HOMOSEXUALITY IN GRECO-ROMAN ART

All history, no society has aroused the same enthusiasm as ancient Greece. This is a truism, yet the fact remains incontestable. Greek achievements in literature, art and architecture set norms for the Western world for two thousand years. When we think, we still employ the intellectual categories its philosophers and scientists devised. By resisting Persian might, Greece made Europe possible. In politics, democracy was a Greek invention. Though women and slaves failed to share the benefits of freedom and equality, it was these ideals that ultimately called into question their own exclusions. Above all, the Greeks charmed us by their sociability, their lively openness to ideas, and their liberality of spirit. Civilization, already millennia old on Egypt, Sumer, India and China, took a vast leap forward under the stimulus of the Greek experiment. My thesis is this: If the Greeks were not homosexuals, then we would not see the homoeroticism that are evidently pervasive in Greek art today. This paper is not only about Greek homoeroticism in art, what’s more important; it is about the homosexuality of ancient Greek culture that was prevalent and celebrated. Because if we think about it, if ancient Greek culture was purely heterosexual, then we would not see what we see today. This paper will chronicle from the time of ancient Greece and shall end with Hellenistic Greece.
Yet there was one aspect of Greek civilization that students of antiquity long chose to consign to the category of the “unmentionable.” In E. M. Forster’s novel Maurice, the Cambridge translation class is routinely cautioned, “Omit: a reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks.” The novel is set in 1910, but four decades later a scholar of repute could still remark, “This aspect of Greek morals is an extraordinary one, into which, for the sake of our equanimity, it is unprofitable to pry too closely.” And indeed, despite the importance of the subject, no book on Greek homosexuality was circulated openly in English until 1978. Christian Europe, from the fourth century onward, regarded same-sex relations as anathema, and its nations competed in devising punishments for “unnatural” crimes. Homosexuality became peccatum non nominandum inter Christianos, “the sin not even to be mentioned among Christians.” Such references as did appear were mainly confined to legal treatises, where penalties were spelled out, or to works of moral theology, where it was necessary for completeness’ sake to list the worst human vices.
In Greek history and literature, on the other hand, the abundance of accounts of homosexual love overwhelms the investigator. Homer’s intentions in the Iliad (800 BCE) have been the subject of much debate. There is ample evidence, however, that by the beginning of the Classical era (480 BCE) his archaic heroes Achilles and Patroclus (Achilles Binds the Wounds of Patroclus.) had become exemplars of male love. Greek lyric poets sing of male love from almost the earliest fragments down to the end of Classical times. Five brilliant philosophical dialogues debate its ethics with a wealth of illustrations, from Plato and Xenophon to Plutarch and the pseudo-Lucian of the third century CE. In the public arena of the theater we know that tragedies on this theme were popular, and Aristophanes’ bawdy humor is quite as likely to be inspired by sex between males as by intercourse between men and women. Vase painters portray scores of homoerotic scenes, hundreds of inscriptions celebrate the love of boys, and such affairs enter into the lives of a long catalogue of famous Greek statesmen, warriors, artists and authors. Though it has often been assumed that the love of males was a fashion confined to a small intellectual elite during the age of Plato, in fact it was pervasive throughout all levels of Greek society and held a honored place in Greek culture for more than a thousand years, that is, from before 600 BCE to about 400 BCE.
Greek religion, too, testifies to the hold pederasty had upon the Greek imagination. Mythology provides more than fifty examples of youths beloved of deities. Poetry and popular traditions ascribe such affairs to Zeus (For example: Zeus and Ganymede. Painted terracotta, ca. 470 BCE), Poseidon, Apollo, Hercules, and Dionysus (For example: Dionysus. From the East pediment of the Parthenon. Fifth century BCE), Hermes and Pan: that is, to nearly all the principal male gods of the Olympian pantheon. Only the war god Aries is (surprisingly) missing. Among the poets, Sappho, Alcaeus, Ibycus, Anacreon (Fig. 53), Theognis, Pindar and a host of contributors to the Greek Anthology and of same-sex love. Aeschylus, Sophocles (Fig. 54), and Euripides produced important plays, now lost, on the subject. The lives of Greek political leaders in a host of cities record episodes, crucial or trivial, of homoerotic passion. These include Solon, Peisistratus, Hippias, Hipparchus, Themistocles, Aristides, Critias, Demosthenes (Fig. 55) and Oscines in sophisticated Athens; Pausanias, Lysander and Agesilaus in militaristic Sparta; Polycrates in his cultivated court on Samos; Hieron and Agathocles in Sicilian Syracuse; Epaminondas and Pelopidas in bucolic Thebes; and Archelaus, Phillip II, and Alexander in semi-barbarous Macedon. Socrates spoke, and Plato and Xenophon wrote, of the inspirational powers of love between men, though they decried its physical expression. After Plato’s death the presidency of his Academy passed from lover to lover. Among the Stoics, Zeno, Cleanthes (Fig. 63) and Chrysippus (Fig. 66) extolled the love of boys. We know much less of the lives of Greek artists, but Phidias’s love for Pantarces was memorialized in marble. In the later Hellenistic age (332 BCE-400 BCE) Plutarch, Athenaeus and Aelian recorded the history of Greek love from its earliest times, while poets from Theocritus to Nonnus celebrated pederastic affairs in idylls, epigrams and epics. This is an astounding record, including as it does most of the greatest names of ancient Greece during the greatest period of Greek culture.
