. He himself was a loyal client of a well-known Corinthian brothel, and likely of others in Athens itself. He crafted the stepson’s speech to push all the right emotional buttons and bring the jury to a state of maximum anger.

The slave was killed without trial, despite everyone’s agreement that she hadn’t meant to harm anyone. “She got what she deserved,” Lysias said. The specifics of the wife’s fate are not recorded, but it is clear that the rest of her life was going to be short and unpleasant. If the jury agreed that her aim had been to kill her husband rather than merely pump him up with aphrodisiacs, she probably would have faced strangulation. Avoiding execution would have been little better for her, as she would have been returned to the control of a male family member who would be certain to mete out his own home-based punishment.
¹

The accusation of murder that the son leveled against his stepmother is understandable, but the question of why she would intentionally kill her husband remains: Doing away with him, after all, meant eliminating the one person able to protect her from oblivion. Her actions only make sense if she had been trying to bring her husband closer to her. She was reaching the end of her useful life, knew little of the world, and had few to zero prospects without him. Marriage in Greece was meant to generate heirs for fathers, but her husband had already had a son when she married him. Minus his desire, she was more vulnerable than ever to being replaced with a newer model.

A respectable woman in Athens was viewed as merely a sperm receptacle, what Sophocles called a “field to plow.” Semen was held to do the real work in conception; the womb merely cooked it up. Aeschylus (in his
Eumenides
) put it bluntly:

She who is called the mother is not her offspring’s
Parent, but nurse to the newly
sown embryo.
The male—who mounts—begets.

The key function of women was physical in Greek culture. It was thus pointless to educate them or to allow them to participate in public life. Instead, they spent their days in the airless inner rooms of walled-in houses, interacting only with slaves and family. Wives never attended their husbands’ whore-greased dinner parties, called symposia, nor did they interact much with their husbands in daily life. The differences between husband and wife in age and cultivation, along with the availability to men of sex from other quarters, virtually guaranteed that spouses would remain strangers to each other. Recognizing this, the early Athenian lawgiver Solon required men to mount their wives three times per month: Sex between husbands and wives was thus a legal duty.

Men could divorce their wives by simply returning the dowries to their fathers-in-law. Women, on the other hand, needed first to get the approval of a male relative, then go to court—the single opportunity in their lives to do so—and take their chances. After spending so much of their existence indoors, encouraged to say little and think less, choosing such a course must have been like emerging from a dark cave into blinding sunlight.

Only three women are known to have attempted divorce, most notably Hipparete, wife of the volatile and sexually unquenchable general Alcibiades. Her disastrous experience was a cautionary tale for other wives, especially as she had a good case: She came from a wealthy family, had a clear reputation, and had been repeatedly humiliated by her husband.

The union between Hipparete and Alcibiades had gotten off to a bad start. On a humorous bet with friends, Alcibiades had punched Hipparete’s father Hipponicus III in the face. When the rest of town didn’t get the joke and Alcibiades’s reputation began to suffer, he went to Hipponicus, ripped off his own clothes, and begged the old man to flog and chastise him any way he saw fit. Hipponicus demurred, but was impressed by the young aristocrat’s bravado and offered up Hipparete for marriage. Alcibiades took her in exchange for a dowry of ten talents. (He later bullied the family into giving him ten more.)

Hipparete was a dutiful wife, but she could not suffer Alcibiades’s constant debaucheries, especially his habit of bringing home foreign prostitutes. Thinking she could influence him by making a dramatic move, she went to live with her brother. Alcibiades barely noticed. Finally, Hipparete went to court to plead for a divorce. She must have known that her chances were long, but at least this way Alcibiades risked being forced to return the twenty talents to her family.
That
got his attention.

The law courts were located in the agora, the city’s tumultuous nerve center, where food vendors crowded with streetwalkers and magistrates and the shouts of Phoenician merchants competed with bell-clanging fishmongers. Alcibiades was known as a powerful, brilliant, and temperamental figure, and was admired as a public speaker—which, in Athens, was saying quite a lot. This time, however, he was in no mood to talk: He had been disrespected by his wife and stood to lose control of a fortune. He marched through the agora, seized her, and carried her home.

