PURSUIT AND FLIGHT BY SIR KENNETH DOVER
Sir Kenneth James Dover (1920-2010) was a distinguished English classical scholar[1] whose greatest work was the ground-breaking Greek Homosexuality, published in 1978.[2] Presented here is Pursuit and Flight (section C4 of his second chapter, “The Prosecution of Timarkhos”), in which he combined his formidable knowledge of the sources with analogies to fairly recent English heterosexual customs to give an exceptional lucid account of ancient Athenian ambivalence over when, how easily and why boys might yield to their erastai or suitors, and how their fathers were likely to see it.
Dover gives his references to Greek sources in an abbreviated form explained on page ix. Here they are restored to their full forms.
In Dover’s references to Greek vases, all given in the same paragraph, B696 is “Attic black-figure (sixth century BC)”, C74 is “Corinthian (sixth century BC) and CW16 is “Etruscan and Italiote black-figure (sixth century BC), while those beginning R are “Attic red-figure and white-ground (ca. 530-430 BC)”. Those followed by an asterisk are illustrated by black-and-white photographs between pages 118 and 119 of Dover’s book.
Pursuit and Flight
In the Symposium Plato portrays a dinner-party in the house of the tragic poet Agathon, at which the guests take turns to make a speech in praise of Eros. The exemplifications used by the speakers are for the most part homosexual (cf. Chapter III D), and in that portion of the work which constitutes an exposition of Plato's own doctrine of eros the response of a male to the beauty of another male is treated as the starting-point of a co-operative philosophical effort to understand ideal beauty. One of the speakers, a certain Pausanias, describes the attitude of Athenian society in his own day to homosexual relations, rationalises an apparent contradiction within this attitude and expounds a principle designed to reconcile its implicit scheme of values with more general schemes of moral valuation. In 182a-c he draws a regional distinction:
The rule (nomos)[3] governing eros is easy to understand in other cities, because it is defined in simple terms, but the rule here and at Sparta is complicated (poikilos).[4] In Elis and Boiotia, and wherever men are inarticulate, it has been laid down simply that granting favours to erastai is creditable - in order, I suppose, that they may not have the trouble, unskilled in speaking as they are, of trying to persuade young men by words; but in many parts of Ionia and elsewhere, regions which are under non-Greek rule,[5] the established view is that granting favours to erastai is shameful.
We do not have to take seriously the reason given (from the standpoint of Attic articulateness) for the casualness of homosexual relations in Elis and Boiotia or the reasons which Pausanias goes on to give for disapproval of them in (for example) Ionia, namely the threat posed to tyrants by the love, mutual loyalty and ambition which homosexual relations allegedly engender (inevitably, Pausanias cites [182c] the case of Harmodios and Aristogeiton). The 'complication' of the Athenian attitude (on Sparta, cf. Chapter IV A) is expounded in detail in 182d-184c. Pausanias begins by listing the phenomena which would lead an outside observer to suppose that the Athenians had a very high regard for the relations between erastes and eromenos (182d-183c):
Being in love openly is said to be more creditable than being in love secretly, and especially being in love with the noblest and best, even if they are not as good-looking as others. And the encouragement given by everyone to him who is in love is quite extraordinary, not at all as if he were doing something shameful. If he wins (lit., 'catches', sc. his eromenos), it is regarded as creditable, and if he does not win, as shameful; our custom grants the erastes, in his efforts to win, the possibility of being commended for doing the most extraordinary things, such that if anyone went so far as to do them in pursuit of any other object but this, or through a desire to attain any other end, he would earn the most severe reproach … making his requests with supplication and entreaty, and swearing oaths, and sleeping in doorways,[6] and being ready to endure a servitude against which any slave would revolt ... When an erastes does all this, people find it attractive ... From this point of view, one would think that being in love and requiting the affection of erastai is held in the highest possible esteem in this city.