Throughout these accounts, male attachments are presented in an honorific light, though there were always some skeptics. But for many biographers, for a man not to have a male lover seems to have bespoken alack of character or a deficiency in sensibility. It is this enthusiastic note, marked by a kind of spirited élan that so clearly distinguishes the Greek view of homosexuality. We hear it sounded clearly and strongly in what is probably the most notable defense of male love in Greek literature, the speech that Plato puts in the mouth of Phaedrus at the beginning of the Symposium. Phaedrus believes that no man would run away in battle if his lover’s eyes were upon him: this would be too ignominious to imagine. Phaedrus is giving voice to what was probably the typical view of an educated Greek of his time. Nor was this view restricted to intellectual circles. Its peculiar note of exaltation echoes repeatedly through all levels of Greek society. Like the rest of humanity, the ancient Greek was susceptible to various erotic moods: heroic, tender, frivolous, ribald, even, on occasion, brutal. But the notion of the potential ennobling effect of such love remained common currency from almost the earliest days of recorded Greek history down to the triumph of Christianity. It cast over the idea of paiderastia a strong aura of glamour. On public occasions it might be respectfully saluted before an audience made up of all classes, as in the case of Aeschines’ speech to the jurors of Athens. Belief in its edifying possibilities was one of the pieties of the tribe, not just for an elite but also for the average citizen nevertheless.
The ancient Greeks had no word that corresponded to our word “homosexual.” Paiderastia, the closest they came to it, meant literally “boy love,” that is, a relation between an older male and someone younger, usually a youth between the ages of fourteen and twenty. The older man was called the erastes or lover. Ideally, it was his duty to be the boy’s teacher and protector and serve as a model of courage, virtue and wisdom to his beloved, or eromenos, whose attraction lay in his beauty, his youth and his promise of future moral, intellectual and physical excellence. In the Symposium, Phaedrus and the other speakers are always careful to use one term or the other, as the occasion requires.
This is especially striking in Phaedrus’ discussion of the Iliad. Here he finds his ideal lovers, for Achilles determines to avenge the death of his comrade-in-arms Patrols, even though the gods have warned him that this will cost him his life. But Phaedrus is puzzled as to which role to assign to which man. He notes that Aeschylus, in one of his most famous tragedies, the Myrmidons, had made Achilles the protector, the erastes. But Phaedrus thinks this is at odds with Homer, since the Iliad emphasizes the remarkable beauty of Achilles, which in Phaedrus’ view qualifies him rather for the role of the eronemos.
Plato wrote the Symposium about 385 BCE. By that time a well-established Greek tradition saw Achilles and Patroclus not just comrades in battle but as lovers in the full physical sense. But did Homer himself mean for us t perceive Achilles and Patrols as lovers? At least since Plato’s day, the question has been a matter of debate. Aeschylus, writing a century earlier, clearly regarded their relation as sexual. We know his Myrmidons was an extremely popular tragedy, though only fragments have come down to us. These fragments, however, make the erotic nature of their love quite explicit. In them Achilles reproaches his dead friend for letting himself be killed, and in the agony of his grief speaks over Patroclus’ naked corpse—in language whose directness must have startled even the Athenians—of the devout union of the thighs. Aeschylus’ sexual reading of the relation was shared by many, though not all, Greeks at the zenith of the Classical period.
We find evidence for this interpretation in a speech made by the Athenian politician Aeschines at his trial in 345 BCE. Aeschines, who is seeking to emphasize the importance of paiderastia to Greek culture, argues that though Homer does not clearly state that Achilles and Patroclus are lovers, sophisticated Greeks will read between the lines: “Although [Homer] speaks in many places of Patroclus and Achilles, he hides their love and avoids giving a name to their friendship, thinking that the exceeding greatness of their affection is manifest to such of his hearers as are educated men.” Other ancient writers follow this tradition, which seems to have been the predominant one.
The question is of historical as well as literary importance. Homer’s two epics, generally supposed to have been composed between 800 and 700 BCE, are by far the most important source we have for the state of Greek manners and morals in archaic times. They are of unique significance for the period before Greek literary texts began to be abundant, that is, before 600 BCE. Thus it is noteworthy that Homer in depicting male companionship in the Iliad does not use the classical terms erastes and eromenos and gives us no clear instance of the typical Greek love relationship so often depicted in later poetry, philosophy and biography. Apparently, in Homer’s Ionian culture, homosexuality had not taken on the form it was later to assume throughout the Greek world. Some scholars, like Bernard Sergent, have argued that it had, though it was not reflected in Homer. But Sergent’s view that ritualized man-boy relations were widely diffused through Greece and Europe from prehistoric times is a theory for which the evidence is slim.
It is impossible to fit the roles Achilles and Patroclus play in the Iliad into the Classical Greek pattern. Achilles is clearly the dominant member of the pair. Among the Greeks assembled on the plain of Troy, he has the greatest prestige as a warrior and athlete: he gives the orders and takes the lead. Patroclus performs some domestic chores, such as cooking and nursing the wounded, as a squire might. This could be seen as fitting him for the eronemos role, but Homer tells us Patroclus is older than Achilles and, as Phaedrus notes, pointedly stresses Achilles’ youth and beauty. And both engage in relations with the opposite sex: on one occasion, the two men retire to opposite sides of their tent to enjoy the favors of captured slave women.
