Last week we saw that in the classical mind, hubris was closely related to the crime of rape. Today the writer demonstrates that hubris included all manner of sexual deviancy, such as we see at Christ Church, Moscow; it included the exploitation & corruption of children; and it was associated with the upper crust of society — the privileged elites, such as the Kirk’s social structure. The following excerpt is taken from chapter four of Eros and Polis: Desire and Community in Greek Political Theory (Paul W. Ludwig [London: Cambridge University Press, 2002], pp. 172–74). The chapter is titled “The Problem of Aggression” and opens by stating: “In Greek legal thought, aggression and sexuality came together in the concept of hubris”:
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Because hubris involved honor and could take the form of rape, hubris was one of the principal connections between sexuality and politics in Greek thought. In particular, orators of the fourth century focused on hubris as they picked up and elaborated the democratic criticism of elite pederasty found in Old Comedy. Their prosecution speeches are exercises in rhetorically biasing an audience, and the democratic fears on which they play verge on the alarmist. The democrat’s quick identification of sexual deviance with oligarchic tendencies could at times reveal a comical pettiness.9 The class bias of pederasty made it easy to equate with the parties leaning toward oligarchy. Above all, the democracy feared and loathed the elite clubs or hetaireiai that served as political, social and sexual nuclei. Because Athens had known its own oligarchic revolutions, had viewed many coups of more permanent character in other cities, and at times numbered among its citizens men of huge ambition and large followings (such as Alcibiades), the Athenian demos may perhaps be excused for believing that any and all upper-class clubs, with which pederasty and sexual hubris were particularly associated, were in league to put down the democracy.10 Yet despite its biases, the democratic perception of elite pederasty finds many instructive parallels in modern theory on aggressive male sexuality. Some of the parallels include the typology of the young, privileged rapist, the enforcement of class boundaries, and the behavior of men in groups.
In the democratic imagination, pederasty was associated with an old guard of aristocratic holdovers who perpetuated themselves by initiating boys into their practices. In part, this class distinction of pederasty was real.11 Historically, the advent of pederasty as an institution coincided with the rise of the polis, forming a cultural pattern that included symposia, aristocratic clubs (the hetaireiai), and gymnasia.12 Socially esteemed male homoeroticism occurred within warrior aristocracies during the formative periods of many Greek poleis long before the rise of full democracy.13 Although little is known of the Dark Age that separated the collapse of the Mycenaean palace-oriented civilization from the age of the polis, the absence or suppression of overt homosexual references in Homer argues for a later development of socially esteemed homoeroticism.14 The rise of political regimes in Greece, in the distinctive, republican sense of oligarchies and (later) democracies as opposed to hereditary monarchies, has usually been seen as the extension and restriction of the franchise to warriors or the classes of inhabitants fit for war.15 The stages of development, by no means uniform, seem to have progressed from regimes based on a wealthy, landed aristocratic class of horsemen to governing bodies inclusive of a more sizable middle class of hoplite soldiers who owned some land. The homosexuality associated with these elites has been explained as resulting from their martial values: they admired (and then desired) courage or manliness, bodily prowess, and the requisite physique, in short, fitness for war; perhaps they denigrated nonmartial, feminine virtues for the same reason.16 Masculine admiration spilling over into attraction between males can be found in various eras and cultures, particularly martial ones.17
9 For example, Wasps 488–502, especially the following passage:
XANTHIAS. And the prostitute who visited me yesterday noon — just because I was telling her to play “back in the saddle”! — became very sharp with me and asked if I was bringing back the tyranny of Hippias. (500–2)
10 This was in a political environment in which members of oligarchic regimes and conspiracies swore oaths such as “I will be ill-disposed toward the people, and I will plot whatever evil for them I can” (Politics 5.9.11, 1310a 9–11). Compare Thucydides 8.54.4 on the function of sworn groups [xunomosiai] in the actual oligarchic revolution of the Four Hundred.
11 T. K. Hubbard, “Popular Perceptions of Elite Homosexuality in Classical Athens.” Men of leisure had more time and means to pursue erotic relationships that, unlike marriage, had no utilitarian end in view. J. J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire, pp. 62–4, contends that the sexual behavior of the political class was merely scrutinized more carefully.
