Greek History: The Basics

Robin Osborne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317690153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

Greek History: The Basics is a concise and compelling introduction to the study of Ancient Greece from the end of the Bronze Age to rule by Rome.

With a chapter on each crucial period of Greece's ancient history, the book covers the key topics, approaches and issues at the heart of Greek History, including:

• The invention of politics and the rise of democracy

• The central role played by the Greek city

• The insights from cultural, political, demographic and economic history

• The benefits and pitfalls of working with different types of sources.

Featuring maps, illustrations, a timeline and annotated guides to further reading, this book is an engaging and authoritative introduction for students of Ancient Greek History.

1

FAMILIAR BUT EXOTIC

WHY GREECE NEEDS HISTORY

What is going on in the scenes on this clay vessel, made and painted by a man named Euphronios in Athens at the end of the sixth century BC and intended for mixing wine in? Taking our cue from the youth with the discus, we don’t find too much difficulty in identifying this as a scene of athletics. We recognise various athletes, some in action, some preparing for action, some tidying themselves up after their exertions. One youth has apparently got a thorn in his foot, and is having it pulled out. Another pours something from a small flask into the palm of his hand, ready to smear it over himself. Another folds up his clothes, or perhaps takes up folded clothes he had laid down earlier.

Athletics is the very activity that most readily links us to the ancient world. It would be quite hard to find proverbial schoolboys who did not know that the Olympic games were named after a Greek festival which happened every four years at Olympia. Quite a lot of schoolboys could tell you that the pentathlon is named after the Greek for ‘five’, the decathlon after the Greek for ‘ten’. They may even know that the Olympic games were accompanied by a ‘sacred truce’, which interrupted wars so that the games could go on whatever the political relations between the cities from which the athletes came. When it comes to athletics, it seems, the Greeks were just like us, only a bit more virtuous.

But look a bit more closely at this pot. Start again with the discus-thrower. Just like the discus-thrower at the modern Olympics, is he? Well, no. After all, he is naked. We are used to sculptures of naked discus-throwers: the Roman copy of a Greek bronze statue of a naked discus-thrower (‘Discobolos’) sculpted by Myron in the first half of the fifth century BC has been much copied in modern times, has inspired many images on medals for less exalted occasions than the modern Olympics. The opening of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia in which the statue of the discus-thrower comes to life is a famous moment in the history of film. Hitler’s insistence on purchasing the most famous Roman copy, for 5 million lire, features large in discussions about the ownership of cultural heritage. But, however familiar the image of the naked discus-thrower has become, in modern western societies men do not do athletics naked.

The nakedness of the discus-thrower is no trivial matter. It indicates that one of the fundamental cultural boundaries was put in a different place. Classical Greeks were themselves conscious that they were unusual in doing athletics naked – conscious enough that the place where this happened was called the gumnasion (the place where one finds bodies naked (gumnos)). One group of pot painters of the late sixth century added loincloths to the pots they painted for export to Etruria. The great historian Thucydides, writing at the end of the fifth century BC discusses the practice of naked athletics in his very up-beat opening section of his history of the Peloponnesian War (1.6.3–6). Here he sets out to prove that fifth-century Greeks were superior both to Greeks of earlier periods and to non-Greeks: it is only a matter of time, he implies, before everyone takes up this Greek invention (and there is a similar ring to the philosopher Plato’s allusion to the practice in Republic 5, 452c). By the second century AD, when the Greek travel-writer Pausanias was visiting Greek sites, Greeks were explaining why they did athletics naked with a story of a man who won a race after his loincloth fell off, and Pausanias (1.44.1; compare IG vii 52) cannot have been the only person who interpreted the moved to nakedness in functionalist terms: one can run faster without a loincloth. (Not surprisingly this is a piece of experimental archaeology that modern scholars have not been able to resist, solemnly timing their exhibitionist displays of sprinting along Greek beaches.) Isidore, a bishop of Seville writing in the seventh century AD, has a different functionalist explanation (Etymologies 18.17.2): nakedness is a matter of health and safety – after a runner’s loincloth came adrift and he tripped, fell and died, nakedness was required to prevent further accidents.

The stories that Pausanias and Isidore tell serve to familiarise doing athletics naked. The practice may be unfamiliar, but the reasoning that leads to it is recognisable: whether we think in terms of it enabling athletics to be done better, or whether we think in terms of the prevention of nasty accidents, the end aimed at remains the end aimed at in modern competitions – record times and distances, with the dangers of being hurt in the process minimised. The strange practice of doing athletics naked only serves to show that they were like us really. For the scholar E.N. Gardiner, writing in 1930, naked athletics achieved exactly what the doctor (then) ordered (1930: 57–58).