Nevertheless, the emotion Achilles and Patroclus feel for each other is intense and absorbing. Achilles treats Patroclus with an indulgent tenderness strikingly different from the arrogance and egotism he routinely exhibits. Usually Greek warriors fought for their own personal glory or for their clan or city. But in Book 16 Achilles indulges in a romantic fantasy that exalts their personal relationship over all else. He wishes that the other Greeks might all perish so that he and Patroclus might face the foe alone together and win the honor of conquering Troy. When Patroclus is slain fighting in Achilles’ armor, Achilles goes wild with grief. He caresses and embraces the body of his dead friend, smears his own head with ashes, and refuses to eat and drink. Finally, the desire to kill Hector, who had killed Patroclus, moves him from the sullen refusal to fight he has shown till then, even though he knows this will mean his own death.
Besides its presumed incentive to valor, three other aspects of Greek culture also favored male love. These were the Greeks’ passion for athletics, their acceptance of male nudity, and their cult of male beauty. From early times the Greeks had exalted athletics, first as useful training for the warrior, then for their own sake. Athletic contests are prominent in the Iliad, which has elaborate descriptions of the games held at the funeral of Patroclus. The Greeks dated other events in their history from the first recorded Olympic games, assumed to have begun in 776 BCE. Sparta, especially, encouraged athletics as part of its military regimen. (For example, Greek Wrestlers: Attic red-figure vase, ca. 525 BCE).
As for nudity, one doubtful tradition held that it began at the Olympics as early as 720 BCE, when a runner from Megara was supposed to have shed-or lost-his loincloth. Thucydides, however, calls the innovation of nudity a recent one. Eventually, not only athletics but also communal celebrations were so distinguished: the sixteen-year-old Sophocles, his naked body gleaming with oil, led the victory parade in Athens after the battle of Marathon.
The municipal schools for exercise took their name from this custom-our “gymnasium” derives from the Greek word gymnos, which meant “naked.” These schools served both for physical training and as social centers where men and youths might meet, talk politics, philosophize, and on occasion, find lovers. The palaestras or wrestling schools for youths served a similar function. Some of these buildings were adorned with statues of Eros, as if to suggest that a beautiful physique might inspire a passionate relationship. Several of Plato’s dialogues take place in wrestling schools.
The beauty of youths was also commemorated in Greek art. (For example, Boy Kissing Man: Red-figure cup, ca. 480 BCE). Archaic and early Classical sculpture found its principal inspiration in young male athletes, gods, or warriors. So did much painting on vases. Decorated vases were often inscribed with a dedication that consisted of a young man’s name and the adjective kalos-meaning beautiful . Over five hundred of theses have come down to us. Scholars have counted over two hundred different names, all male, except for about thirty which designate Athenian hetairai, or courtesans . Respectable women, who were secluded within the women’s quarters of their houses, could not have been celebrated in this way: such publicity would have insulted and compromised them. But beautiful boys of high social standing were a different matter, and many of the most famous vase painters inscribed their work with the names of boys of rank and repute.
No reputable Athenian woman of this period would ever have appeared at a social gathering where men were present , even in their own homes. To do so would have been prima facie evidence she was a prostitute. Married at fifteen or sixteen to men twice their age and confined to the house except for religious festivals or visits to relatives, women were so deprived of education and knowledge of the world that there was little they could talk about, described an annual public festival, where lesbian girls in trailing robes go up and down, being judged for their beauty, and about them rings the marvelous holy cry of women in every year. Apparently some religious cult was associated with this festival.
For Lesbos’ most famous citizen, the worship of beauty was the center of her existence. Our knowledge of Sappho’s life remains fragmentary and problematic. But of this we can be certain: Sappho sings of the beauty of flowers, of gold and sunshine, of shady temple gardens, and, above all, of the beauty of women. Born about 610 BCE into an aristocratic family, she grew up in the city of Mytilene, married, and bore a daughter. Though a revolution exiled her temporarily to Sicily, she soon returned to become the leader of a coterie of women and girls who shared her artistic and erotic tastes. Her lyrics tell of the powerful feelings these women aroused in her. Repeatedly, Sappho strikes her characteristic note of intense feeling. It is not surprising that Sappho’s favorite goddess was Aphrodite, whom she invokes in a passionate prayer.
As a poet, Sappho stood next to Homer in the esteem of many Greeks-the greatest lyric poet, as he was the greatest writer of epics. Plato called her “the tenth Muse.” Her profile appeared on the coinage of her native Mytilene and other cities; statues and paintings honored her throughout the Mediterranean world. All this occurred despite her avowals of love for women in her poems, avowals that have made the word “lesbian” a synonym for female homosexuality. One ancient commentator, Maximus of Tyre, writing in the second century CE, compared her love for her disciples to the love of Socrates for his. To her own contemporaries their erotic tenor must have been clear: how then, we may wonder, did her contemporaries in the Greek world react to this knowledge?
