Greek Homosexuality by K J Dover

Greek Homosexuality by K J Dover

Author:K J Dover [Dover, K J]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781474257169
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2016-11-15T00:00:00+00:00


III

Special Aspects and Developments

A. Publicity

Two passages of Aristophanes introduce us to a phenomenon of Greek life which expressed and sustained the homosexual ethos. In the first (Ach. 142-4) an Athenian envoy who has returned from a visit to Sitalkes, a Thracian king, says:

And he was quite extraordinarily pro-Athenian (philathēnaios), and a true erastes of you (sc. the Athenian people), to such an extent that he actually wrote on the walls, ‘Athēnaioi kaloi’.

In the second passage (Wasps 97-9) a slave from the household of Philokleon describes the old man’s mania for serving on juries:

And if he’s seen Demos anywhere, the son of Pyrilampes, written on a door (sc. as being) kalos (i.e. ‘ ... “Dēmos kalos” written on a door’) he goes and writes beside it ‘kēmos kalos’.

Demos, son of Pyrilampes, was outstandingly good-looking (PL Grg. 481de, where Kallikles is treated as being in love with him), and it would seem from the passage of Wasps that in the late 420s anonymous graffiti acclaimed him for his looks (Philokleon’s kēmos is the funnel of the voting-urn used in a lawcourt). The passage of Acharnians expresses the passion of Sitalkes for the Athenians by imagining the king as playing the part of an erastes who writes on walls the name of his eromenos followed by ‘(sc. is) beautiful’.

Several references to this practice are made in Hellenistic epigrams, notably Aratos 1:

Philokles the Argive is beautiful at Argos, and the stelai1 of Corinth and the tombs of the Megarians cry the same things; and he is written as far as the Baths of Amphiaraos as (sc. being) beautiful.

Anon. HE 27.1-4:

I said, and I said again, ‘Beautiful, beautiful!’ Yes, I will go on saying how beautiful Dositheos is, how lovely to look at. I did not engrave this utterance on oak or pine or wall, but my eros is contained within my heart.

Cf. Meleagros 94.1, ‘No longer is Theron written by me (sc. as being) beautiful’, i.e. ‘No longer do I write “Theron is beautiful” ’. Anon. 27 suggests that a graffito2 of this type is simply the transformation into written form of an admiring exclamation, such as Pindar reproduces in Pythian Odes 2.72, ‘Beautiful is a monkey among children, always beautiful’; we can almost hear them gooing over a furry animal and saying, ‘Aaaah! Isn’t he lovely?’ A clear example in a sexual context is [Theokritos] 8.72f.:

Yesterday a girl with brows that meet saw me from her cave as I drove my heifers past and said that I was beautiful, beautiful; but I did not say a word, not even a push-off ...3

The despairing erastes seems to have used ‘X is beautiful’ as a means of declaring ‘I am in love with X’; cf. Kallimakhos 2.5f.:

Lysanias, you are – yes! – beautiful, beautiful! But before it’s properly out of my mouth, an echo says, ‘He’s someone else’s’.4

Cf. id. 5.3, ‘The boy’s beautiful, marvellously beautiful!’ (addressed, it seems, to the water which the poet is not putting into the wine in which he drinks the boy’s health); Anon.



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