Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture

Marilyn B. Skinner

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118611081
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This agenda-setting text has been fully revised in its second edition, with coverage extended into the Christian era. It remains the most comprehensive and engaging introduction to the sexual cultures of ancient Greece and Rome.

• Covers a wide range of subjects, including Greek pederasty and the symposium, ancient prostitution, representations of women in Greece and Rome, and the public regulation of sexual behavior
• Expanded coverage extends to the advent of Christianity, includes added illustrations, and offers student-friendly pedagogical features
• Text boxes supply intriguing information about tangential topics
• Gives a thorough overview of current literature while encouraging further reading and discussion
• Conveys the complexity of ancient attitudes towards sexuality and gender and the modern debates they have engendered

1

The Homeric Age: Epic Sexuality

In traditional agricultural societies, like those of ancient Greece, sexual beliefs and practices are closely bound up with cult attached to fertility deities, mainly female. Greek women’s own fecundity authorized them to intercede with powerful ­goddesses such as Artemis, Demeter, and Hera; wives and mothers played a leading role in rites promoting the fruitfulness of crops and animals. At female-only festivals, the celebrants’ activities might include using obscene speech or handling replicas of sexual organs, because in a ritual context indecency that is otherwise taboo is charged with procreative energy (Dillon 2002: 109–38). For women in particular, then, certain facets of human sexuality possessed a numinous quality, and we must bear this in mind when reading the amatory verse of Sappho or viewing vase paintings of women tending sacred phalloi (models of male genitalia) as part of the Haloa festival. Although we will not deal with the ritual element in ancient sexuality at much length – that topic is more conveniently treated in a book on Greek and Roman religion – we should remember that seasonal commemorations of the erotic in human life were an important part of ordinary people’s devotional experience.

Study of ancient discourses about sexuality properly begins with the archaic oral poets Homer and Hesiod and their followers who composed the Homeric Hymns. In the epic (narrative) works the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer offers intimate glimpses of mortal and immortal couples and alludes to numerous unions of gods with mortals. Hesiod’s didactic (instructional) poems the Theogony and the Works and Days contain important accounts of the origins of the gods Aphrodite and Eros and the first woman, Pandora. In the later Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the story of the goddess’s seduction of Anchises reveals early Greek notions of the pleasures and dangers associated with sexual activity. Epic passages supplied basic models for many later Greek and Roman narratives dealing with erotic relationships. Since these poems were performed orally long before they were written down, and were therefore widely accessible, it is likely that they deeply influenced men’s and ­women’s perceptions of themselves as gendered beings.

For their subject matter, Hesiod and Homer drew upon myths and motifs that had been circulating since at least the third millennium BCE not only among Greek-speaking peoples of the mainland but, with variations, all over the Eastern Mediterranean world. Archaeological finds indicate that the inhabitants of Bronze Age Greece, the Mycenaeans, whose civilization reached its zenith between 1450 and 1200 BCE, participated fully in the commercial and artistic exchanges of the Eastern Mediterranean. Parallels, thematic and even verbal, between archaic Greek poetry and Near Eastern texts imply that the early Greeks borrowed many ­ingredients of their religious and cultural heritage from the centralized and long-established Semitic and Egyptian states with which they traded (West 1997: 10–59). For this reason, much current work on the Greek system of gender and sexuality locates it within a larger Mediterranean environment and looks to ancient Near Eastern societies for close structural parallels.

However, religion is one of the most conservative features of any society. When cult practices developed by one culture come into contact with a different system of beliefs, the recipients are sometimes able to integrate such practices into their own religious framework only by changing their meanings radically. During the formative years of classical Greek civilization, in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, Hellenic peoples of the mainland and the settlements on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean were attempting to define their religious identity by purging borrowed myths and rituals of disagreeable constituents (Garrison 2000: 59–88). Epic poetry was vital to this process because it fixed the natures and attributes of the Olympic divinities in the popular imagination: thus the sixth-century philosopher Xenophanes, criticizing erroneous theological beliefs, blamed Homer and Hesiod for popularizing the notion that gods might be capable of theft, adultery, and deception (fr. 11 DK).

