From Sappho to De Sade (Routledge Revivals)

Moments in the History of Sexuality

Jan N. Bremmer

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138781245
• eBook ISBN: 9781317671237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Theory & Criticism
• Index: History

The history of sexuality has been the subject of increased interest in recent years and more widely acknowledged importance in the interpretation of past mentalités. Yet historians have only recently begun to study sexual practices in any depth, establishing that sexuality is not a biological constant but an ever-changing phenomenon, continuously shaped by people themselves.

The contributors to this inter-disciplinary collection bring their expertise in ancient as well as medieval history, anthropology, modern history, and psychology to bear upon the history of sexuality. They explore various aspects of sexuality in successive periods: pederasty and lesbian love in antiquity, incest in the Middle Ages, sexual education during the Dutch Republic, voyeurism in the rococo, prostitution in Vienna around 1900, and the invention of sexology.

From Sappho to De Sade, first published in 1989, offers an informative and entertaining collection of essays for students of cultural anthropology, social history and gender studies.

1

Greek pederasty and modern homosexuality

Jan Bremmer

There was a time, not so long ago, that homosexuality was regularly called ‘Greek love’ or ‘Socratic love’. Such expressions implied that modern homosexuality occurred already among the ancient Greeks. But was this really the case? The words ‘homosexuality’ and ‘lesbian love’ do not predate the second half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, it was only in this period that the medical professions began to consider homosexuality a perversion the study of which belonged in the field of sexual psychopathology. Such developments strongly suggest that homosexuality as we know it is a recent phenomenon. Did homosexuals not exist in ancient Greece?¹

The best study of Greek homosexual practices fails to perceive these problems – witness its title Greek Homosexuality.² In classical Greece, however, homosexual couples of two adult men were not to be found. Greek texts and vases show that homosexual relationships normally took place only between adults and adolescents or between young men and boys. Previous generations of scholars have overlooked this Greek peculiarity and have preferred to explain the homosexual practices as a consequence of the militaristic way of Greek life, drawing parallels with cases of homosexuality among soldiers during the Second World War.³ But although it is true that decent Greek women were tightly guarded, there were plenty of courtesans about to serve the Greek males’ sexual needs.⁴ Moreover, the ‘militaristic’ solution also fails to explain why the participants in the sexual relationship never were two adult men.

We, therefore, will seek a different approach. Short homosexual affairs between adults and boys also occurred among ‘primitive’ tribes in Australia, New Guinea, and Melanesia. Examining evidence from these areas may enhance understanding of the Greek practices – even if the approach is somewhat unusual.

1 PEDERASTIC PAPUANS

Between 1926 and 1932, the English social anthropologist F. E. Williams visited the Papuans of the Trans-Fly a number of times. This is his account of homosexual practices during the Papuan rites of initiation:

It was frequently maintained that setivira, or bachelors, remained truly celibate until they entered upon sexual relations with their own wives. Without giving too much credence to this statement, we may note that the hospitable exchange above noted was nominally restricted to married adults. Some informants maintained that setivira could secure the favours of married women at feast times, but it seems evident that this was not definitely sanctioned.

The bachelors had recourse to sodomy, a practice which was not reprobated but was actually a custom of the country – and a custom in the true sense, i.e., fully sanctioned by male society and universally practised. For a long time the existence of sodomy was successfully concealed from me, but latterly, once I had won the confidence of a few informants in the matter, it was admitted on every hand. It is actually regarded as essential to the growing boy to be sodomized. More than one informant being asked if he had ever been subjected to unnatural practice, answered, ‘Why, yes! Otherwise how should I have grown?’

The ceremonial initiation to sodomy and the mythological antecedents to it will be spoken of elsewhere (pp. 194, 308). In the meantime it is enough to note that every male adult in the Morehead district has in his time constantly played both parts in this perversion. The boy is initiated to it at the bull-roarer ceremony and not earlier, for he could not then be trusted to keep the secret from his mother. When he becomes adolescent his part is reversed and he may then sodomize his juniors, the new initiates to the bull-roarer. I am told that some boys are more attractive and consequently receive more attention of this kind than do others; but all must pass through it, since it is regarded as essential to their bodily growth. There is indeed no question as to the universality of the practice.

It is commonly asserted that the early practice of sodomy does nothing to inhibit man’s natural desires when later on he marries; and it is a fact that while older men are not debarred from indulging, and actually do so at the bull-roarer ceremony, sodomy is virtually restricted as a habit to the setivira.⁵

This description is confirmed by more recent anthropological studies.⁶ Thus, the following points should be noted as important features of the practice. (1) We have here a case of pederasty, which should not be confused with modern homosexuality, as both initiators and novices normally marry afterwards. (2) The active pederasts are the novices of the previous initiation, and it may be of importance to note that it is these novices who usually play a prominent role in upholding discipline during the initiation. Finally, (3) copulation, in which the novice is always the passive partner, takes place anally.⁷

Among the Greeks, similar homosexual practices occurred during rites of initiation. We will therefore employ the description of the Papuan ceremony as a means of ‘opening our eyes’ during our analysis of the Greek rites.