Thereupon Pausanias passes to a consideration which, he says, would lead the observer to the opposite conclusion (183cd):
But when fathers put slaves in charge of boys with whom men are in love, and won't allow them to talk to their erastai, and those are the orders given to the slave in charge, and when the boy's friends of his own age reproach him if they see anything of the kind going on, and their elders don't restrain these reproaches or tell them off for saying the wrong thing - looking at all that, anyone would reverse his opinion and think that eros of this kind is regarded here as absolutely shameful.
So far Pausanias has given us a factual description of overtly expressed Athenian attitudes; his description may be true or false, but it is uncontaminated by speculation. That a boy's family tries to shield him from erastai is taken for granted in Xenophon, Symposium 8.19, and Plato, Phaedrus 255a says that boys discourage one another from listening to erastai. Plato Lysis 208c, 223a give us an idea of the authority of slaves put in charge of boys. Pausanias goes on (183d-184b), to explain the apparent contradiction in the Athenian rule as the product of a wish to discriminate between good and bad eros. The erastes who is ‘in love with the body rather than the soul’ (183e) loses interest when his eromenos matures, and he breaks his promises of lasting love and gratitude; but the erastes who is in love with the 'good character' of the eromenos 'stays for life', since character, unlike youthful beauty, is lasting. Thus (183e-184a):
Our rule wishes to test these (sc. good and bad erastai) well and truly, and (sc. wishes eromenoi) to grant favours to the good but keep clear of the bad. Therefore it encourages erastai to pursue, but eromenoi to flee; it organises a contest, and puts erastes and eromenoi to the test to see to which category each belongs.
At this point another item of information about the Athenian attitude is introduced (184ab):
So for this reason it is regarded as disgraceful, first of all, (sc. for an eromenos) to be caught quickly- the idea is that time, which is held to be a good test of most things, should intervene - and secondly, disgraceful to be caught by (sc. the offer of) money or (sc. the exercise of) political influence, whether he (sc. the eromenos) has been intimidated by maltreatment and fails to hold out, or whether, offered advantage in material terms or attainment of political ends,[7] he has failed to reject this with contempt.
The circumspect language is precisely that which we have observed and have learned to interpret in contexts of a more down-to-earth nature (pp. 44f.): kharizesthai (182a-c, 183d, 184ab, 184de, 185ab), hupourgein (184d), 'pursue' (184a, cf. 182e), 'flee' (184a), 'catch' (182d, 184a), 'entreat' (183a), ‘accomplish’ (183ab, 184b). It would be a mistake to imagine that when Pausanias distinguishes (183e) 'the man who is in love with the body rather than with the soul' from 'the man who is love with the good character (sc. of the eromenos)' he denies the latter any desire for bodily consummation or any inclination to refuse it if it is eventually offered.
Pausanias himself is represented by Plato (Protagoras 315de) as erastes of Agathon when the latter was about eighteen, and as remaining so more than a dozen years later (the dramatic date of Symposium is 416), when Agathon had become an established dramatist (Symposium 193b; cf. Xenophon Symposium 8.32); when Agathon emigrated to Macedonia, at some time between 411 and 405, Pausanias seems to have followed him there.[8] He therefore has a strong personal reason for treating erastai who turn their eros into an enduring relationship as superior to those whose interest in a given eromenos is more transient, and for treating the endurance itself as a justification of the original homosexual relationship.
It is not necessary to accept as true his explanation of Athenian motives as essentially rational. The situation which he describes - sympathy for the erastes, but at the same time protection of the eromenos and criticism of an eromenos who is 'quickly caught' - resembles to a striking degree the situation which can be observed in many societies which are strongly heterosexual in their orientation but at the same time allow women a certain freedom of movement.[9]
In the first place, we notice that heterosexual relationships in such a society and homosexual relationships in Greek society are regarded as the product not of the reciprocated sentiment of equals but of the pursuit of those of lower status by those of higher status. The virtues admired in an eromenos are the virtues which the ruling element in a society (in the case of Greek society, adult male citizens) approves in the ruled (women and children). Anakreon fr. 360 addresses one of his eromenoi thus:
O boy with the virginal eyes, I seek you, but you do not listen, not knowing that you are the charioteer of my soul!
