Homosexuality in Ancient Greece

Brief Political History
800 - 400 BC: Classical Greek period
After 400, Alexander of Macedonia conquered Athens and built an empire (Hellenistic Period)
146 BC the Greek mainland was brought into the Roman Empire
A History of City States - Predominately a history of Athens Society for most of early Greek history,
society was hierarchical (oligarchy). Birth status made ones lot in life (gender, family wealth, etc.)
In periods of Oligarchy and Democracy, Greek Family always the central unit of society:
Oikos - Greek name for self sufficient family units, responsible for their own economic survival and protection Family was the basic block of society:
Oikos composition:
a) Kyrios (male head of family)
b) Wife
c) Servants
d) Children
Genos - Clan
Phratry - Brotherhood
State depended upon the Oikos
Early aristocratic families controlled state almost entirely
Development of Democracy:
Reforms of Solon, Kleisthenes and Pericles moved citizenship to varying degrees of Democracy (the Periclean period being the most democratic - a direct democracy, not a representative democracy)
Structure of Periclean Democracy:
1) Direct democracy - not representative
2) The Assembly:
a) any adult male citizen could participate (as opposed to an assembly of elected representatives)
b) met at the Pnyx (by the thousands)
c) anyone was entitled to speak
d) speakers were called rhetors
e) assembly controlled military affairs
f) Periclean period - assembly ruled over all affairs
3) Public vs. Private spheres:
American govt. - has a right to intrude into private affairs - govt. is central
Greek govt. - the citizen is responsible for the well being of the home. Individual is central
Citizenship:
a new idea - basic legal parity between citizens before the law
Types of Citizen status: Citizen, Metic, Slave (women and children were property, like slaves)
Citizen rights:
a) access to courts
b) no enslavement (but the very creation of citizen class makes the distinction that other people are slaves - that's what makes citizenship a privilege)
c) religious and cultural participation
d) death penalty was rare
e) becoming a citizen was nearly impossible
f) citizen duties - taxes, military service
Metic rights/restrictions:
a) foreign born artisans or traders
b) could not own land
c) needed an Athenian sponsor
Slave rights/restrictions:
a) large slave population (1/3 of the population in classical and Hellenistic periods)
b) only right was to not be murdered Prostitution - man who prostitutes loses citizen rights: Important for understanding
Greek ideology of the body
1) The protection of the body (from death penalty, slavery) was central to citizenship
2) The selling of the body = the loss of citizenship (voting and other rights). Take on the status of a slave
3) Man holding office who was found to have prostituted himself could be executed
4) Slaves could be prostituted
Greek Homosexuality: to understand it, we must first understand Gender in Ancient Greece
Specific Status of Women:
1) Every woman had a Kyrios (guardian) and a life long status as a minor
2) Family with all daughters? (disaster) Daughters would be married to an uncle to keep property in the family
3) No women were heads of their own household
4) Early marriage for women was a tactic of control over them (Xenophan's character trains a 14 year old bride)
5) Dowry a legal requirement
6) Divorce was imaginary
7) Marriage agreement - made between the guardian and the groom - the festivities and unveiling were ritual legitimization
8) Unveiling was the first time the bride would usually see the groom
9) Labor: in house textiles, housework, water carrying (one of the few times women left the house). Poor women shamed themselves and left the house to sell hand made goods at the market
How male domination of females occurred:
wealth passed down patrilineally
1) women must have sex only with their husbands
2) men have total freedom (except with other men's wives)
3) Female child abandonment was common (probably - its hard to prove)
4) Marriage for procreation, property, not love (vase evidence, literature makes clear)
5) Nudity: men - everywhere: in public and private. Women - clothed even in their own private quarters of the house. Honor/shame issues
Gendered Space - Private/Public Space for men and women
Public architecture: center opened by round colonnades Private homes:
1) Around a private courtyard
2) Aristotle: windows to outside were forbidden
3) Segregated: women's and men's quarters
4) Women were often locked in "for their protection" from the sexual advances of slaves
5) Men's quarters: Symposiums, guests, drinking, Hetarai (expensive in-house prostitutes)
6) Private/public space: women could almost never leave the home while men dominated all public space (like modern Middle East) women were not to leave the home until after child bearing
7) Architecture - phallic pillars - Hermes all over public buildings and private homes
Relationships between men and women: Honor, Shame and gender: Male honor depends upon the chastity of his female kin (not vice versa)
- Boys in ancient Greece spent their first seven years in their mothers quarters of the house
- When they become men - No initiation ritual into manhood
- Part of what makes men in this culture paranoid about their masculinity is that it is an elusive trait. Men must achieve it.