2 INITIATION AND PEDERASTY AMONG GREEKS, GERMANS, AND ALBANIANS

In Greece, the most detailed description of a pederastic affair occurs in a report of a Cretan initiation ritual by the fourth-century historian Ephoros:⁸

They [i.e., the Cretans] have a peculiar custom regarding love affairs, for they win the objects of their love, not by persuasion, but by capture [harpagei]; the lover tells the friends of the boy three or four days beforehand that he is going to make the capture; but for the friends to conceal the boy, or not to let him go forth by the appointed road, is indeed a most disgraceful thing, a confession, as it were, that the boy is unworthy of having such a lover. When they meet, if the abductor is the boy’s equal or superior in rank and other respects, the friends pursue him and lay hold of him, though only in a very gentle way, thus satisfying the custom [to nomimon]; afterwards they cheerfully turn the boy over to him and allow him to lead him away. If, however, the abductor is unworthy, they take the boy away from him. And the pursuit does not end until the boy is taken to the men’s house [andreion] of his abductor. They regard as a worthy object of love not the boy who is exceptionally handsome, but the boy who is exceptionally manly and decorous. After giving presents to the boy, the abductor takes him away to any place in the country he wishes; and those who are present at the capture follow behind them and after feasting and hunting with them for two months (for it is not permitted to detain the boy for a longer time), they return to the city. The boy is released after receiving as presents a military habit, an ox, and a drinking cup (these are the gifts required by law, nomon), and other things so numerous and costly that the friends, on account of the number of expenses, make contributions thereto. Now the boy sacrifices the ox to Zeus and gives a feast for those who returned with him. Then he makes known the facts about his intimacy with his lover, whether, perchance, it has pleased him or not, the law [nomou] allowing him this privilege in order that, if any force was applied to him at the time of his capture, he might be able at this feast to avenge himself and be rid of the lover. It is disgraceful for those who are handsome in appearance and also are descendants of illustrious ancestors to fail to obtain lovers.… So much for their customs [nomima] regarding love affairs.

Before we look at pederasty in particular, we should note a few details characteristically found in initiatory rituals. A short stay in the ‘bush’ and hunting are typical of initiation among most ‘primitive’ peoples; indeed, these practices can be recognized even in modern fairy-tales that include an initiatory scenario, such as Grimm’s ‘The twelve brothers’. The gift of a suit of armour signified adulthood, as in Greece only adults fought in full armour. In the city of Thebes, a boy also received armour from his male lover when he was registered as an adult, and several Athenian vases show adult males offering their beloved a helmet or some other piece of armour.⁹ But what about the drinking cup?

The drinking of wine played an important part in the existence of Greek men – witness the central place of the symposium in Greek society. This importance is reflected even in the way in which Greeks looked at neighbouring peoples; whereas the Greeks themselves drank mixed wine, they ascribed the drinking of unmixed wine, milk, or water to others. In fact, wine was so important to the adult male Greeks that some cities forbade wine to women and boys altogether. In order to demonstrate this difference, boys were often employed at the symposium as wine-pourers. By letting them pour the wine but not drink it, the adult males stressed the adolescents’ inferior position. The mythical counterpart of these boys is Ganymede, son of a Trojan king, who was kidnapped by Zeus to become his wine-pourer and, according to later versions of the myth, his beloved.¹⁰ The possession of a drinking cup, then, was a sign of adulthood.

It is also important to note that the pederastic ritual was sanctioned by the Cretan community. The pursuit of the boy ended in the andreion, the men’s house, which, as in many ‘primitive’ tribes, was the centre of political activity. The various references in the report to customs and laws also show that the Cretan community supervised the ritual. Evidently, pederastic kidnapping was a ‘must’ for every aristocratic boy.

What about the nature of pederastic copulation? Unfortunately, we have no direct information, but it is clear that the lover had to take account of the boy’s feelings. It may be noteworthy that a poem glorifying the derrière of a boy is written by the Cretan Rhianos, but, naturally, admiration of a nice derrière does not necessarily imply anal copulation.