The 'virginal eyes' go with readiness to blush (e.g. Plato, Charmides 158c), shyness (e.g. Plato, Lysis 207a, 222b) and unobtrusiveness. Kharmides, asked by Socrates to define sophrosune (Plato, Charmides 159b ), hesitates becomingly, and in the end says it is 'doing everything in a quiet and orderly way, including walking and talking in the streets'. Right in Aristophanes, Clouds 963f. puts these virtues at the head of his praise of boys as they were in the good old days:
In the first place, the rule was that no one should hear so much as a murmur from a boy. Secondly, they had to walk in an orderly way through the streets to the music-master's ...
A boy who speaks seductively to his erastes, ‘acting as his own procurer with his eyes’, or is the first to snatch delicacies at a meal, or ‘giggles or crosses his legs’, is the product of these degenerate days, according to the complaint of Right (979-83). When an eromenos reminds an erastes, by 'putting on airs', which of them is the beggar and which the potential giver, it is disconcerting to an erastes, and in Xenophon Symposium 8.4 Socrates puts on a delightful act as a conceited and coquettish boy:
‘Are you the only one, Antisthenes, who isn't in love with anyone?’
'By God I am!' said Antisthenes, 'I'm in love with you!’
Socrates, making fun of him, as if putting on airs, said 'Now, don't bother me now! Can't you see I'm busy?'
Antisthenes replied 'You - your own pimp! - always behave like that. Sometimes you make your "sign from a god" the excuse and don't talk to me, and sometimes you're after something else'.
‘O, I beg you, Antisthenes,’ said Socrates, 'please don't beat me up! Any other bad temper I put up with from you, and I'll go on putting up with it, because I'm fond of you. But look, let's keep our eros quiet, because it isn't my soul you're in love with, but my good looks.’[10]
The junior partner in homosexual eros is called pais (or, of course, paidika) even when he has reached adult height and hair has begun to grow on his face, so that he might more appropriately be called neāniskos, meirakion or ephēbos.[11] There is a clear distinction between paides and neāniskoi in (e.g.) Plato, Lysis 206de, and in Charmides 154a Socrates says of Kharmides:
He wasn't unremarkable even then, when he was still a pais, but by now, I imagine, he must be quite a meirakion.
When Kharmides appears, Khairephon asks Socrates 'What do you think of the neāniskos?' (154d). In Plato's Euthydemos Kleinias is repeatedly called neāniskos (271a, 275a) or meirakion (273ab, 275a, 275de), but when Ktesippos, one of his erastai, shifts position he does so in order to 'get a better view of his paidika' (274c), and in Lysis 205bc pais and neāniskos have the same reference, the adolescent Lysis. Meleagros 117 describes a blissful erotic dream in which he embraced an 'eighteen-year-old pais', and the young man whose beauty so moved the paiderastēs Episthenes in Xenophon, Anabasis vii 4. 7 is described by Xenophon as 'a pais who had just reached maturity'. Once the beard was grown, a young male was supposed to be passing out of the eromenos stage; that is why Socrates' friend says to him in Plato, Protagoras 309a:
I thought he (sc. Alkibiades) was a handsome man - but a man, Socrates, between ourselves, and getting quite a beard by now.
Cf. the witticism of Bion, recorded in Plutarch, Dialogue on Love 770bc: the beard, appearing on the eromenos, 'liberates the erastes from the tyranny of eros'. The sordidness of the Sausage-seller's way of life in Aristophanes, Knights 1242 lies not merely in his having been ‘fucked a bit', but in his earning money that way when he was grown-up.
The very numerous painted inscriptions on vases which comment on the beauty of a young male always, when they do not name the individual instead, speak of pais, never using a word for 'youth'. The same word, with the feminine definite article he, is used in the comparatively small number of vase-inscriptions which refer to female beauty; similarly in Aristophanes, Peace 869f., where preparations are being made for the wedding of Trygaios with the supernatural being Opora, we are told 'the pais'- i.e. the bride- 'has had a bath'.
