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. 171–72). The chapter is titled “The Problem of Aggression” and you can read the previous excerpts here & here. This excerpt delivers the payload. There is a direct relationship between hubris, enemies, rape, and shaming the victim — humiliating them. As you read this, please note that ancient Greece treated hubris as a serious crime.
WARNING: The imagery is explicit:
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The clearest portrait of the behavior of young men in a social club, at least as they were perceived by the democracy, is offered by Demosthenes in his prosecution of Conon. The self-styled “Ithyphalloi” prided themselves on their virility. Conon’s sons, as members of the gang, seek to create situations in which honor may be won or lost. They allegedly begin unprovoked abuse of the plaintiff’s slaves and later abuse the plaintiff himself. It is impossible fully to understand their aggression without first understanding what has been called the “zero-sum” game of honor.34 In one version of the game, the antagonists begin a contest of verbal or mild physical abuse in which each seeks to escalate the stakes until the other grows afraid and backs down. The winner then departs in possession of the loser’s honor. If they come to blows, the loser retains some honor if he never stops trying to fight or continues to send signals that he has not given up;35 ideally, the winner imposes unmanliness on the loser in some form, a humiliation that he forces the loser to accept. Each antagonist thus looks for a form of submission in the other. “Enemies” are a necessary adjunct to one’s own honor in this game; if circumstances do not provide them, the principals must and will pick a fight in order to create them on their own.36 Brute force, applied against the principal target, is not the only means to victory in the game of honor. The attack may be indirectly aimed at the mark through the intermediary of his household or possessions; as subsequently discussed, Conon’s sons begin their aggression through Ariston’s slaves. Stealth and seduction may be used to separate a man from his wife or loved ones. Although the seclusion of women effectively prevented anything like the full flower of Donjuanism as it was known in later European culture, Cohen has written persuasively on adultery in Athens as a crime against the husband’s honor.37 Even housebreaking,38 because it penetrated the sanctity of the inner portion of the home, the women’s quarters, tarnished the honor of the men as too weak to defend their own, and the women came under the cloud of unchastity.
The insult from which a man had to defend his family extended not only to his wife and daughters but also to his sons.39 The latter were particularly vulnerable as they had relative freedom of movement outside the house. Seducing a man’s son struck a blow at the family honor,40 which honor then accrued to the seducer, at least in the eyes of his peers; the boy was a status marker in the game of honor between the father and his antagonist. Graffiti of uncertain but early date, uncovered on Santorini from the Spartan colony of Thera, reveal the sexual honor game as it was played in one Greek city. In the context of other self-honorific graffiti proclaiming the writers to be “good,” “best,” “first,” “a good dancer,” and “the best dancer,” several artists proclaim their conquests of citizen boys. Crimon penetrated a boy, “Bathycles’ brother.” He did the same to Amotion, etc.41 It is significant that many of the graffiti include not only the name of the active but also the name of the passive partner, a secret that a magnanimous lover would protect. Such inscriptions almost certainly were aimed at deliberate public humiliation of the boy who submitted.42 The young wolves raised their own esteem just insofar as they lowered the boy’s, or took away (some of) the honor that formerly belonged to him. The station of the boy’s family in society was therefore important to the seducer, hence the inclusion of the designation of a well-known family member, for example “Bathycles’.” At least one graffito records a group action: Pheidippidas, Timagoras, Empheres, and the “I” writing the inscription all took part in the active role.