As the unhappy couple passed the statues of Hermes that marked the agora’s boundary, the crowd must have been entertained by the unusual (but not illegal) sight of one of the most admired men in Athens dragging his wife around like a barbarian. Far from trying to stop Alcibiades, they probably nodded their approval for taking the problem in hand. Plutarch, considering the case around 450 years later in his
Life of Alcibiades
, believed the Athenian was doing the right thing under the law:

I should explain that this violence of his was not regarded as being either inhuman or contrary to the law. Indeed, it would appear that the law, in laying it down that the wife who wishes to separate from her husband must attend the court in person, is actually designed to give the husband the opportunity to meet her and recover her.

So much for an Athenian woman’s right to complain of her husband’s infidelity. Hipparete died in Alcibiades’s house not long afterward. Years later, Alcibiades himself was killed in Turkey—by some accounts at the hands of the family of a wellborn girl he had seduced.
²

WHERE THE WIFE in
Against the Stepmother
had probably tried to save her marriage by having her husband’s slave spike his wine, the slave herself was attempting to preserve an intimacy she had no right to expect. By law, slaves weren’t sentient beings worthy of protection; they were thus prey to all who owned or rented them. Not all slaves were prostitutes, and not all prostitutes slaves—but the two roles overlapped often enough. The slave in
Stepmother
was likely a hetaera, an upper-end courtesan of the type hired to spice up symposia with conversation, music, and dance. Their performance and sex fees were regulated and taxed, though price limits were ignored in bidding wars for the most desirable ones.

Despite the mercantile basis of their affections, many hetaerae grew close to their clients, and sometimes had children by them. But slave prostitutes were still slaves, and therefore vulnerable. Their owners had every right to sell them, syndicate their sexual services to multiple investors, or, as the slave in
Against the Stepmother
feared, consign them to brothels and forget about them.

A special legal council resolved investor disputes over prostitutes, which sometimes became complicated. One knotty court case, referred to as
On a Wound by Premeditation
, involved two men who had come to blows over an unnamed slave concubine. The problem arose following an agreement to settle a business dispute by exchanging property. The slave was transferred along with oxen and other goods, but the two men disagreed as to whether she would be available to both of them on a shared basis—as the defendant argued—or whether she would become the plaintiff’s sole sexual property.

Fortified by an evening of drinking with “boys and flute-girls,” the defendant broke into the plaintiff’s house with some friends, grabbed a shard of broken pottery, and hit the plaintiff with it, blackening his eye. The plaintiff sued, claiming the defendant had tried to kill him. The latter testified that he had been too drunk to intend much of anything and was, in any event, justified in his attack, as the girl was his to share. He also argued that the slave was the one best equipped to resolve the issue, as she was a witness to nearly everything that had transpired. As the law held that a slave’s testimony was only allowable if obtained by torture, the best thing to do, he added, was to inflict pain upon her and hear what she had to say. (The defendant may have cared for her, but not enough to think twice before putting her through agony.)

As with many Athenian court cases, the record is not complete. The defendant was facing exile, and the plaintiff risked losing control over the woman. If the case looked as though it was going to favor the defendant, the plaintiff probably would have agreed to serve up the slave for torture. However, unlike the slave in
Stepmother
, her life was probably safe—at least two men still desired her.
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THE THRUST OF ATHENIAN SEX LAW

In both
Stepmother
and
Wound
, sex was the
cause
of the offense, not the crime itself. There was little direct regulation of sexual behavior in Athens, or anywhere in ancient Greece for that matter. What laws there were advanced two main goals: safeguarding the honorable participation of male citizens in public life, and ensuring that fathers could leave property to their legitimate sons without complications. Unless one of these concerns was affected by sexual behavior, it is likely that a given carnal conduct was permitted.