Ktesippos, like his paidika Kleinias, is neāniskos (Euthydemus 273a), and some, at least, of the erastai of Kharmides are neāniskoi (Charmides 154a). This suggests the possibility of homosexual relationships between coevals,[12] perhaps conventionally disguised by the acceptance, on the part of one partner, of the designation pais; but the vase-paintings do not make much use of such a relationship.[13] Instances known to me are: B696, two youths wrapped in one cloak; R200*, one youth caressing another, who reclines beside him, and swinging a leg over him, much as in the heterosexual scene R82*. Other instances are each in some way peripheral, special or ambiguous: C74, abandoned behaviour on the part of comasts (cf. p. 7); CW16, where it is hard to be sure that both participants are male, and even harder to decide on their age[14]; R223*, in which a squatting youth, becoming impatient while some of his friends are engaged in heterosexual activity, tries to pull another youth down on to his erect penis;[15] R243*, an unusual scene of 'group activity', in which two youths, bending over, have backed towards each other while a third prepares to thrust his penis between their buttocks;[16] R954*, in which a boy with a small but no doubt imperious erection lolls seductively on a chair while another boy mounts the chair to oblige him (perhaps they will change places afterwards);[17] R1127*, satyrs; R1167, a boy or youth holding a ladle under the half-erect penis of another youth. It was shocking if an erastes was younger than his eromenos; Xenophon Anabasis ii 6.28, in the course of portraying Menon as a man almost too bad to be credible, alleges that he treated as his paidika Tharypas, whose beard was well advanced, though Menon was still beardless. The boys in Plato, Charmides 154c are enchanted by Kharmides' beauty, but hero-worship of that kind is nothing out of the ordinary. One could be erastes and eromenos at the same stage of one's life, but not both in relation to the same person; cf. Xenophon, Symposium 8.2 on Kritoboulos.
Aiskhines i 195 refers to 'hunters of such young men as are easily caught', and hunting is not an uncommon metaphor of homosexual pursuit; cf. Pl. Prt. 309a, Socrates 'out with the hounds' after Alkibiades' beauty; Plato, Phaedrus 241d, comparing the fondness of an erastes for his eromenos to the fondness of wolves for lambs;[18] Pl. Lysis 206a, a simile from hunting, Meleagros 116, 'boy-hounds'; Rhianos 5.1, 'I caught a fawn and lost it'. This usage and the very frequent use of words for pursuit, flight and capture sustain the notion that the eromenos is the quarry or victim of the erastes. Hunting is a sport, and one of the favourite sports of the Greeks; although the object of pursuit is capture, a quarry which sits waiting to be picked up spoils the fun of the chase, and conversely a quarry which gives the huntsmen a good run for their money earns their respect and affection (the more difficult the chase, the greater the happiness at completing it successfully). If the quarry is human and the object copulation, the difficulty of the chase enhances the value of the object, and eventual capture, after fierce competition with rival hunters, is incalculably reassuring to the hunter himself. No great knowledge of the world is needed to perceive the analogy between homosexual pursuit in classical Athens and heterosexual pursuit in (say) British society in the nineteen-thirties. So long as there were female slaves who had no say in how they were used and female prostitutes who needed to earn money for themselves or for their owners, a young Athenian male, especially if he was well-off, was not short of sexual outlets. Purchased sex, however, could never give him what he needed emotionally, the experience of being valued and welcomed for his own sake. Since girls of citizen family were protected by their families against contact with men, the seducer was necessarily directed towards his own sex. In a heterosexual society a young man is not merely excused by his peers and elders if he pursues women with intent to seduce; if it is believed that he has been successful, he is envied by most of his peers and elders and openly admired by many; he may even be treated with ridicule, contempt or mistrust if he shows no inclination for the pursuit. The women whom he seduces, on the other hand, win no respect or sympathy for their co-operation in his attainment of an apparently praiseworthy end, but very much the reverse; pursuit is the role prescribed for the male, flight for the female, and both are judged and valued in accordance with their success in carrying out their respective roles.[19] Parents are therefore apt to issue different commands (explicit or implicit) to their sons and to their daughters. Social competition is among the factors affecting what we say to our children; there can be no winners without losers or losers without winners, and it matters to us very much that we should be the winners and others the losers.[20] If my son seduces my neighbours' daughters, but their sons do not succeed in seducing my daughter, I have demonstrated both that I am a more conscientious and efficient guardian of what I am supposed to guard and also that the member of my family of whom enterprise and virility are expected possesses it in greater measure. An Athenian father, similarly, who sternly told his fourteen-year-old son never to speak to strange men on the way home from the gymnasium, yet betrayed by a glint in the eye and a curl of the lip that he was not wholly displeased by a rumour that his twenty-year-old son had ‘caught’ the fourteen-year-old boy next door, was acting as humans act.