The sex act in these cases, although not necessarily forced, is perceived by the participants as a shaming action. Aristotle’s definition of hubris brings out the anatomy of deliberate shaming.43 “The one committing hubris . . . thinks little of [sc. his mark]; for hubris is the doing or saying of that by which shame exists for the one suffering it.” Aristotle then goes on to discuss motivation: “not that anything may be produced for him other than what happened; rather, in order that he might feel pleasure. . . . The cause of the pleasure for those committing hubris is that they think that, by doing an ill turn, they themselves rise above.” Because in the case of the Santorini graffiti hubris is connected with sexual aggression or assertiveness, it seems important to establish the precise character of this pleasure that Aristotle says is characteristic of hubris. In his treatment of the precursors of hubris (looking down on people, thinking little of them, and deliberately vexing them), Aristotle duplicates the motiveless motive of not wishing to produce anything by such actions: no material good is the aim. “For vexation is an impediment to the will [of the other]: not in order that one may have something but that the other may not have it” (2.2.4, 1378b 17–20). Thus the motivations behind both vexation and hubris are other regarding. They seek to cause a change in the psychological state of another person. They are goods of the spirit. The hubris of sexual conquest is thus not primarily concerned with bodily pleasure. In the game of honor, sexual aggression is a bodily means to a nonbodily end. It remains a question whether the sexual pleasure is displaced by the pleasure specific to hubris (the pleasure of dominating or rising above the victim) or whether the latter pleasure combines with and enhances sexual pleasure.44 In either case, the extrasexual, political aim seems connected to the bodily, merely sexual aim.
Conon’s sons first abused the slaves of the plaintiff, Ariston, when both parties were on military maneuvers; they allegedly beat them and urinated on them (54.4). Because no honor can be taken from slaves, the likelihood is that the young men intended the abuse as a deliberate provocation to the slaves’ master, whoever he might be; they hoped to initiate a series of exchanges that would escalate into a confrontation with a citizen.45 When Ariston, instead of confronting them himself, complained to the general, they knew they had a easy mark in their sights. After one unsatisfactory (because interrupted) beating while still in the field, one of the young men and his father, Conon, and other associates catch Ariston back at Athens in the agora with a lone companion. In the course of the assault, they subject him to four shaming actions. They strip his clothes off,46 smear him with mud, and give him a beating (54.8).When he is no longer able to struggle, the father, Conon, engages in a bizarre ritual of insult that, because the victim would ordinarily not allow it, shows symbolically that he has submitted, that is, he is no longer fighting back. Conon stands above the victim and crows over him like a cock, flapping his elbows like wings. Canon’s son and friends cheer him on to perform this ritual display (54.9). Cohen has pointed out the mock rape implicit in Ariston’s account.47 If the Ithyphalloi actually raped him, Ariston could have been prevented from testifying to that effect for fear of losing all honor himself, to the possible, although unlikely (since no money exchanged hands) extent of being disfranchised from the citizen body for continuing to exercise citizen rights after having submitted to another man or men. A man who cannot protect himself is not fully a man. The now-famous vase cited by both Dover and Cohen,48 depicting a Persian bent over for the Greek who approaches him from behind, demonstrates how sexuality can be the symbol for a conquest of a nonsexual kind, in this case probably a Greek military victory over the Persians.49 Canon’s victory dance50 stands in for the rape, whether in Ariston’s narration or in the actual event, at the moment it would ordinarily have happened, that is, when the victim was subdued.
Demosthenes implies that sexual and other assaults on outsiders were practiced by the Athenian clubs. He imagines Conon announcing, “We are an association called Ithyphalloi, and when we feel eros, we beat and choke whomever we please.”51 Beating and choking, which eros is said to inspire, are subduing actions correlated with rape.52 Whether or not eros entered the assault overtly (Ariston is portrayed as a very young man at the time of the assault53), the four actions that Ariston does admit he suffered were all undertaken for the sake of that pleasure that Aristotle says is specific to hubris, the pleasure of shaming and thus of rising above the victim.54
This desire to commit hubris, both sexual and otherwise, revealed the fault line between classes in Athens. Aristotle characterizes two groups as prone to hubristic behavior: young men and wealthy men: “For they think that they rise above by committing hubris.”55 The sexual honor game was one means by which the young and the wealthy could rise above. Dover reminds his readers that sexuality in many places and times has not been an exercise in mutuality but rather “the pursuit of those of lower status by those of higher status.”56 Rape and seduction, like other forms of hubris, reaffirm class or superior status.57 The two groups mentioned by Aristotle indicate not so much the notables of unquestionable status, deriving from old, established families, but rather their younger scions and, more importantly, men from families whose only claim to attention was their wealth. The Athenian attitude toward mere wealth or “new money” ranged from condemnation to, at best, the hypocrisy of looking the other way, as the judicious use of money could often gain a new man entry into elite circles.58 The merely wealthy were therefore likely to be more sensitive about their honor than were the older noble families. The task of the nouveaux riches, at least in their own minds, was to separate themselves from the common run and to show their superiority to it in order that they might rise to the next level. For entirely different reasons, young men not yet come into their own, whether scions of notable families or other families with the privilege of leisure, may have felt a need to assert themselves and to prove their independence from their fathers. Young men coming of age, like the newly rich, have doubts about themselves and must combat the doubts of others as well. Both the young and the newly rich have something to prove. It is important to see the relevance of shaming actions to these types. Shaming humiliates or humbles the victim; by climbing over, or literally mounting the victim, these types undergo a corresponding exaltation.
