SOPHOKLES AS A BOY-LOVER
Sophokles (497/6-406 BC) was the most popular of the three ancient tragedians, all Athenian, whose works have survived. The following stories about him, assembled from four original sources, show him to have been a particularly enthusiastic lover of boys and offer lively insights into Athenian pederasty in its cultural heyday. Three of them are versions of a single anecdote about Sophokles and Perikles (ca. 495-429 BC), the leading citizen of Athens for nearly forty years at the time she was politically and culturally greatest.
The Latinisation of Greek names in all the translations has been undone in favour of transliterated forms of the Greek.
Athenaios, The Learned Banqueters
These anecdotes are from a long speech discussing famous boy-lovers by Myrtilos recorded by Athenaios of Naukratis in his late second century AD Deipnosophistai (The Learned Banqueters) 603f-604f.
The translation and notes are from pp. 80-81 of Thomas Hubbard’s Homosexuality in Greece and Rome (University of California Press, 2003).
603f-604f
Sophokles was as much a lover of young boys as Euripides was a lover of women. The poet Ion of Chios[1] writes thus in his book Encounters.
Hieronymos of Rhodes[8], in Historical Notes, says that Sophokles induced a good-looking boy to come outside the city walls to have sex with him:
This boy laid his own cloak on the ground under them, and they wrapped themselves in Sophokles’ cape. After the act the boy snatched Sophokles’ cape and went off leaving Sophokles his own boyish cloak. The incident was widely reported. Euripides heard of it and made a joke out of it, saying that he had had that boy too and it did not cost him anything; Sophokles had let himself go and had paid with ridicule. When Sophokles heard that, he composed an epigram against Euripides in the following sense, alluding to the story of the North Wind and the Sun, and at the same time satirising Euripides’ adulteries: It was the Sun, and not a boy, whose heat stripped me naked;
As for you, Euripides, when you were kissing someone else’s wife
The North Wind screwed you. You are unwise, you who sow
In another’s field, to accuse Eros of being a snatch-thief.”
Cicero, On Duties
De Officiis (On Duties) is a treatise in three books written by the Roman orator and politician M. Tullius Cicero in October to November 44 BC. The translation is by Walter Miller for the Loeb Classical Library volume 30, published by William Heinemann in London in 1913. The Latinisation of Greek names has been undone in favour of transliterated forms of the Greek.
I 144
| For it is unbecoming and highly censurable, when upon a serious theme, to introduce such jests as are proper at a dinner, or any sort of loose talk. When Perikles was associated with the poet Sophokles as his colleague in command and they had met to confer about official business that concerned them both, a handsome boy chanced to pass and Sophokles said: “Look, Perikles; what a pretty boy!” How pertinent was Perikles’s reply: “Hush, Sophokles, a general should keep not only his hands but his eyes under control.” And yet, if Sophokles had made this same remark at a trial of athletes, he would have incurred no just reprimand. So great is the significance of both place and circumstance. | turpe enim valdeque vitiosum in re severa convivio digna aut delicatum aliquem inferre sermonem. Bene Pericles, cum haberet collegam in praetura Sophoclem poëtam iique de communi officio convenissent et casu formosus puer praeteriret dixissetque Sophocles: “O puerum pulchrum, Pericle!” “At enim praetorem, Sophocle, decet non solum manus, sed etiam oculos abstinentes habere.” Atqui hoc idem Sophocles si in athletarum probatione dixisset, iusta reprehensione caruisset. Tanta vis est et loci et temporis. |
Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings
Valerius Maximus was a Roman rhetorician who wrote during the reign of Tiberius (AD 14-37). His nine books of Factorum et dictorum memorabilium (Memorable Doings and Sayings) is a collection of historical anecdotes, mostly Roman, intended for use in schools of rhetoric. The translation is by D. R. Shackleton Bailey for the Loeb Classical Library volume 492 published by the Harvard University Press in 2000.
IV 3 De abstinentia et continentia (On abstinence and continence) ext. 1
| Let us not grudge outsiders commemoration of the same virtue. Perikles, the Athenian leader, had the writer of tragedies Sophokles as his colleague on the board of generals. When they were together occupied in public duty, Sophokles praised in excessive terms the beauty of a freeborn boy who was passing by. Rebuking his lack of control, Perikles observed that not only should a general’s hands be restrained from pecuniary gain but his eyes from lustful gazing. | Ac ne eiusdem laudis commemorationem externis invideamus, Pericles, Atheniensium princeps, cum tragoediarum scriptorem Sophoclea in praetura collegam haberet, et is publico officio una districtus pueri ingenui praetereuntis formam impensioribus verbis laudasset, intemperantiam eius increpans dixit praetoris non solum manus a pecuniae lucro sed etiam oculos a libidinoso aspectu continentes esse debere. |
The Greek biographer and essayist Plutarch wrote a biography of Perikles at the beginning of the second century AD, but using much earlier lost sources, as one of his Parallel Lives. Here follows the only passage in it relating to pederasty.
The translation is by Bernadotte Perrin in the Loeb Classical Library volume LXV (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1916).
8 v
On how careful Perikles was to avoid frivolity in his speech:
| Once also when Sophokles, who was general with him on a certain naval expedition,[9] praised a lovely boy, he said: “It is not his hands only, Sophokles, that a general must keep clean, but his eyes as well.” | καί ποτε τοῦ Σοφοκλέους, ὅτε συστρατηγῶν ἐξέπλευσε μετ᾿ αὐτοῦ, παῖδα καλὸν ἐπαινέσαντος, “Oὐ μόνον,” ἔφη, “τὰς χεῖρας, ὦ Σοφόκλεις, δεῖ καθαρὰς ἔχειν τὸν στρατηγόν, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὰς ὄψεις.” |
[1] A fifth-century poet, known to have produced tragedies in Athens between 451 and 428, but also active in other genres.
[2] Sophokles was general during the Samian War, probably 441–440.
[3] Something is missing in the Greek text at this point, perhaps a description of the boy.
[4] Phrynichos was an early tragic poet, known to be active between 511 and 476. This line is cited earlier by Athenaios (at 13.564F) as from his Troilos, describing the Trojan prince known for his beauty.
[5] Pindar, Olympian 6.41, cf. Tyrtaios 3.2.
[6] "Rosy-fingered Dawn," as, for example, in Odyssey 2.1 or Hesiod, Works and Days 610.
[7] Appropriately Sophokles uses a phrase, kat' orthon "just right," which was one of his own favorites in his poetry (three citations in Liddell and Scott 1925–40 s.v. orthos III.1.b).
[8] A philosopher and literary historian active in Athens under the patronage of Antigonos Gonatas in the third century B.C.E. A pupil of the Aristotelian school, he later became an Eclectic.
[9] Against Samos, 440–439 B.C. [Translator’s note]
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