The prescription of heterosexual roles today (or rather, until recently) and the prescription of homosexual roles in ancient Athens differ in two important respects which have the effect of cancelling each other out. On the one hand, the Athenian father of a handsome boy did not have to worry about the financial and organisational problems which are created by the birth of an illegitimate baby, and to that extent we might have expected him to take a less repressive attitude towards the boy's homosexual affairs. On the other hand, whereas a woman insulated from contact with men throughout her youth and encouraged to treat all men alike with mistrust may find it hard to make the transition from the approved role of virgin daughter to the approved roles of bride, housewife and mother, a boy who rejects the advances of erastai will nevertheless turn into an adult male citizen, and his performance of that role will not be impaired by his past chastity. From that point of view it is not easy to see any reason why a boy (or his father) should have tolerated erastai at all, no matter how decorously they behaved.
Yet some reasons emerge on reflection. Anyone would rather be good-looking than ugly; the attentions of an erastes, assuring a boy that he is not ugly, are welcome to him for that reason alone (the young Alkibiades felt 'dishonoured' [Plato, Symposium 21 9d] when Socrates did not try to seduce him),[21] and the boy's glory is reflected on the father. A generous erastes earns gratitude, and generosity has many forms, from a giving that can be crudely assessed in monetary terms to an unobtrusive sacrifice of one's time, convenience or advantage. A patient erastes can earn his reward by working upon a boy's sense of justice (we tend to think that patience deserves reward); an unhappy and desperate erastes earns compassion; an erastes who has demonstrated military, athletic or artistic prowess earns a boy's admiration and is taken by him as a model; and a lovable erastes earns love. One can see in all such cases how, if the boy is at all inclined to yield, his father's opposition may weaken too, especially if the erastes belongs to a powerful and influential family or is in truth an excellent model for the boy to imitate. Of course, if homosexual desire were in itself regarded as a moral defect, so that one might hear 'I thought X was a real friend' (or 'I thought X was a good influence on my son') 'but it turned out that he wanted ...', none of the ways in which an erastes might hope to earn consummation of his desire would avail him much; but as we have seen, neither an Athenian boy nor his father is in the least likely to have regarded the existence of the desire in the erastes as a defect, and criticism could only take the form ‘ ... but he only wanted ... '.
The analogy between an ancient homosexual and a modern heterosexual society can be pursued further if we extend the category ‘modern’ to include the presentation of respectable British society in the literature of the nineteenth century. The good woman, in this literature, does not desire or seek sexual intercourse.[22] She does not even desire marriage; but if a man of good character and ability asks her to marry him, obtains her father's consent, displays patience, tact and modesty in all his dealings with her, and participates with her in a prolonged and complicated ritual of which the essential element is the utterance of formulae and responses in a church, thereafter she has sexual intercourse with him whenever he wishes. He has not at any time alluded directly to this aspect of marriage. She does not enjoy it or take the initiative in it; she accepts it because she loves him and because it is her duty. She does not speak to her friends of what she and her husband do in bed; nor does he, if he is a gentleman, speak of it to his. A woman who seeks sexual intercourse outside the sequence of courtship and marriage as just described, whether because she likes it or because she needs to earn money, is excluded from association with those who have obeyed the rules, and it is difficult for her ever to resume association once she has demonstrated, however briefly, her possession of a disposition and moral character which has made deviation from the rules possible. Elements of this moral schema persist to this day, varying from country to country and from class to class. The analogy with Greek homosexual eros is not complete - heterosexual relationships, after all, produce and rear children, and the utterance of the crucial words of the marriage ceremony, whether in church or in registry, is an event distinct in kind from the partners’ enunciation of their wishes and society's acceptance of their relationship - but the common ingredients are not negligible.