We have abundant documentation on male affairs in ancient Greece but nothing comparable for lesbian love, perhaps because we have such slight knowledge of the personal lives of women. Later, in Christian times, prejudice reduced Sappho’s nine books of poems to the two poems quoted and a handful of fragments. There is evidence, however, that in some states in sixth-century Greece love between women was openly countenanced. But any tolerance was lost in Classical and late antiquity. The hard-boiled lesbians in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans (ca. 160 CE) are stereotypically masculine and presented from an unsympathetic point of view.
Sappho belonged to the same generation that produced Solon, who was born about 640 BCE. But where they won renown as poets, Solon’s fame was a statesman’s. For the skill he showed in governing the Greeks he was ranked among the Seven Sages of antiquity. A successful merchant with an aristocratic background, he assumed power when the city was on the verge of a civil war between rich and poor, a disaster he averted by softening Draco’s harsh penal laws, canceling the debts of the poor, and laying the groundwork for Athens’ democratic constitution. In his younger days Solon also wrote poems. One verse speaks of a youth loving a boy. His most significant pronouncement on the love of males, however, appears among the gnomic verses that became a standard part of Athenian literary education and found their way into the collection known as the Theognidea. Male love was not only a source of pleasure. According to Plutarch’s biography of Solon, it played an important role in Athens’ political life.
So far, our picture of male amours in ancient Greece has been drawn from poetry, drama, art and historical anecdotes. With the dawn of the fourth century BCE, new and more complex perspectives appear. The philosophical discourses of Plato and Xenophon offer a cornucopia of opinions and insights, with vivid glimpses of the intimate side of Greek social life. In the place of fragmentary comments we have elaborate debates, with a wealth of sociological detail and, in the case of Plato, subtle characterizations and touches of irony. Undoubtedly the most brilliant and instructive of these works is Plato’s Symposium. But its very richness presents special challenges. Its seven speakers were well-known Athenians who express significantly different views on the male eros. This raises important questions. Do the words Plato puts in their mouths, so often at odds with his own, represent views widely held in Athens, or were they idiosyncratic? And to what extent was Plato’s own position, conveyed throughout his mouthpiece-Socrates-accepted by Greek society?
Plato’s outlook was colored by his heredity. He was born into a wealthy aristocratic family claiming descent from Solon and Athens’ ancient kings. In 404 BCE, at the end of the Peloponnesian War, relatives and friends of Plato participated in the oligarchic terror that convulsed Athens under the Council of Thirty. The restored democracy, in revenge, executed Socrates in 399 BCE. Plato’s detestation of popular government must have been powerfully reinforced by this judicial murder. His own social philosophy combined the Cynics’ devotion to the simple life (rejecting both luxury and familial comforts) with an aristocratic ideal of service, which sank individualism in Spartan communalism. Like most Greeks he was passionately devoted to intellectual debate. He was also Greek in his ardent belief in love-that is, male love. But he abhorred pleasure as much as he did with democratic politicians, and sexual pleasure was for him especially threatening. Plato’s ideal lovers remain palpitatingly desirous of each other but unremittingly chaste.
Another disciple of Socrates, Xenophon, also wrote a Symposium, less well known than Plato’s and less scintillating but illuminating as to Socrates’ views on love. Xenophon was not a professional philosopher, but first he was a soldier and later a country gentleman. At thirty he joined the expedition of Cyrus, who was trying to overthrow his brother, the Persian king. His Anabasis tells how he helped lead ten thousand Greeks back to safety through many hardships after Cyrus’ defeat and death. Later, his Spartan sympathies and service with the Spartan king Agesilaus led to his exile from Athens and twenty years of retirement on a Spartan estate. There, he wrote on practical subjects like horsemanship and estate management and set down his recollections of Socrates in his Memorabilia.
Xenophon’s Symposium imitates Plato’s in its setting. Friends have gathered at a celebration arranged by Callias for the handsome Autolycus, who has just won a victory in the Panathenaic games. Once again we witness the power of male beauty to inspire love. Socrates declares that all men present are lovers. One, he notes with catholic tolerance, is even in love with a woman-his wife! Finally, he sets forth at length his own views, arguing for the superiority of a purely spiritual love, which, since it is not based on physical bloom, will last until old age and, since it respects the honor of the beloved, will more likely be reciprocated by him. In contrast, carnal love turns the boy into a possession and must be clandestine so as not to offend the boy’s relations. Moreover, the boy will not, he thinks, share in the pleasure of intercourse as a woman does and must consequently look with chilly contempt on his partner’s ecstasies.
Aware of the sanctions Greek tradition provided, Socrates employs all his rhetorical skill to de-eroticize homoerotic myths and legends. He argues that Zeus was attracted to Ganymede solely for his mental attributes and that Homer portrayed Patroclus not as an object of Achilles’ passion but as his comrade. Harkening back to Plato’s Symposium, Socrates also counters Phaedrus’ argument that homosexuality promotes military morale. He admits that the Eleans and Thebans may encourage such practices but denies the Athenians do and claims that in Sparta male love between warriors exists without the least spark of concupiscence. In every way, spiritual and mental qualities are supreme; the body and its desires are to be sternly repressed.
