Sexuality

It is nowadays commonly thought that the Greeks, and certainly the Romans, were sexually uninhibited in ways that we can only dream of, or that should fill us with disgust (depending on one’s attitude to sexual emancipation in our time). In fact, it is clear enough from our sources that sexual life in the ancient world was as much subject to inhibitions and shame as in more recent times. Sexual acts were seen as something personal that should be kept private. Feelings of shame seem to have become stronger during the classical period, when erotic vase painting, quite popular in Archaic Greece, almost died out. Literary texts became more euphemistic and less explicit. Intercourse was considered to be ritually defiling: it was prohibited in sanctuaries, those who had had intercourse had to refrain for some time from entering sanctuaries or had to cleanse themselves, and sexual abstention was an element in parts of cultic life. A shameless individual was considered to be an untrustworthy individual.

Much imagery with sexual content once belonged in a religious context. Seeing the images in that context does not remove the sexual content, but makes us look at it with different eyes. The ancient world was preoccupied with fertility. This does not come as a surprise, because the fertility of crops, animals, and humans were all of crucial importance for the continued existence of one’s community. Also—and this has partly to do with fertility as well—humans were constantly trying to ward off evil. In propagating fertility and warding off evil, some of the same symbols were used, for instance, the phallus, which was easily the most common symbol. The phallus symbolizes fertility, and it also embodies the power that can avert the evil eye.

Of course, sexually explicit images and texts also occurred outside a primarily religious context. These, however, were restricted to very specific occasions, and to very specific genres. At certain venues, such as the symposium and the comedy, it was permitted to speak openly of sexual acts, and display them acted out or put into images, but only on these specific occasions. And here too we find the aforementioned development toward reticence or even prudery. The whole idea of an ancient world that enjoyed unbridled sexual freedom should be rejected. There may not have been such a large gap between a strict morality on the one hand and actual behavior on the other, and ancient society may have been less frustrated about the body and its bodily functions, but they were not uninhibited.

Homosexuality in the ancient world is a difficult subject. First, we should understand homosexuality in those days in terms of sexual acts between people of the same sex, and not as an identity. There is some inkling in the sources of something that approaches a homosexual identity, but this is never very clearly spelled out. Most of the time, homosexuality was about something you do, and not about what you were. Whether homosexuality in the above sense was acceptable to society depended on the social status of the partners involved. Sexual contacts between a citizen and a slave or a free non-citizen were a private affair if—and this is important—the citizen was the active party. How about contacts between citizens? These were, in several places in the ancient world, only acceptable in the shape of paiderastia, pederasty, that is the relationship between a young, unmarried man (in his twenties), the erastes, and a boy (in his teens, a pais), the eromenos. The erastes was not merely the lover of the boy, but his protector and mentor. Whether there

Was, in some places, a female variant of this paiderastia is much debated. In some poleis, pederastic relationships were forbidden, whereas in others, such as Athens, the judgment is ambiguous: the law did not forbid it, but public opinion varied from extremely positive to extremely negative. Other homosexual relationships between citizens were not forbidden by law either, except for prostitution. But they were regarded as dishonorable and were made fun of and worse. This is not to say that such relationships did not exist: of course, we should never forget that the norms of ancient society and the practices of real human beings need not always be identical.

In most Greek communities that accepted pederasty, it seems to have been limited to certain social layers and to certain age groups. In Athens, it must have been relatively marginal, but in the socialization of the sons of the upper crust of Athenian society it would have played an important role. In this way, it most likely formed part of the education of the most important and influential citizens. It must have been for precisely this reason that it is overrepresented in the visual and literary arts of Athens. In Doric societies, such as Sparta, pederasty was institutionalized, a general initiatory and educational rite of passage. In these conservative communities, pederasty was not an aristocratic or elite practice as it was elsewhere, but part of the collective upbringing of young men (but then, all Spartan men were an elite in themselves, as we have seen). It is undoubtedly right to stress the socializing nature of such pederastic relationships, but that is not to say that they were not in fact sexual. Quite a number of Greek men thus went through a phase where their sexual contacts were exclusively homosexual, first as an eromenos, then moving on to being an erastes, and eventually marrying and having a mainly, though not necessarily exclusively, heterosexual sex life.