- Femininity, on the other hand, is considered natural - women don't need to know how to become women, they just are women.
- Men spend their lives fearing that they are not truly men and they find ways to prove that they are men.
- Men compete with each other in this culture to prove their maleness
- Proof of masculinity sometimes comes with sex
- when a man sexually dominates a boy or a woman, he establishes his manhood
- At the same time, for women, sex with a stranger brings father or husband extreme shame
- he can't control her. For a man, the women in his family became the weak link in his protection of his honor
- Relationships of equality between men and men, or men and women becomes impossible. Men must have relationships where they dominate their partner sexually
- Men actually define their own maleness by distancing themselves from acts and behavior associated with femininity.
- In this culture, that means avoiding being dominated by other men. When a boy does not yet have hair on his chin, it is socially acceptable for him to be dominated by another man. But if a young man is known to be dominated by another man, he is called a derisive term: Kinaidos
Construction of Homosexuality
We see, then, that in this culture Sexuality is structured around male power - the ability of a man to dominate a boy or a woman, in order to reinforce his understanding of his own maleness.
Sexuality was restrictive, not hedonistic
The regime was aligned differently from ours: inequality in all relationships
- The focal point of modern sex is pleasure
- The focal point of Greek sex was assertion of social status along with pleasure
- ALTHOUGH: Rape of boys is almost never represented except in mythology of the gods
- Erastes and Eromenos: pederastic relationship was the norm
- Sources: vase paintings (hundreds) philosophers, comic literature
- Partners were defined as active or passive, not male or female
- Homosocial life became the context for Greek "homosexuality"
- Segregated spaces such as the men's and women's quarters of the home, the Gymnasium for men, etc.
- Homosexuality" was a broad institution
- Most Athenians were probably less worried about the effects of homosexuality on boys than the partners that a boy chose.
- We know a great deal about male sex, but almost nothing about lesbian sex.
Source Material
- Vase painting: Representative of a broad variety of social experience
- NOT NARROW LIKE PORN
- As works of art, they represent idealized aesthetics and behavior
- Hundreds of paintings
- Plato's Symposium and other philosophers such as Aristotle and Xenophon
- Comedies: particularly Aristophanes and his contemporaries
- Mythology: Zeus steals the boy Ganymede away and has a sexual relationship with him One of our best sources
- Plato's Symposium:
Symposiums were drinking parties. In Plato's famous Symposium, Pausnias, Aristophones and Socrates all give their accounts of love.
1) These parties included men drinking, talking, eating, and 'socializing' with hetarai (female prostitutes) and boys.
2) Homosexual attraction was the norm at these parties (Plato shows us by making casual descriptions of love between men and boys without showing any sense of moral wrongdoing)
3) Separated from women's quarters
a) Pausnias description of love:
1) Those inspired by Dione desire the opposite sex
2) Those inspired by Aphrodite desire boys
3) Those who love boys have a higher love because they delight in the "Valiant" and the "intelligent"
b) Aristophanes description of love
1) Man was originally made in 3 sexes: man, woman and the two combined
2) Man made an attack on the gods
3) Zeus split them in half as a punishment, but then later healed them
4) Ever since this man has spent his life searching for his other half: the men who were all man seek out boys, the women who were all women seek out other women, and the ones who were a mix seek out the opposite sex to marry
c) Socrates description of love:
1) Through Diotima he reveals the perfect love
2) This love can be found in a man's relationship with a boy
3) It is through love that the gods speak to man
4) Men who seek authentic love seek only the good
5) Some men have children and their love for their children is in fact only a love of immortality (Their name will live on)
6) "More creative love" to Socrate's mind is a love that procreates a spirit of love. That is the highest love in his mind
David Halperin essay on the Symposium: "Why is Diotima a woman?"