12 The Theognidea are usually cited as evidence for attitudes from the archaic age, although the dating is uncertain and many poems may be of much later vintage (for bibliography see K. Raaflaub, “Poets, Lawgivers, and the Beginnings of Political Reflection in Archaic Greece,” note 33). The erastes of “Cyrnus” speaks for a hereditary aristocracy and disdains the new money obscuring its genealogy (Theognidea 183–192 West). On the ideology of symposiasts as constituting the ideal community, on symposia as politically formative and performative, and on the special place of pederasty in them, both in Theognis and elsewhere, see D. B. Levine, “Symposium and the Polis”; J. Bremmer, “Adolescents, Symposion, and Pederasty”; P. Schmitt Pantel, La cité au banquet. On Cretan ritual pederasty, sec W. A. Percy, Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece, pp. 59–72, for a suggestive pastiche of many sources.
13 The homoerotic poems attributed to Solon, who was himself of noble family, may be thought to coincide with the partial breakup of “feudal” land ownership and indentured servitude. The franchise came to be based on a property assessment. (139–56 West; Constitution of the Athenians 5–13; OCD3 s. v. thetes).
14 That pederasty should be considered an aristocratic and oligarchic practice more than a democratic practice is in accordance with Aristotle’s opinion in the Politics, in which open homosexual relations are thought to characterize warrior peoples, for whom the highest value is the virtue necessary for war: courage or manliness, precisely the connection made in the Symposium by Phaedrus, Pausanias, and Aristophanes. “Open” (phaneros): said of the Celts, who are exceptions to the rule of gynocracy because of their homosexuality. In their militarism the Spartans are comparable with the Celts (2.9.7, 1269b 25–36, cf. 7–2.9–19, 1324b 4–14). Note the derogatory term thasutes standing in for the full virtue, andreia (1269b 35 with Nicomachean Ethics 3.7.7–91 1115b 24–34); Aristotle thought the Spartans focused on warlike (polemike) virtue to the detriment of other virtues (Politics 2–9.34, 1271a 42–b 2).
15 Aristotle (Politics 4.13.10, 1297b 16–24): in the first postmonarchical regimes, the governing bodies consisted of those who fought most effectively: first the relatively small body of wealthy horsemen, then later, with the rise of a middle class, the much larger body of hoplites or heavyarmed soldiers. (Whichever way the process of cause-and-effect worked, a similar connection can be seen in the democratization of Athens with the enfranchizement of the poor laborers or thetes who served as rowers when sea power became preeminent.) For an interpretation, see V. D. Hanson, The Other Greeks, pp. 108–26, 365–9; see also Raaflaub, “Beginnings,” p. 47.
16 The alternative views have much to recommend them: (1) as a holdover from ritual initiations that inverted ordinary sexual roles. See especially Calame, The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece, criticized in the Introduction, note 10. For the strong view of “Indo-European” pederasty, see J. Bremmer, “An Enigmatic Indo-European Rite: Paederasty”; B. Sergent, Homosexuality in Greek Myth; H. Patzer, Die griechische Knabenliebe. For Dorian only: E. Bethe, “Die dorische Knabenliebe.” Contra: Percy, Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece, pp. 15–35; Dover “Greek Homosexuality and Initiation,” pp. 116–19, 124–6. (2) As “situational” or “opportunistic” homosexuality- the absence of women on long campaigns: thus Posner, Sex and Reason, pp. 149–50 explaining the prevalence that genetic arguments fail to explain. Contra: Dover points out that “the behaviour of the inhabitants of a barracks in the middle of a town is not the same as that of an expeditionary force in a desert. . .” (GH, pp. 192–3).
17 Among the Samurai: G. Leupp, Male Colors, pp. 47–57, emphasizes physical culture and battle preparation (for politics see pp. 48–9), but also stresses isolation from women as well as later androgyny under the influence of a priestly, nonmilitary tradition. Other cultures: see D. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality, pp. 110–16. Posner, in Sex and Reason, shrewdly brings the issue closer to home by citing latent examples in the ostensibly heterosexual literature of older British and American male fiction, in which the motif of the female love interest being favorably compared to a boy occurs often enough to give the reader pause. The positive valuation of female boyishness, particularly in their athleticism and demeanour, occurs more often in, but is not limited to, masculine genres.
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