Among Greek legends, no one is more famous than Alexander the Great, who ascended to the throne at the age of sixteen. King Philip II of Macedon had used Theban lessons to smash Thebes. He did not long outlive his victory. Successful in his effort to unite Greece, Philip stood poised to invade Persia, when, two years later in 336 BCE, he was assassinated at his daughter’s wedding under sensational circumstances. Most accounts of the deed speculate on the possible complicity of his wife, the fierce Olympias, and his half-estranged son, Alexander. The polygamous Philip, who waged war by marrying, had several wives and numerous mistresses, but he also had male favorites. One of these, Pausanias, had been successful in his affections by another young man who bore the same name. The elder Pausanias denounced his rival as a whore who did not love the king. In a battle against the Illyrians, Pausanias saved Philip’s life by sacrificing his own. Appalled at this suicide, Attalus, who was one of Philip’s chief generals, invited the elder Pausanias to a feast, made him drunk with wine, and had him raped by his muleteers. When Pausanias demanded vengeance from Philip, who was sympathetic, but since Attalus was one of his most valued commanders and the uncle of Philip’s newest wife, Philip did not punish Attalus. When Philip was left unguarded at his daughter’s wedding, and in front of the assembled guests, Pausanias stabbed Philip to death.
With his father dead, Alexander now began the astonishing career that would make him master of Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, Persia and northeastern India. In one respect, however, he differed strikingly from his father-Alexander was not a womanizer. In fact, even though Alexander would marry the Bactrian princess Roxana, he would also possess a young Persian boy by the name of Bagoas. The latter would be by the young king’s side. Alexander’s closest and most enduring emotional tie was not with his Persian favorite, however, but with his boyhood friend Hephaestion, who had studied with him under Aristotle in Macedon, commanded armies during the march to the East, founded cities at his friend’s bidding, and become his grand vizier in Persia. One important inspiration for Alexander’s ambition was Homer. He slept with the Iliad under his pillow and consciously took Achilles as his model. In this romantic dream, Hephaestion was cast for the part of Patroclus. On a visit to the site of ancient Troy, Alexander deliberately dramatized these identifications: he himself sacrificed to the hero Achilles, Hephaestion at the shrine of Achilles’ companion. They assumed the same oneness. When the aged queen mother of Persia, brought as a captive to Alexander’s tent, bowed by mistake to Hephaestion, who was taller and better looking, Alexander eased her embarrassment with the remark: “Never mind, Mother. For he too is Alexander.”
When Hephaestion died of a fever in Ecbatana in 324 BCE, Alexander’s grief surpassed even Achilles’. Yet, here in the fourth century BCE, we are left with the same ambiguity we found in Homer. The same cloud of uncertainty surrounding the love of Achilles and Patroclus envelops the Macedonians. Despite the intensity of Alexander’s feelings, we cannot be sure that they were lovers, though; they may have been in their early years. Even Plutarch, the indefatigable chronicler of amours, who seems to have read very widely in now-vanished sources for his biographical sketch, fails to make that claim.
With Alexander, the Classical Age of Greece comes to an end. From now on Greek culture would recognize not one but two intellectual capitals: Athens and Alexandria, the splendid new metropolis Alexander had established in Egypt. Even more than in the archaic age, male homoeroticism had played a visible and important part on the major stages of the Greek world. To understand Greek culture at its zenith, we must take this into account. Whether expressed as heroic devotion, playful amorousness, or brutal violence, male love was often a crucial element in war or politics. In art and literature it has left its mark abundantly, while inspiring the subtlest and most daring philosophical speculations. Wherever the spotlight of history shines in this brilliant world, we find the love of male-for-male.
When Alexander the Great died in 323 BCE, he left behind him a world turned upside down. Within ten years he had conquered the entire Persian empire, soon to be divided up into the four great dynasties of Macedonian origin: the Antigonids in Macedonia, the Lagids (or Ptolemies) in Egypt, the Attalids in Pergamum, and the Seleucids in a Syrian kingdom comprising the whole Middle East. The period is known today as Hellenistic because it saw the spread of Hellenism. Massive and formerly barbarian provinces came under Greek influence, at least politically: the widening of horizons led to profound social and economic changes and the introduction of new ways of thought; finally, power moved to new capitals situated outside Greece itself, the cities of Alexandria, Antioch and Pergamum, which became art centers. Amidst these changes, art was inevitably going to start depicting new subjects in new styles.
The period of Classical Greece might have ended with the death of Alexander. This, ironically, gave birth to Hellenism and everything Hellenistic. Rome would adopt and absorb everything Greek, including the imperialism that has been pervasive in Greek culture when it was an empire. With the adoption and absorption of Greek conventions came, also, the homoeroticism in art, especially in the genre of sculpture. This is evident despite the fact that Roman culture differs from Greek culture in terms of its attitude towards homosexuality. Yet, homoeroticism in art persisted with the spread of Roman imperialism, until its demise after almost a thousand years of dominance via Rome. When Rome became an empire, it became the new capital of Hellenistic advancements. In terms of artistic achievements through innovations, Hellenism should be looked upon as being just as pervasive, thus important, as that of the Classical era. Regardless of the Roman attitude towards homosexuality, Hellenistic homoeroticism lives.