Just as a great deal can be said about marriage, and indeed has been said, without any direct reference to sexual intercourse, and at the same time without going so far as to suggest that respectable married people abstain from intercourse, so Aiskhines finds it possible to omit all mention of favours granted by an eromenos to a good erastes, without ever committing himself to the opinion that it is wrong in all circumstances to grant such favours. Clearly, in his view, the eromenos must be exceedingly modest and circumspect if he is to escape censure, and if the deep emotions of the erastes find expression in poetry it must be poetry which admits of 'innocent' interpretation; whatever reward the erastes receives in the end, it must be the reward of long restraint.[23] With these provisos, however, what eventually happens is shielded from comment or description by conventional reticence. Plato's Pausanias is a little less reticent. The eros of which he approves is a protracted relationship, in which the resistance of the eromenos makes great demands on the erastes, but there are circumstances in which resistance should cease. Pausanias makes the point (Symposium 184c) that total subordination of oneself to the wishes and commands of another is exempt, in the eyes of Athenian society, from blame and dishonour if its purpose is self-improvement in skill, knowledge or any other form of excellence; no doubt he has in mind apprentices, trainees, pupils and disciples. If this principle is applied to homosexual eros, then (184de):
When erastes and eromenos meet, each observing a rule, the erastes (sc. the rule) that it would be right for him to subordinate himself in any way to an eromenos who has granted him favours, and the eromenos (sc. the rule) that it would be right for him to perform any service for one who improves him in mind and character (lit., 'who makes him sophos and agathos') . ... then ... in these circumstances alone, and in no others, it is creditable for an eromenos to grant favours to an erastes.
In short (185b):
It is creditable to grant any favour in any circumstances for the sake of becoming a better person (lit., 'for the sake of goodness').
To translate from euphemism into plain English: acceptance of the teacher's thrusting penis between his thighs or in his anus is the fee which the pupil pays for good teaching, or alternatively, a gift from a younger person to an older person whom he has come to love and admire. In any individual case, each of these alternatives may contribute half of the truth; if one is nearer the truth than the other, it is not easy for anyone but the eromenos himself to know which. That the eromenos should initiate a homosexual act for its own sake is not a possibility admitted by Pausanias or by any other Greek enthusiast or apologist for homosexual eros.
[1] He was President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford from 1976 to 1986, President of the British Academy from 1978 to 1981, and Chancellor of the University of St Andrews from 1981 to 2005.
[2] Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
[3] Nomos covers not only explicit legal prescription but also custom and usage. [Author’s note 36]
[4] Winckelmann deleted the words 'and at Sparta' as an interpolation, and E. Bethe, ‘Die dorische Knabenliebe’, RM N.F. lxii (1907) 442 n. 10 regards the deletion as necessary; Robin transposes the words to follow ‘and Boiotia’. I have argued for preservation of the transmitted text (Dover [1964] 37) and I am still of that opinion; the Spartan 'rule', as described (rightly or wrongly) by Xenophon, Lacedaemonians 1.12-14, is ‘complicated’ and is quite explicitly contrasted by Xenophon with the practice of the Eleans and Boiotians. [Author’s note 37]
[5] At the time when Plato wrote the Symposium (not, however, at its ‘dramatic date’) Persian sovereignty over the Greek coastal cities of Asia Minor had been formally recognised. [Author[‘s note 38]
[6] For this motif in poetry cf. Asklepiades 12, Kallimakhos 8, Meleagros 92. [Author’s note 39]
[7] An adolescent youth could not actively engage in politics, but all kinds of changes in the balance of power and influence within the citizen-body can be covered by the Greek expression ‘polītikos achievements’. (or ‘... accomplishings’). [Author’s note 40]
[8] Cf. K. J. Dover, ‘The Date of Plato’s Symposium’ Phronesis X (1965) 13f. [Author’s note 41]
[9] The artful attempts of an erastes to create a situation from which he may profit, as described in Plato Symposium 217c, have an exceedingly familiar ring if transposed into modern heterosexual terms. [Author’s note 42]
[10] Sokrates is here making fun of his own well-known ugliness; in Plato’s Symposium 215ab, Alkibiades, who loved him, compared him in appearance to a Silenos, a woodland god generally depicted as a comically ugly old man.
