The Greek Islands (25 page)

Homosexuality in ancient Greece is an interesting subject. It is not reasonable to suppose that the Greeks were any more or less homosexual than their neighbours – the Persians, for example; but the Greeks were singular in that they
institutionalized
and solemnized the proclivity. It seems clear that homosexuality gradually grew up, and that during the Doric period – up to, say, Homer – the predilection, if it existed, was not yet subject to civic sanction. Aristotle explained the
phenomenon
by saying that Dorians found it a way of expressly limiting population; they were the first to encourage the love of boys and to try to segregate women from society. There is
nothing
intrinsically irrational about this. Population has always been the curse of developing civilizations. The Romans exposed girl-children in an effort to regulate it. In some South Sea islands, the amount of food available was calculated per head and surplus population was exposed to ensure the safety of the community. In our time, a high infant mortality has done something like the same job – but not, alas, in Egypt, India and elsewhere. At any rate, the boy-love of the Greeks, once adopted, took firm root and found even the holiest sanctions of religion.

Pederasty pervaded Greek culture as a necessary feature of superior citizenship; it was a form of chivalry, it sanctified
virtue.
Judaism, and after it Christianity, fought the habit from the
outset, but had little success to begin with. Finally, in 342, it resorted to criminal punishment. Monosexualism developed with monotheism. The Bible makes no special reference to homosexuality. But for the Jews the sexual cravings had to be subordinated in the interests of the tribe, and social motives therefore dictated their attitude also – which was very different from the open and poetic Greek ideal. The Greek code of behaviour was sufficiently original to deserve a mention here; and it is not out of context in this chapter if one remarks, apropos Sappho, that no such code obtained for lesbian
practices
, unless somehow they were also partly institutionalized in the temples devoted to female deities such as Aphrodite. It is vexatious to know so little about the profounder feelings and attitudes of the old Greeks; the joky, sexy, bawdy incidents graven on the vases, scenes in which gods and goddesses took part, may have had some quite special cathartic significance. I mean, if one interpreted literally the blood and skulls of Tibetan temple-decoration, one would think the worshippers were bloodthirsty cannibals, rather than Buddhists. So Greek satire and smut might have made laughter figure among the cathartic canons of Aristotle, along with the pity and terror which bloodshed and horror represented on the stage was supposed to induce in the spectator.

Although some traces of the boy cult were to be found among the Ionians, the actual custom, like knighthood, only became fashionable with the Dorians. It became, for example, a privilege only permitted to the free citizen, the knight. Slaves were expressly forbidden to practise homosexuality under pain of death. There were also strict rules which admitted no
deviation
. In Sparta, Crete, Thebes, the training for
Arete
(virtue) among the dominant classes was based on pederasty. The Spartan lover was held accountable for his ‘companion', who became attached to him at the age of twelve; he, and not his
boy, was punished severely for any shameful act on the latter's part. Sparta of course was the model fascist state – it is curious how these repressive systems and their perverted concepts arise. The Nazis invented nothing, it seems. (‘The battlefield at Chaeronea was covered with the bodies of lovers lying in pairs …')

Stranger still, from an anthropological point of view, the choice of a boy-lover in Crete assumed the form of a bridal theft, like becoming betrothed to a girl. The lover advised the family of his intention to come and abduct the boy. If the family did not like the proposed ‘match' they did their best to thwart it; but the higher the social position of the lover, the greater the honour for the boy and his family. After being
initiated
, the chosen one was sent home bearing ritual gifts. In Thera and in Crete, such unions even enjoyed official religious sanction, the actual coupling of the knight and his boy taking place formally under the protection of some god or hero. At Thebes, the seventh-century inscriptions make the matter abundantly clear. Upon the holy promontory, about seventy metres from the temple of Apollo Kerneies, outside the city, we find chiselled in large script, upon a site consecrated to Zeus, the following: ‘On this holy spot, sacred to Zeus, Krion has consummated his union with the son of Bathycles and,
proclaiming
it proudly to the world, dedicates to it this
imperishable
memorial. And many Thebans with him and after him have united themselves with their boys on this same holy spot.'

In Crete, it was considered a shame for a boy to possess no knightly lover, and a great honour for him to be desired by many. Both parties, the Cretans thought, would profit morally and spiritually from such a union. As in a code of chivalry, each was inspired to do his best in order to prove his mettle, to become an
agathos anir
(virtuous man). Early heroic tales seem to take this relationship into account, for the wondrous
deeds of Heracles were carried out in honour of a male lover, Eurystheus. Repelling a wooing knight was considered a blot on one's character. Plutarch relates the story of how Aristodamos, a knight, lost patience with an obstinate boy and struck him down with his sword – by which love act the knightly lover transferred his chivalric virtue to his page.

It is difficult for us who still dwell in the shadow of Freud to realize what all this meant to the people who lived with it then. There are hints of a similar predisposition in the English public school codes of ‘friendship', though such friendships were implicit, and not institutionalized, while pederasty was and is frowned upon. Moreover, since psychoanalysis raided the larder of the unconscious we have developed notions about
narcissism
and its effects which the old Greeks would have found bizarre in the extreme. What would they have made of these remarks by Stekel?

A Greek would have been puzzled and perhaps disdainful because we have not invented a mechanism to cope with this. Also, of course, our view still smells of Pauline repression, of Aboriginal Sin, however much it is disguised in frigid medical terms. The truth perhaps is that nature itself cures imbalances of population, blindly tipping the scales down when it proves necessary, on one side or the other; and so the customs of different peoples at different times vary.