Pederasty in puberty rites also occurred in Sparta, a city well known for its archaizing customs, as appears from the words of Xenophon in his Laconian Institutions (2. 12, tr. Marchant, Loeb): ‘I think I ought to say something also about intimacy with boys, since this matter also has a bearing on education [paideian].’ The institutionalized role of pederasty also clearly appears from the fact that the highest Spartan authorities, the ephors, penalized those who, although qualifying, had not chosen a boy to be their beloved. Xenophon, who had lived for a time in fourth-century Sparta, stated that the homosexual relationships in Sparta remained platonic but honestly added that he did not expect people to believe him (2.13). His suggestion, is indeed hardly convincing, as pederastic graffiti already occur in the early Spartan colony Thera, the present Santorini. It is therefore difficult to believe that practising pederasts were absent in the mother city, Sparta.¹¹

The Athenians were so fully convinced of pederastic practices in Sparta that a comedian even coined the word kusolakōn, ‘anus-Spartan’, a term that leaves little to the imagination. From a methodological point it is of course dubious to accept without reflection the Athenian allegations, for the comedians were more concerned with good jokes than with faithfully reporting other peoples’ customs. Nevertheless, the expression is valuable in a different way, as it seems to be characteristic of peoples who themselves practise pederasty to impute the act to others. Thus the Athenians called pederasty ‘doing it the Spartan way’, or ‘doing it the Chalcidian way’ as the inhabitants of Chalcis also had the (deserved) reputation of being pederasts. In the Middle Ages the practice was ascribed to Arabian influence, the early modern French considered the Italians to be the bougres par excellence, and modern Albanians vilified the gypsies as pederasts (below). These imputations seem to point to a culture’s subconscious discontent with its own pederastic practices; otherwise the origin of the custom need not have been ascribed to other peoples.¹²

The Greeks were not the only peoples who practised pederasty during initiation. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus (31. 9. 5) relates that among the Taifali, a tribe connected with the Goths, the boys lived in a state of pederasty until they had killed a boar or a bear. The killing of a boar was a typical heroic ordeal, and also had initiatory value in Macedonia, where a man could recline at dinner, i.e. have the status of an adult, only when he had speared a boar without a hunting-net. As the pederastic relationship continued only till the boy reached adulthood, this case is similar to the Greek customs, even though the method of copulation remains obscure.

Pederastic relations were reported even in nineteenth-century Albania, still one of Europe’s most isolated countries. Unfortunately, we are not told whether the practice had supposed educational goals, but the relationship was sanctioned by society: the young lovers (16 and 12 years old, respectively) together took the eucharist. The nature of copulation in this case can be pinpointed, perhaps, with the help of a list of dirty Albanian words, published in 1911 in Anthropophyteia, a scholarly journal specializing in scatology. From this list I take the following: ‘büthar = pederast [literally: “Arschman”]’; the word speaks for itself. Yet not all Albanians were charmed with their pederastic practices, as one might judge from the fact that the same list contains the words madzüp (gypsy), madzüpi (pederasty), and madzüpoj (to practise pederasty). Whereas the Albanians were themselves convinced pederasts, they denounced the gypsies, a regularly stigmatized group. This ambivalent attitude is also apparent in the 1854 report of the Austrian civil servant von Hahn, the oldest source for Albanian pederasty. His informant, a young Albanian, assured him that the relationships were purely platonic – a fact denied by better-informed sources.¹³

Among Greeks, some Germans, and Albanians, then, pederastic acts were a fixed feature of a boy’s road to adulthood. Until now, however, our informants have reported about the ‘outside’ of the rituals. It usually remained completely obscure what the participants themselves thought about the practices. Did they like it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• 1 GREEK PEDERASTY AND MODERN HOMOSEXUALITY
• 2 LESBIAN SAPPHO AND SAPPHO OF LESBOS
• 3 TO THE LIMITS OF KINSHIP: ANTI-INCEST LEGISLATION IN THE EARLY MEDIEVAL WEST (500–900)
• 4 A BRIDLE FOR LUST: REPRESENTATIONS OF SEXUAL MORALITY IN DUTCH CHILDREN’S PORTRAITS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
• 5 THE WOMAN ON A SWING AND THE SENSUOUS VOYEUR: PASSION AND VOYEURISM IN FRENCH ROCOCO
• 6 VENUS MINSIEKE GASTHUIS: SEXUAL BELIEFS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY HOLLAND
• 7 DE SADE, A PESSIMISTIC LIBERTINE
• 8 SEXUAL MORALITY AND THE MEANING OF PROSTITUTION IN FIN-DE-SIÈCLE VIENNA
• 9 MANNISH WOMEN OF THE BALKAN MOUNTAINS
• 10 A HISTORY OF SEXOLOGY: SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL ASPECTS OF SEXUALITY
• Notes on contributors
• Select bibliography
• Index