Prominent among the deities imported into Greek religious life from the Near East may have been the powerful Semitic goddess of love and war variously known as Inanna, Ishtar, or Astarte. If she was incorporated into the Greek pantheon as Aphrodite, it was well before Homer’s time. In literature, though, the disposition of the Greek goddess is quite different from that of her oriental cousins, for Hesiod and Homer concentrate almost exclusively upon the sensual and enticing aspects of her divine personality. Yet traces of her more formidable Eastern character are present elsewhere; in archaic and classical Sparta, for example, she was worshipped as a martial deity, an unexpected side of her persona that intrigued later Greeks (Budin 2010).

The Golden Goddess

Aphrodite’s origins continue to be disputed. One influential school of thought regards her as a doublet of Ishtar-Astarte directly adopted from the Near East (Burkert 1985: 152–3; Breitenberger 2009: 7–20). Conversely, some scholars have attempted to make a case for her indigenous Greek background, drawing parallels with deities in other Indo-European pantheons (Boedeker 1974). However, her name does not appear in proto-Greek Linear B tablets from Mycenaean sites, as we might expect had she arrived with the earliest Greek-speaking settlers. Lately she has been traced to Cyprus, where a goddess cult heavily influenced by Levantine traditions flourished in the late Bronze Age (Budin 2003: 131–79). Whatever her remote antecedents, there has obviously been extensive cross-cultural contamination. Even if Aphrodite is not originally Cypriot – or Palestinian, as the historian Herodotus (1.105) and the travel writer Pausanias (1.14.7) assert – her cult does show close links with that of Ishtar-Astarte, including the use of incense and dove sacrifices; the descriptive title Ourania, “Heavenly,” which corresponds to Astarte’s designation “Queen of Heaven”; and associations with war, gardens, the sea, and, especially at Corinth, sacred prostitution, though the historical reality of the last item is questioned. The epithet chryseê, “golden,” is restricted to her and used in epic verse more often than any other formulaic term: numerous passages describe her wearing golden jewelry. Although it was naturalized into Greek quite early, the word for “gold” is a Semitic borrowing, and the motif of a goddess adorning herself with jewels as she prepares to deploy her sexuality for manipulative purposes can be traced back to the Mesopotamian myth of Inanna and her mortal lover Dumuzi (Brown 1997: 31). These resemblances, though arresting, still do not ­convince everyone, and the debate goes on with little hope of resolution (Cyrino 2010: 18–19).

In Hesiod’s Theogony Aphrodite’s birth results from the castration of the sky god Ouranos. Urged by his mother, the earth goddess Gaia, to punish Ouranos for imprisoning his siblings, their son Kronos lops off his father’s genitals with a sickle and throws them into the ocean. “They were borne along the open sea a long time,” Hesiod recounts, “and from the immortal flesh a white foam [aphros] rushed, and in this a girl was nurtured” (190–2). Bypassing the island of Cythera, off the coast of southern Greece, and arriving at Cyprus, she steps forth on land, grass springing up as she walks. She is called by several names: Aphrodite since she was born of foam, Cytherea and Cyprogenes from Cythera and Cyprus, her first ports of call, and Philommêdês (“genital-loving”) because she originated from Ouranos’ ­members. Eros and Himeros, “Desire” and “Yearning,” are her attendants, and her assigned realm of interest (moira) is “maidens’ banter and smiles and deceits and sweet delight and lovemaking and gentleness” (205–6).