To return to Sappho: at the moment we do not know the real truth about her, and perhaps we never will; and if we think of the waves of puritan counter-propaganda – such as the one that produced Clement of Alexandria's attacks on ‘obscene' gnostics – which always follow relatively calm political periods, we should be warned that our present estimates of the lady may well have been distorted by some witch-burning group of now forgotten historians. Of course fashions in love change, just as fashions in poetry do. I knew an Italian surrealist poet who won a fitful glory by describing the transports of Zeus and Hera as ‘the mating of surgical pianos'. I wonder what Sappho would have thought about that. We are also told that she was after all a married woman, and indeed had a daughter of her own. Her little group may have been as innocent as the ‘finishing school' that the impoverished Duchess of X set up in Kensington, to gain a few guineas and mould the socialites of the future from the adolescent children of her friends.

The aristocratic streak in Lesbos seems to have started very early; at one time the nobility liked to trace its descent from Agamemnon, who is supposed to have conquered the island during the Trojan War. Once, the island was called Pentapolis,
or the Five Cities (Mytilini, Eressos, Methymna, Antissa and Pyrrha); but her huge natural harbours made it unnecessary for the Lesbians to make the same sort of decision as the Rhodians, in founding their capital. Lesbos was always rich economically, and also, perhaps because of this, politically; it was once a prominent Aeolian settlement, with colonies in the Troad and in Thrace, and with Pergamum not far away. To some extent, one still feels her pre-eminence today, for Lesbos is far more beautiful and colourful than the little group of islands which surround it – certainly than the two northern ones, Samothrace and Lemnos. It was here, in the storming of Mytilini that Julius Caesar first made his mark as a soldier, rescuing one of his comrades under enemy fire, for which he was awarded a crown of oak leaves.

Nevertheless, this corner of the Aegean is the home of many of history's greatest fiascos, which stretch from Troy to the Dardanelles campaign. One of the more dramatic disasters occurred during the Peloponnesian War and was caused by Lesbian arrogance. The ruling oligarchy forced a revolt against Athens, which cost the island dear – a two-year siege, followed by a savage sentence upon the islanders which was only avoided because of a gorgeous bit of rhetoric by a certain Demodotus. Cleon had already whipped up the feelings of the Athenian Assembly with his demand for condign punishment – every man in Lesbos to be put to death, every woman and child to be sold into slavery; indeed, the ship bearing these instructions had already left. Then Demodotus took the floor and urged cooler reflection on this quite preposterous judgment. Now, anyone who can persuade a Greek politician to cool his temper and moderate his judgment is a remarkable person, and Demodotus well deserves the generous space which Thucydides accords the text of the speech in his account of what happened. So marked was its effect that the Athenians at once sent off a
second ship to countermand the original orders, limiting judgment to the ringleaders of the plot. With every rower's muscle straining, the relief ship arrived just in time to avoid the unnecessary slaughter, which was just as well; the decision was far-sighted as well as generous, for at the time it was taken Athens was locked in a death-grip with the Spartans.

To realize the contrast between Lesbos and the rest of the group, you have only to cross the water to Lemnos, a damnably dull island, although there are one or two little items of its classical history worth recording. Here, for example, the brutish Hephaestus set up his forge and bellows. Here he consummated that disastrous marriage with Aphrodite – how did they do it? He was horned like a Medusa in less than no time – and rather surprisingly the women of Lemnos took issue with Aphrodite on his behalf. Of course, it was fatal to incur the wrath of the love-goddess; Aphrodite punished them with a spell which made them repugnant to their husbands, and finally, in despair, the sex-starved women set upon their menfolk and murdered them. There must be a moral in all this, but I confess it escapes me. Happily for the widows, the Argonauts were just passing, so the question of finding newer and abler men was solved and the island instantly re-populated. Another odd visitor was Philoctetes, he of the gangrened leg. Ernle Bradford has
suggested
that his legend may have got itself mixed up with that of the famous healing earth of Lemnos, which was considered so valuable that only a small portion of it, dug up by a priestess on one certain day of the year, was permitted to leave the island; Galen came to watch it being dug and states that only one cartload was allowed out. Actually this earth has had a wide sale all over Europe and you can still apparently buy portions of it; whether it has ever been analysed or not, I do not know. In classical times the earth ‘cake' was impressed with the head of Aphrodite. Nowadays the sacred digging takes place under the
eye of an Orthodox priest, on the feast of the Saviour, 6 August.

I do not think it is wrong to take Lesbos as an axis and consider Lemnos, Thasos and Samothrace as forming a small complex of islands, the most northerly group in Greece. Up in this corner of the map the tonality of things changes slightly, especially for the tourist; these islands are the summer
playgrounds
of Salonika and Kavalla, and communications with them are somewhat awkward and haphazard, involving the use of places like Volos and Alexandroupolis as springboards. The main cruises would certainly visit Lesbos, and perhaps at a pinch Thasos, but probably not Samothrace and Lemnos. What also changes is the prehistory, which here concerns remote and poorly known places like Phrygia and Persia. Before the Greek Olympians came along and orientated religion, quite rightly, towards the
Folies Bergères
, the dark hinterland of what we now know as Turkey set up puissant secret cults, dominated by gods and goddesses whom the Greeks adopted and humanized – I see it like that. A very powerful and complicated set of
superstitions
and beliefs about which we know very little today was responsible for temples and altars which stretched from here right the way across to Sicily, to Mount Erix with its strange multi-faceted Aphrodite. The Greek stamp is so firmly upon all this that we tend to forget that some of it existed before the Greeks – and that even their delicious alphabet was borrowed.