1) She is not a man: she will not be biased in her account of love between men and boys (This is the traditional response to this question)
2) BUT… much of the language is distinctly feminine in its use of imagery (being "pregnant with love," etc.)
3) Plato is proposing a kind of love that runs counter to the standard relationships of domination which were the model for Greece at this time
4) He uses a female image as a teacher to men to show an alternative to a model of love that is a model of male domination
5) This Platonic model of love becomes all the more remarkable when we consider all of David Gilmore's ideas on Honor and Shame
Historic origins of Greek homosexual cultural pattern:
- Man/boy sexual patterns had possible cultural origins from Dorian Invasions (Like the cult of Isis, it may have been imported as a cultural norm)
Patterns may also have been handed down from Cretan practice:
- Plato's laws "We blame the myth of Ganymede on the Cretans"
- Ephoros (4th cent. BC. Historian) tells us of a Cretan ritual
1) boy is kidnapped
2) brought to country for several months
3) hunting, fishing, homosexual sex
4) marriage-like ceremony
5) temporary relationship
Sparta also shows signs of homocultural patterns:
1) sex segregated society
2) militaristic, older men ruled
Specifics of Greek Homosexual cultural patterns:
1) Virtually all men who had sex with boys were also married or would eventually marry (as the family was so central to the greek social and political world).
2) Free men would seduce free boys as young as twelve but usually in their teens
3) Sexual encounters often took place in the gymnasium (Aristophanes Birds, Peace, Plato's Charmides)
4) Often the relationship was a teacher/pupil relationship
5) relationships were usually temporary
6) younger is penetrated, older penetrator (as shown on vase images and is represented in humor)
7) the convention (xenophan's Symposium tells us) is that the younger is passionless, perhaps acquiring love, knowledge, not gratification
8) BUT: Vase work shows some of the passive partners aroused - Vase work shows almost all of the active partners reaching for the penis of the passive partner. If this was non-erotic for the passive, why do this?
9) Boys were often given gifts (hares, foxes and stags)
10) masturbation and felatio is rarely represented in art and literature between men
11) intercrural and anal sex were the conventions
Kinaidos
1) Kinaidos: he is an adult male character in literature who desires to take on the feminine role in sex (feminine as perceived by the Greeks).
2) He is the opposite of maleness, one who desires to be penetrated
3) He is the opposite of the idealized Greek warrior
4) Masculinity was not compromised by having sex with a boy or another man - it would only be compromised by being penetrated as a man
5) Greek comedy makes humor of men being penetrated
6) Punishment for adulterers: (from Aristophanes Clouds, Lucian's peregrinuss" humiliation which is given by the offended husband: sticking a radish up the man's anus.
Women and homosexuality:
1) hardly any representation in sources
2) Plato's Aristophanes (mentioned above)
3) Hellenistic epigram of two women who "deserted men"
4) Plutarch's Lycurgus: "Spartan women loved girls"
5) Sappho: Atthis and Aphrodite poems of love and devotion (but homosexual?)
6) Partheneia (songs for choruses) had homoerotic female language
Conclusions:
John Boswell and other essentialists would point to the existence of homosexuality in ancient greece as proof of the timelessly universal quality of our modern sexual categories. They would point to the section of Plato's symposium where Aristophanes describes the preferences of some men for boys and some men for women as complimentary evidence.
David Halperin and other Social Constructionists would argue that in a completely male dominating world like ancient greece, men frequently chose to have sex with boys, female prostitutes and their wives. Heterosexuality and homosexuality were not that important to Greek men - domination of sexual partners was. Men would sexually dominate their partners to reinforce their sense of control and masculinity, whether the partner was a boy, wife or prostitute.
[http://www.nathanielwandering.net/Greece.htm]