Demosthenes anticipates the defense’s argument that young men in groups sowing wild oats is commonplace enough not to warrant a prosecution, and he turns that commonness into a point for the prosecution by playing on his democratic audience’s unease about the frightening normalcy of such behavior: the city contains many sons of noble men (kalon k’agathon andron) who, sporting as young people will, make up names for themselves such as Ithyphalloi and Autolecythoi, literally “self-flaskers,” meaning that no personal slaves accompanied them to carry their flasks (or to witness their deeds).59
The countercultural aspect of these clubs was symptomatic of the change from aristocracy to democracy. The need to fabricate distinctions for themselves over against the egalitarian order, no matter how empty of content or purely formal such distinctions might be, is characteristic of privileged elites when they are not simply allowed to rule.60 Fraternities, secret societies, and organizations of illuminati offer their members mutual admiration when the public denies them their “due.” Both a wealthy class of pretenders to high station and an aristocracy driven in on itself by the influence of the democratic regime tend to throw up caricatures of nobles, dandies such as Crobylus with his topknot hairstyle, if not darker reversals of prevailing virtues and pieties. One society of self-styled atheists in Athens solemnly gathered in observance of religious holidays, on which they performed ritual sacrilege in order to demonstrate to one another their contempt for the gods and the belief all around them.61 The inner dynamic of groups that set themselves in opposition to the larger society around them practically demands that the members perform some action in concert against nonmembers; the group loses its distinctiveness and the reason for its cohesion during a period of prolonged inactivity.62
34 The concept is well laid out with a variety of cross-cultural evidence in Cohen, Law, Sexuality and Society, pp. 66–9, 183–7. The preoccupation with “dissing” (disrespecting) in modern U.S. gang culture is a recent example. It is significant that the neologism has changed the noun “disrespect” into a transitive verb. Typically, a gang member’s belief that he or his gang is being shown disrespect is expressed as a defense of honor, so that, in theory, it would be possible for rival gangs to leave one another alone; in practice, however, going on the offensive to gain honor by actively disrespecting another, is the highly sought-after prize of the game. Compare K. Polk, When Men Kill, pp. 189–90; see also Winkler, The Constraints of Desire, pp. 47–9.
35 Compare D. G. Mandelbaum, Women’s Seclusion and Men’s Honor, p. 95.
36 In the Pukhtun culture of Pakistan and Afghanistan, a limit case of this tendency, an anthropologist quotes a village elder as thanking God for his many enemies (Mandelbaum, p. 94).
37 Cohen, Law, Sexuality, and Society, pp. 82–6, 98-132, 185.
38 Toichoruchia, literally wall digging, because burglars tunneled through the walls separating public from private. At Clouds 1327, Strepsiades, apoplectic at being beaten in his own home by his own son and at a loss for a bad-enough name to call him hysterically resorts to “housebreaker,” which otherwise would not describe Pheidippides’ behavior at all. Psychologically for Strepsiades, however, it is as if a stranger broke in and took away his son. “Homewrecker” might be a more accurate translation.