[11] Cf. T. Hopfner, Das Sexualleben der Griechen und Römer, I pt. i (Prague, 1938) 233-6. Neos, 'young', can be applied to an infant, a youngish man, or anything in between, according to context. [Author’s note 43]
[12] Asklepiades 24 and Meleagros 80 may be examples. In Xenophon Memorabilia ii 1. 30, 'using men (andres) as women', the word 'men' as representation of the male sex, rather than 'youths', is probably chosen in order to make a disagreeable impression on the reader. The same phenomenon may occur in Theokr. 2.44f. (cf. p. 67), on the lips of a girl discarded by her lover. [Author’s note 44]
[13] Cf. K. Schauenburg, ‘Euromedōn eimi’ M DAI (Athen. Abt.) xc (1975) 119. [Author’s note 45]
[14] Cf. K. Schauenburg, ‘Euromedōn eimi’ M DAI (Athen. Abt.) xc (1975) 73-5. [Author’s note 46]
[15] Emily T. Vermeule, ‘Some Erotica in Boston’, AK xii (1969) 12 describes the second youth as a woman, but the figure has an unmistakably male torso (contrast the woman's breasts on a figure to the right); the position of the legs hides the genital region. [Author’s note 47]
[16] The scene makes me think of the young men, a hundred and fifty years later, at whose behaviour the speaker of Demosthenes liv 16f. is so shocked (cf. p. 38). Closer in time is Theopompos Comicus fr. 29, where (lit.) ‘the excessively youths (meirakia)' - i.e. those who overplay their role as young? – ‘grant favours to their fellows of their own age’ on the slopes of Lykabettos. (I withdraw the interpretation I offered in K. J. Dover, ‘Eros and Nomos’, BICS xi [1964] 41 n 7). [Author’s note 48]
[17] Cf. P.H. von Blanckenhagen, ‘Puerilia’ in In Memoriam Otto F. Brendel: Essays in Archaeology and the Humanities (Mainz 1975) 44-6 who compares R 970*. [Author’s note 49]
[18] In prisons the ‘wolf’ is the active homosexual, and does not reverse roles with his partners (D. J. West, Homosexuality Re-examined (London, 1977) 233f.). [Author’s note 50]
[19] Cf. K. J. Dover, ‘Eros and Nomos’, BICS xi (1964) 31; Margaret Mead, Male and Female (London, 1949) 290f. [Author’s note 51]
[20] Cf. P. E. Slater, The Glory of Hera (Boston, 1968) 36-8 on the Greek passion for competition and its relation to what he calls Greek 'narcissism’. I do not think the Greeks were as different from us as he seems to imply, but that is because I define 'us' differently; cf. GPM 228-42. [Author’s note 52]
[21] Cf. P. E. Slater, The Glory of Hera (Boston, 1968) 33f., G. Devereux, ‘Greek Pseudo-homosexuality and the “Greek Miracle”’, Symbolae Osloenses xlii (1967) 75, 90. [Author’s note 53]
[22] Cf. Eric Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalens (London, 1976) 56-64, 123-5. [Author’s note 54]
[23] The context in which Aiskhines expressed these view has been explained earlier: his politically-motivated speech against Timarkhos for having prostituted himself in his youth.
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