Winckelmann, in his History of Art Among the Ancients, rejoiced that destiny had preserved such a great masterpiece from destruction and allowed it to serve as eternal proof of the magnificence of beauty. According to Wincklemann, the group of statues depicting the priest Laocoon and his two sons being set upon by sea serpents offers the spectacle of human nature at a moment of maximum agony. It presents the image of a man striving to marshal every ounce of his strength to overcome his fate. He described Laocoon’s furrowed brow as expressing courage, his mouth as taut with anxiety, while the excess of suffering swells his muscles and strains his nerves. He concluded enthusiastically that the three artists could not embellish nature in so dramatic a scene, and so they strove to depict in its rawest state, at the instant of the greatest effort within its power. The Laocoon Group was so perfect a work of sculpture in his eyes that he did not hesitate to date it from the purest times, in other words, the period of Alexander the Great, during the fourth century BCE.
This dating, based solely on the evidence of aesthetic feeling, is no longer accepted today. Contemporary archeologists have assigned its origins to some time after the middle of the first century BCE. This is substantiated by the fact that Virgil narrated this particular episode in Book II of his Aeneid. The scene takes place in front of the walls of besieged Troy; two enormous sea serpents emerge from the depths and lunge at the priest and his two sons, wrapping their huge coils around their bodies and constricting them, while Laocoon desperately tries to free himself from their grasp. But it could also be that Virgil and the sculptors of this statue took their inspiration from an older literary source that has been lost, or even that the existing group is a copy of an earlier original, as is often the case with other Greek sculptures.
Following the Socrates (Fig. 45) of Lysippus with its Silenus-like countenance, an art of portrait-busts stressing psychological character and expression was developed during the fourth and third centuries BCE. The likenesses most often represented were those of famous poets and philosophers. The days when sculptors followed the Polyclitan canon and excluded all signs of individuality from their work had, by then, become a thing of the past. The Bust of Homer (Fig. 122) portrays him with wide-open, but unseeing eyes in a haggard and wrinkled face. A seated statue of the Stoic Philosopher Chrysippus (Fig. 66), which shows a stooped old man with deeply etched features, pulling his mantle over his bony back for warmth, clearly symbolizes the idea that individual thought was no longer shored up by ancestral certainties. The bust of the ascetic and sickly Epicurus presents not just a sum of naturalistic details, but also expresses the concentration of a thinker who sought to reestablish rules of proper human conduct in the midst of a turbulent and changing world.
All this has similarities with and yet is very different from the physical sufferings that would wrack the Giants in the Pergamum frieze and from Laocoon’s desperate struggle. During the Hellenistic period, which lasted about three centuries, we find neither outstanding masters creating characteristic works, nor distinct stylistic schools, but a diverse and active artistic production, which is difficult to categorize. In addition to the ideological changes, which strongly marked this period and led to a re-definition of the sacred and divine, new maritime and overland trade routes were established, enabling artists to leave the impoverished cities of Attica and the Peloponnese and travel to where their skills were in demand, which in turn created the possibility for further contacts. Gone were the days of Myron, Polyclitus and Phidias, who were known mostly within a relatively small circle, in the age of Pericles, was restricted to a few capitals.
From here on I will individually focus on some of the most homoerotic masterpieces that, I think, proved that the Hellenistic period was the best and most successful period in Greek civilization in terms of its artistic achievement.
Of all Hellenistic sculpture that is homoerotic, there is one sculpture that, I think, is the most beautiful and extremely homoerotic. The famous Laocoon Group (Fig. 124), which was discovered on an estate near Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome-and overwhelmed Michelangelo to the point of tears-seems to be derived from the same inspiration as the Pergamum Gigantomachy. In it we find the same power and the same exacerbated movement. This sculptural masterpiece, with its anguished rhetorical suffering, is the best example of Hellenistic baroque. It represents the Trojan priest Laocoon and his two sons attacked at an altar by two giant snakes. Ever since its discovery in Rome in 1506, Pliny, who ascribed it to three artists from Rhodes, Agesander, Polydorus and Athenodorus, said, “Of all the paintings and sculpture, it was the most admirable.”
The original Laocoon group was probably concerned not with the best epic version of the story in which Laocoon was killed by the snakes simply for opposing entry of the Trojan Horse into Troy, but rather with the tragic version in which Laocoon was punished for breaking vows of priestly celibacy and related sensual crimes. The subject of the group, then, was one of mortal error and divine punishment. Like the heroes of Greek tragedy, Laocoon is suffering intensely for defying the gods.
The Terme Ruler (Fig. 74) is a powerfully ruler who stands in a tautly balanced posture with one arm raised holding a spear. The pose was probably first used for Alexander’s statues, was common for royal statues after him, and soon came to mean simply ‘ruler’ or ‘man of power’ without necessary royal connotations. The Terme Ruler is the finest large-scale example of the type. The subject wears no royal diadem, and should be either a non-royal dynast or more likely a Macedonian prince. The naked body employs a heightened form of athletic musculature as an expression or metaphor of military-political power. The body has an impressive swagger accentuated by the unnaturally small head. The portrait features are treated with a treated realism in which precise individuality is muted by an ideal expression of forceful energy and vigor. The portrait well expresses what ancient theoreticians of kingship called royal deinotes, a sense of awesome force. This statue was found in Rome, where it no doubt arrived from the Hellenistic east as booty in the late Republican period. The ‘Terme’ are the Baths of Diocletian, part of which is now Rome’s National Museum.)