Scholars agree that the story of Ouranos’ castration, bizarre and horrific even by Greek standards, is derived from the Near East: parallels with the Babylonian ­cosmological epic Enūma eliš are especially striking (West 1997: 277, 280–3). Aphrodite’s birth, however, is an independent narrative stemming from another source. This was possibly a Cypriot cult myth, for a terracotta figurine found at Perachora near Corinth in Greece, dated to the mid-seventh century BCE and ­showing obvious Oriental influence, depicts a female figure emerging from what appears to be the male genital sac (Sale 1961: 515). Surprisingly, the figure, though given long hair and breasts and clad in a woman’s dress or peplos, is depicted as bearded and must therefore be androgynous: the excavators connect it with “the bisexual Aphrodite of the Orient and Cyprus” (Payne et al. 1940: 232). This may also be an early representation of Aphrodite in her aspect as Ourania, “Heavenly Aphrodite,” who governed the transmission of the manly way of life by example through the cultural institution of pederasty and whose most salient characteristic was masculinity (Ferrari 2002: 109–11). At the same time, the Hesiodic myth of origins attempts to explain Aphrodite’s name, which is most likely non-Greek, by ­associating it with the Greek word aphros, which can mean both “semen” and “froth of the sea.” It may imply that the semen issuing from Ouranos’ severed member was transformed into sea-foam, a familiar phenomenon of the natural world (Hansen 2000). Appropriately, then, the goddess of love would come into being out of a matrix at once supernatural and earthly.

Since the Greeks conceived of the universe as animate and thought of the world and its physical features in biological terms, ancient cosmology endows the divinities who arouse desire with the vital function of creative intermediaries: by inspiring beings to mate and procreate, they bring new entities into existence. Consequently, Aphrodite is portrayed as older than the other Olympian gods, for she emerges as a stimulus to union in the previous generation, immediately after the sky and the earth are forcibly separated. Her placement outside the genealogical scheme of the Theogony indicates that she is not altogether subject to the same rules as the Olympians. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite affirms that just three goddesses – Athena, Artemis, and Hestia – are immune from her power, and that she even deceives Zeus himself, the king of the gods, whenever she pleases (Hymn. Hom. Ven. 7–39).

Homer’s portrayal of Aphrodite ignores those exotic origins, welcoming her into the Olympian family by making her a daughter of Zeus, born of the goddess Dione. Early in the Iliad, she displays her intimidating side when she urges Helen to go to Paris’ bedchamber after he has been vanquished by Menelaus. Helen refuses, but Aphrodite frightens her into submission by threatening to withdraw her protection and leave her exposed to the wrath of Greeks and Trojans alike (3.383–420). Shortly thereafter, though, the goddess herself becomes an object of ridicule when she attempts to rescue her son Aeneas on the battlefield and is wounded in the hand by the Greek warrior Diomedes (5.311–430). She flees sobbing to Olympus, where Zeus, her father, sternly advises her that “the deeds of war have not been given to you” (5.428). Hellenic Aphrodite is thus dissociated from her Asiatic counterparts, who are redoubtable battle-goddesses.

In the famous episode of Zeus’ deception (14.153–351), Hera, the queen of the gods, contrives to borrow Aphrodite’s decorated breast-band (himas kestos) in order to make herself sexually irresistible to her husband. Homer describes the sash in this way:

… From her breasts she [Aphrodite] loosed the fretted band,
ornate, and there on it all kinds of spell have been worked:
thereupon is lovemaking, and yearning, and bantering persuasion,
which steals away the mind of even those who think prudently.

Normally, Homer uses himas to denote a leather strap, such as a chin-strap; thus he seems to envision the abstract elements “lovemaking,” “yearning,” and “persuasion” as anthropomorphic personifications tooled onto the sash. Figurines found in Turkey and Iran, dated to the end of the third millennium BCE, depict a nude goddess with a single strap or a double crossed strap across her breasts and carefully stylized pubic hair calling attention to her sexuality (Garrison 2000: 75, with figs 3.3a–b and 3.4). However, actual examples of Near Eastern and Greek magical spells dating from the classical period involve the wearing of knotted cords to gain mastery of another, erotically or for some other purpose (Faraone 1990: 220–9). It appears that the love-goddess’s emblem, a very old symbol of her control over fertility, has been given an ominous significance through association with the unwholesome use of love magic.¹

In the Odyssey, the blind singer Demodocus sings of Aphrodite’s adultery with the war-god Ares (8.266–366). The tale is cast as comic entertainment, for it ­accompanies a display of skilled dancing by the young men of Phaeacia intended to mollify Odysseus, who has been insulte...