But these two stories are not the only ways in which the nakedness of Greek athletes has been regarded. Some modern scholars, for instance, have considered the Greek practice to be not an admirably rational response to perceived hazards to running in a loincloth, but rather quite irrational. How could an athlete possibly run at top speed if his genitals were flopping around? Roman observers, on the other hand, saw the practice as not so much irrational, but immoral. The first of the great Roman epic poets, Ennius, said that ‘to bare bodies among citizens is the beginning of vice’, and the passage of the great Roman orator and philosopher, Cicero, that quotes and approves Ennius’ statement expresses the view that love between men and boys began in the gymnasia where homoerotic affairs were permitted and unrestricted (Tusculan Disputations 4.70).

The link between athletics and sexual relationships between men and youths is not a product merely of a fevered Roman imagination. The so-called second book of the sixth-century BC poet, Theognis of Megara, includes the following couplet: ‘Happy is he who, being in love, when he has come home spends time in the gymnasium, sleeping all day with a handsome boy’ (2.1335–36, West’s text). The link between athletics and love is explicit on a number of Athenian red-figure pots: a drinking-cup attributed to the Carpenter Painter has scenes of older men and youths engaged in a variety of athletic activities on the outside, and on the inside shows a bearded man and youth embracing.

The heteroerotic and homoerotic sex-appeal of the sporting body, whether male or female, is not unfamiliar in modern western societies. The Greeks seem rather like us when it comes to the fantasies that get recorded in myth about the attractions of women athletes or in anecdotes about the illegal presence of women spectators at male athletic competitions. So the mythical Atalanta was said to have been beaten in a race for her hand in marriage only because she was unable to resist stopping to pick up the golden apples dropped by her opponent. And according to Pausanias (5.6.7) one Kallipateira revealed herself as a woman illegally spectating at the Olympic games when in her excitement at the victory of her son she leapt over the fence to congratulate him and revealed herself. It is indeed important to acknowledge that the sexual desire unleashed by the athlete might be heterosexual as well as homosexual. All the same, the particular mode of sexual expression regularly displayed, not just in fantasy but in reality, in the Greek gumnasion took a form likely to shock in two respects: its concentration on the male genitals and its concentration on boys.

Look again at Euphronios’ pot. More particularly, take a look at the figure at the far left of one side, a figure I passed over in my earlier description. This is a young man, attended by an implausibly small boy-slave, who holds a lace or thong in his right hand and with his left appears to be stretching the foreskin of his penis. Precisely the image to make the film censor limit viewing to those over eighteen. What is going on here? Modern scholars have often termed it ‘infibulation’, and the most thorough study is by a remarkable figure, E.J. Dingwall, in a book published in 1925 entitled Male Infibulation. But ‘infibulation’ makes you expect a pin (‘fibula’) and none is involved, so recent treatments have preferred the term ‘ligaturing’, or, in plain language, ‘tying-up’. In antiquity the practice was sometimes termed the dog-leash, kynodesme, and is first alluded to in a partially preserved burlesque satyr play by the tragedian Aeschylus (the Theoroi or Isthmiastai, frg. 78a Radt, lines 28–31). On the pot the athlete is about to tie up his penis (or just possibly has recently untied it). Scholars who worry about the practicality of running naked discuss this practice, seen on a number of pots, in terms of ‘genital protection’, but the images on vases make it clear that the dog-leash was part of the discourse of sexuality and not merely of sensible precautions against damage to a vital part of the body.

There certainly are images of athletes with their genitals clearly tied up, sometimes with a neat bow, but pot painters do not restrict displays of the restrained male genitals to athletes; they also show the phenomenon in the case of men out revelling after a party and of the mythical half-man, half-horse satyrs. These scenes are significant not because they offer us a snapshot of real life – there were no real-life satyrs, and the manner in which ligaturing is shown in some of these pots defies physiological possibility – but because the painters have adopted the ligatured male genitals as a sign in a discourse, and by looking at the whole array of pots on which the sign appears, we can read this discourse. Even if we could persuade ourselves that it was the physical boisterousness of revellers that led them to tie themselves up, mere boisterousness will not explain the juxtaposition, on an early fifth-century wine-cooling vessel (psykter) now in the British Museum and attributed to a painter named Douris, of a ligatured satyr to other satyrs displaying what sexual excitement enables a male to do with a pot. Douris’ psykter makes it clear that ligaturing carried a message about sex, and in particular about sexual restraint. But advertising sexual restraint only makes sense in circumstances in which loss of sexual restraint might be expected: by drawing attention to his self-control the ligatured athlete advertises the gymnasium as a place in which encounters and activities could be expected to have a sexual aspect.

Satyrs’ sexual desire is most regularly for females; only rarely are they shown on pottery desiring each other or desiring young men. The erotic encounters of the symposium and of the revelling that followed it are similarly most frequently shown to be heterosexual. But the gymnasium, like athletic festivals themselves, was a space limited to men and boys. When pot painters show athletic victors being rewarded with garlands and the like, it is always a bearded man who gives the victory tokens and a boy who receives them. On one cup, once in Dresden but now lost, such a giving of prizes is juxtaposed to the handing over of other tokens of love, rabbits and the like, by an older man to a youth.