39 Compare Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.12.35 1373a 34–5; Cohen, Law, Sexuality, and Society, p. 178.
40 Fisher, “Hubris and Dishonour,” pp. 186–7.
41 IG Vol. 12, 3.536–47. Compare Percy, Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece, pp. 31–2; GH, p.123.
42 Percy, p. 32. Obviously, no passive partner inscribed his own name.
43 Rhetoric 2.2.5–6 1378b 23–8.
44 Compare Fisher, “Hubris and Dishonour,” p. 186.
45 Compare Cohen, Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens, p. 123.
46 Until he was naked he says (54.9), although the word gumnos would still be used properly if Ariston meant that he retained an undergarment.
47 Cohen, Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens, pp. 124–6.
48 GH, p. 105; Cohen, Law, Sexuality and Society, pp. 184–5 and Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens, p. 126 note 11. For a nonpolitical reading, see G. F. Pinney, “For the Heroes are at Hand,” with J. N. Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes, pp. 170–1. A. C. Smith, in “Eurymedon and the Evolution of Political Personifications in the Early Classical Period,” argues for retaining some political significance. See also M. F. Kilmer, “’Rape’ in Early Red-Figure Pottery,” pp. 135–8. Pinney’s reading is certainly possible, but seems to have a prior commitment to removing the violent or hierarchical aspect of eros stressed, e.g., by Dover.
49 The Athenians and their allies led by Cimon defeated the Persians at the river Eurymedon in Pamphylia (southern coast of Asia Minor) ca. 466 B.C. (Thucydides 1.100.1).
50 The imitation of a fighting cock may be significant. For the psychological and metaphoric connections between fowl of all kinds and phalluses in Greek iconography, cf. Arrowsmith, “Aristophanes’ Birds: The Fantasy Politics of Eros.”
51 “. . . erontes hous an hemin doxei paiomen kai ankhomen,” 54.20. This passage was pointed out to me by M. Crawford; see his treatment in Eros under a New Sky, pp. 57–8.
52 M. Amir, Patterns in Forcible Rape, p. 342.
53 Ariston was an ephebe doing his military training at Panactum, a fort on the border with Boeotia (54.3), when the first assault occurred. The two years mentioned at 54.7 probably refer to the two-year tour of duty as an ephebe, which would establish Ariston’s age as approximately eighteen at the first assault and twenty at the second. Twenty-two would be the upper bound for his age at the second assault.
54 Modern parallels: Amir’s classic study of rape found that U.S. street gangs practice group rape on outsiders as a rite of passage and to establish group cohesion (Patterns in Forcible Rape, pp. 189–91). The incidence of group rape was much higher than popular perceptions would indicate (43%; cf. S. Brownmiller, Against Our Will, p. 187). There was a significant correlation between group rape and shaming actions against the victim, with the types of sexual acts selected to produce intentional humiliation (Amir, pp. 222–3).
55 Rhetoric 2.2.6 1378b 28–9. Compare Lysias 24.15–18.
56 GH, p. 84.
57 For rape conceived of as a tool to keep women, as a class, in their place, cf. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, p. 127; Brownmiller, Against Our Will, p. 15.
58 W. R. Connor, The New Politicians of Fifth-Century Athens, judges that aristocratic distaste for Cleon arose not because his family had been in trade a generation earlier (that was true of a number of new families) but because he repudiated his philoi to court the masses.
59 J. E. Sandys, Select Private Orations of Demosthenes, pp. 212–14. Even loyal slaves could turn evidence after having been put to the torture. Compare Triballoi (below) and Kakodaimonistai. For an account, see Jones, The Associations of Classical Athens, p. 225.
60 Aristotle, in the Politics, observes that the notables are content if given office.
61 Lysias fragment 53.2 in Athenaeus 12.551e; cf. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. 3, p. 245.
62 Compare Amir, Patterns in Forcible Rape, pp.189–91. Non-empirical: W. H. Blanchard, “The Group Process in Gang Rape”; contrast A. N. Groth, Men Who Rape, pp. 113–15 and note 66 below.
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