A Cultural History of Democracy in Antiquity by Paul Cartledge;Carol Atack;

Author:Paul Cartledge;Carol Atack;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

FIGURE 6.5 Scene from the inside of a kylix showing an older man propositioning a younger man, with allusions to both athletic and sympotic contexts. Douris, c. 470–460 BCE, Athens. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 52.11.4.

The ambiguity between acceptable pederastic relationships and unacceptable ones offered scope for pursuing political rivals with claims about their past behavior. Aeschines’ speech shows how an accusation of prostitution could be used as a political weapon, with the intention of forcing a rival out of politics. The consequences for men of being labeled a prostitute were somewhat different from those for women, because they could lead to prosecution on charges for which a standard punishment was atimia, or the loss of citizen rights; Aeschines cites a law listing the political and religious functions from which the convicted citizen will be barred (Aeschin., In Tim. 21).

Aeschines presents Timarchus as a man of dissolute habits in the present, exemplified by his presentation in public; his performance of citizenship in the present is a marker of his past dissolution. Timarchus has contravened standards of dress and behavior, speaking “just now” in the assembly first with his arm outside his cloak and then discarding his cloak entirely to “wrestle naked in the assembly, with his body in a bad and shameful state through drunkenness and foul behaviour” (Aeschin., In Tim. 26). His performance contrasts strongly with that of Xenophon’s Ischomachus, a character who exhibits all of the qualities of the gentleman (Xen., Oec. 6.13–17). In introducing this character, Xenophon has Socrates say that he first looked for the “gentleman” among those who were physically beautiful but found that they were often “depraved in their souls.”

The ideology underlying the objection to prostitution is the strong and continuing idea (seen in other cities, and in Roman republican ideology) of the inviolability of the citizen body (Halperin 1990: 88–112). Both the act of being penetrated and receiving payment for it were problematic; the performance of bodily services was the province of slaves and noncitizen workers, and the presumption was that citizens would not engage in improper physical contact (Cohen 2015; Halperin 1990).

Rome did not have a culture of pederasty, but its courts heard similar accusations, in which political and economic misdeeds were associated with nonconformity with the gender norms attached to the idea of citizenship. The lifestyle and behavior of Catiline, who led a rebellion against the established regime in the late Roman Republic, is one example. Contemporary historian Sallust argues that the political culture of the Roman Republic was in moral decline; “men let themselves be used as women, while women prostituted themselves” (Sall., Cat. 13.3). The same association between homosexuality, women’s sexuality, and prostitution was drawn, and again connected to a lack of self-control and to undisciplined physical appetites (Rauh 2011; Williams 1999).

In this case enemy politician Cicero, too, famously challenges norms of the performance of masculinity within Roman republican politics, as he rose through the ranks of Roman leadership in the courts rather than through military leadership, and was a “new man” (Cic.

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