The very term pederasty, directly derivative of the Greek term paiderastia (love of boys), has become so associated with child abuse that it is hard to discuss Greek practice without explicitly or implicitly commenting on current sexual morality. Scholarly discussion of Greek homosexuality has exploded since the 1970s, but scholars have very largely avoided the issue of sexual relations with minors, despite the fact that it is relations between teenage boys and older men with mature beards that lies at the heart of the visual evidence for homosexual relationships in Athens (in textual discussions the age of the parties is more often obscure).

Kenneth Dover, whose Greek Homosexuality of 1978 is the keystone of the field, was apt to explain relations between older and younger men in Athens with reference to the courting of young women by men in modern societies: ‘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’ he writes (p. 88). When he comes to flesh out the analogy, however, we find that it is heterosexual courtship of young women by young men that he has in mind: ‘In a heterosexual society a young man is not merely excused by his peers and elders if he pursues women with an intent to seduce …’ and again ‘Parents are therefore apt to issue different commands (explicit or implicit) to their sons and to their daughters … If my son seduces my neighbour’s daughter …’ (all p. 88). When Dover does discuss the fact that the object of passion is regularly referred to as ‘pais’, a child, it is to the use of this phrase to refer to youths in their late teens that he devotes most attention. Michel Foucault’s (1985) project on the history of sexuality was premised on a conviction that past and present sexual practices were not comparable but contrasting; nevertheless he exploits the same analogy in only a slightly more subtle way when he writes in The Use of Pleasure, volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, that ‘Later in European culture, girls or married women, with their behavior, their beauty, and their feelings, were to become themes of special concern … It seems clear, on the other hand, that in classical Greece the problematization was more active in regard to boys, maintaining an intense moral concern around their fragile beauty’ (pp. 213–14). Although Foucault’s chapter is entitled ‘A boy’s honor’ the issue of age is never there addressed, and his earlier discussion (pp. 199–200) of the age of the beloved concentrates on the question of the point at which the boy became too old.

In recent work James Davidson, a sharp critic of Dover and Foucault, has addressed the issue more directly, arguing that ageterminology in Greek texts points to youths of around 18 as the objects of older men’s sexual desires, and that sexual maturity came up to four years later in antiquity so that boys shown on pots with the first sign of facial hair should also be reckoned to be 18. Davidson’s arguments are intended to make the Greeks essentially like us, but they do not carry conviction. The small stature of boys shown being groomed on many Athenian pots guarantees that the painters were not trying to make the users of the pots think of these sex objects as young men of an age to serve in the ranks of the heavy-armed infantry. Whether we like it or not, it is love of boys that is in question.

‘Familiarising’ tactics must be resisted. In the discussion of love in his dialogue Symposium, Plato has Aristophanes give a speech in which he traces sexual attraction back to a splitting of what had once been a single organism, and stresses that those sliced from an original that was wholly male will ‘so long as they are boys’ show affection for men, but ‘when they reach manhood they become lovers of boys’ (191e–192a). The courtships to which the gymnasium played host were between mature men and immature boys, from the beginnings of puberty until the stiffening of the downy beard. Eighteen-year-olds were on the way out, or at least on their way to courting rather than being courted.

Two further points are important here. The first is that, despite that speech of Aristophanes in the Symposium, homoerotic desire was not regarded as restricted by nature to certain men, nor something that excluded heterosexual desire. The reputation of Alcibiades, the aristocratic degenerate par excellence in the history of classical Athens, shows this well enough. He too appears in the Symposium and there tells of his unsuccessful attempt to seduce Socrates – itself an outrageous turning of the conventional tables in which the younger man tries to seduce the older. But he also acquired a reputation for taking prostitutes, both free and slave, home with him (his wife did not much appreciate this behaviour, [Andokides] 4.14).

The second point is that we are not dealing merely with a difference with regard to male homosexual relations. Puberty was the beginning of sexual life for girls as well as for boys. The fifth-century laws preserved from Gortyn on Crete specify that an heiress may marry at 12, and in Xenophon’s dialogue on household management Iskhomachos says that his wife was not yet 15 when he married her (Oikonomikos 7.5). Aristotle Politics 7.16 (1335a6–35) has a long explanation of the physiology of reproduction, leading to the recommendation that the best age for a woman to be yoked together with a man, to use the Greek imagery of marriage, was 18 (and 35 for the man), but his concern in this discussion is with quality of offspring, not sexual morality. Once a girl or a boy reached puberty they became an appropriate object of sexual desire and sexual pursuit, though the pursuit took different forms in each case.

Athenian expectations and practices when it came to sexual behaviour should not be thought of as merely a more liberal version of contemporary western expectations and practices. Sexual behaviour in Athens was very far from unregulated, but their regulations have at best a superficial resemblance to contemporary laws on sexual behaviour. Questions of age arise in Athenian law when it is specified that those who have charge of youths in various capacities should be over the age of 40. This is the case for those training boys...