My most favorite sculptural masterpiece of Hellenistic achievement is one also known as the Barberini Faun (Fig. 146). The young male sprawls asleep on a rock The viewer’s first surprised impression of its openly erotic effect is only slowly modified by the realization that the subject is a satyr fallen asleep drunk in the wilds, not an athletic Greek youth sunbathing. The well-formed, muscular body has little of the distinctive sine-way satyr style, and the head reveals even on close inspection only a few animal-satyr traits-the ears and a mall tuft of hair on the forehead. His identity is otherwise expressed only by the panther skin on which he lies. This is both an astonishing ‘genre’ portrait of a satyr in the tradition of the Scythian knife-grinder in the Marsyas group, and a provocative study in homoerotic voyeurism that is removed only a slight distance from reality by its Dionysian setting. The sculptor has captured most convincingly the abandoned relaxation and exposed pose of one who is sure he will not be observed. The figure is a copy (?) of a work of about 200 BC.
The Pasquino group of Menelaus and Patroclus (Fig. 119) is perhaps the best example of Hellenistic baroque ingenuity. The Hellenistic baroque, which we know best from the Great Altar at Pergamum in the second century BC, was probably formed in heroic groups of the third century BC like this one. The baroque was a grand, elevated style designed to represent the tumultuous world of epic heroes. The famous Pasquino group portrays the culminating episode of Iliad books 16-17. The young Patroclus, having borrowed the sulking Achilles’ armor in order to fight his place, has been killed and stripped, and we see his body being rescued by the older hero Menelaus. Menelaus wears a tunic, belt and baldric and is armed with sword, shield and helmet. Patroclus’ nudity is thus not only ‘heroic’ but also part of the narrative, that is, he is not ‘nude’ but rather he was stripped of his armor. His youthful body slumps with broken neck and trailing arm in a posture that combines realism and pathos. The powerful figure of Melenaus stands astride the body, looking up with thunderous glance both at the viewer and at the surround enemy. Sculptors of the early Hellenistic period experimented with action groups in the round like never before. They made groups of wrestlers, hunters, equestrian figures and various mythological and historical subjects. The compact pyramidal design of the Menelaus and Patroclus is one of the most successful of the mythological groups. Historical battle groups of very similar kind are known to have been royal dedications, and their close connection to the mythological groups suggests these too may have been royal commissions.
Although this next sculpture is not included in Pollitt’s text, I am including this because of the male homoeroticism it invokes in me. Known as the Italian Businessman from Delos, this statue was found in the main reception room of a large house on Delos. It is sometimes nicknamed the ’Pseudo-Athlete’ because it has the body of a classical athlete but the head of an Italian businessman. In the later second and early first centuries BC, Delos was a free a free port that played a key role in the transfer of wealth, especially slaves, from the Hellenistic east to Italy. This island provides for us the best cross-section of the late Hellenistic at that was now available to Roman patrons. The statue represents probably one of the great financiers and slave traders who organized this transfer of men, goods and culture to Italy. It is an arresting figure that highlights some marked changes that Roman patronage brought to Hellenistic art.
First, in the portrait head there is an intensification of the individual realism of Hellenistic portraits into an uncompromising, hardheaded, almost aggressive style that appears distinctively ‘Roman’. This was how Romans liked to see themselves, and many of their friends in the Greek east followed this portrait manner in a lighter key.
Secondly, the statue makes no attempt to convince us that it represents the real athletic body of the sitter, in the way Hellenistic ruler statues did; rather, it is styled in an obviously classical and ‘unreal’ manner. The statue employs the prestigious vocabulary of a Polyclitan athlete in order to suggest some elevated but unspecified status for the sitter. Classic body types with realistic portrait heads had a long future in Roman art.
Finally, the style of the body also points to a wider or more general Roman preference for the Classical style over contemporary Hellenistic styles. In the same house on Delos, the owner displayed a copy of the Diadumenus by Polyclitus-an earliest example of a precise marble replica of a Classical statue that was intended to be recognized as such. Although the story of much late Republican art in Italy is of re-creation and redeployment of Hellenistic art in Roman settings, these statues illustrate that the Romans also made some important choices of their own-in portraiture and in preferred art-styles of the past.
Perhaps one of the most recognized statues from the Hellenistic period is the Aphrodite of Melos (Fig. 172). Made in the second century BC, the ‘Venus de Milo’ saturates female homoeroticism. The notorious lack of arms of the Aphrodite of Melos has invited many reconstructions. Available parallels suggest there was support at one side on which she rested her left arm-perhaps holding the infant Eros-and on the base of which her slightly raised left foot would rest. The statue was made in two main parts joined at the hips. The highly naturalistic drapery is carved in a casual, almost perfunctory manner, while the naked upper body is worked with great sensitivity. She has the soft massive forms of the canonical Aphrodite-broad hips that indicate sexual maturity and small breasts that indicate youthfulness. Unlike the engaging ‘portrait of the Crouching Aphrodite, the Melian statue’s head is rather conservatively Classical in both expression and hairstyle. Her hair is plainly arranged without the extravagant bowknot on top of the head, and her features employ a rather heavy, severe ideal that gives the head an almost masculine expression.
Probably one of the most sexually charged sculptures of the Hellenistic period is of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite (Fig. 160). The sleeping figure lies in a long, sinuous pose of extraordinary elegance, clearly intended to be seen from behind. The spectator’s approach to the statue from this view was probably carefully programmed it its setting, so that the discovery of its hermaphrodite sexuality would have come as a much greater surprise than in the Satyr and Hermaphrodite Group. There the laughing face revealed immediately the context of Dionysian play. Here the figure has the classic ideal head type and hairstyle of a divinity or heroine. Sleeping maenads spied on by satyrs had featured before in Classical paintings, but to a Hellenistic audience the best-known figure in this posture and style would have been rather the abandoned Ariadne—a famous Hellenistic painting showed her in a similar pose. Thus the viewer was led to expect the unusual subject of a naked Ariadne in the round, but discovered instead an anonymous androgyne. The statue playfully engages a (male) viewer’s ideas and assumptions about iconography and sexuality.
The Winged Victory of Samothrace (Fig. 11) was discovered in 1862 on the island of Samothrace. This graceful figure, still radiating strength and majesty despite its fragmentary state, has been thought to be sculpted between 150 and 180 BCE by a student of Lysippus or Scopas. It stands on a pedestal representing the prow of a Greek bireme that was originally set on the side of a hill, so that it could be seen a distance and low vantage point by pilgrims arriving at the port of Samothrace. The figure in this votive monument seems to have been inspired by a medallion celebrating the naval victory of the king of Macedonia, Demetrius Poliorcetes, over the king of Egypt, Ptolemy, at Salamis. Although the head and arms have been lost, it is thought that she carried a wreath or blew into a trumpet. What remains of the figure suggests that the artist wanted to depict her winging down from the heavens to take her place on the prow of the victorious ship, her drapery buffeted by a strong sea wind. The purists long scorned this statue as a mere show of virtuosity, but the Winged Victory of Samothrace is still a stirring expression of the pride of triumph, and her damaged state enhances the life that it has miraculously preserved.
It is safe to assume that homosexuality has been around since the first human inhabited the Earth. To argue otherwise would be homophobic, if not heterosexist. Homosexuals had existed long before the birth of ‘civilization.’ It is also safe to presume that throughout human history, homosexuals had been castigated, stigmatized, penalized, persecuted and executed for loving one’s own sex. The birth of Western civilization is a dichotomy: on one hand, Greek civilization has pushed homosexuality to the fore front, thus legitimizing it as a natural sexual orientation; on the other hand, this legitimization had also place homosexuals at risk because of cultural homophobia/heterosexism. With the birth of Christianity, gays and lesbians had been persecuted even more, no thanks to the Holy Bible. In fact, it is through the institution of religion that homophobia/heterosexism persists. Especially through Western religions, gays and lesbians are considered as immoral. During World War II, among millions of defenseless human beings that were sent to concentration camps, at least 250,000 homosexual women and men were also executed, just because they were deemed by the Fascists as degenerates. And when the Allies, meaning the Americans, liberated those that were fortunate enough to survive, homosexuals were the very last people to be liberated. In fact, some were sent to jail despite the fact that they were already imprisoned.
Like heterosexuals, lesbians and gays throughout history had made contributions to civilization building. From serving in the military to creating arts to literature to architecture to athletics, we do what we can. The civilization of Greece fascinates me. One, as a homosexual; and two, as an artist. Greek civilization amazes me because of so many factors. Excluding their form of slavery and misogyny, their contributions to Western civilization are phenomenal, thus, should be applauded with respect. From aesthetics to philosophy, from ‘democracy’ to homosexuality (Paiderastia), from Socrates to Plato, from Homer to Sappho to Xenophon etc., Greek civilization proves to be far more advanced than other civilizations before and after them, including the Egyptians. From Achilles and Patroclus to Alexander and Hephaestion, male love was the norm, almost an institution.
Because of their paiderastia, the Greeks produced/created some of the very best arts in the forms of sculpture, vase painting and architecture. Greek sculptures are the best because of the homoeroticism they arouse, at least to the homosexual viewer. The homoeroticism in Greek sculpture is far more superior to any other types of sculpture. Their celebration of male beauty is incomparable to any other civilization. Their practice of paiderastia is admirable. Thus, their (form of and acceptance of) homosexuality should be respected and admired.
The more I read about these Greeks, the more they intrigue me. Suppose that homosexuality was unacceptable in ancient Greek civilization, then, we would not see what we see today in terms of the homoeroticism in their art.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boardman, John, ed. The Oxford History of Classical Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Crompton, Louis. Homosexuality and Civilization. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Duby, G. & J. Daval, eds., Sculpture: From Antiquity to the Present Day. Kohn: Taschen,
1996.
Forster, E.M. Maurice: A Novel. New York: Morton, 1971.
Laisne, Claude. Art of Ancient Greece: Sculpture, Painting, and Architecture. Paris: Terrail, 1995.
Marcade, Jean. Eros Kalos: Essay on Erotic Elements in Greek Art. Geneva: Nagel Publishers,
1965.
Pedley, John G. Greek Art and Archeology. London: Laurence King Publishing, 1998.
Sergent, Bernard. Homosexuality in Greek Myth. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.
Williams, Craig A. Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999

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abstract, expressionist, movement and neo