Queering Mythology II: Ancient Greek Society

Now that my month of conferences is over, I am back to writing. Since you lovely readers have followed my progress with my previous chapters, 'Women in the Texts', 'Men in the Texts', and 'Antigone's Afterlives', I'm now going to tell you about my current CIP (Chapter in Progress): 'Queering Myth'. If that sounds familiar to you, it may be because you remember my blog post 'Queering Myth: Iphis and Ianthe' or even my journal article on the same topic. Now, over a year later, I am finally getting around to writing the chapter that this research is going into. 

Since my love of aesthetic notes and mindmaps seems to have bled into this blog, check out this one I've made of the basic outline of my 'Queering Myth' chapter: 

My chapter opens with the sentence 'There has been a long and complex relationship between queer sexualities and Classics' and then I just sort of wade into that history, attempting to give an overview of attitudes to same-sex relationships in antiquity and then in more recent history. After that, I analyse modern translations of Sappho, Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy, and Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles as some of the most contemporary examples of Greek myth and literature being used to voice modern-day queer narratives. 

This blog post, then, will take you through the first of these sections, same-sex relationships in Ancient Greek society & a snapshot of a few myths that these attitudes were reflected in.  

Institutional Pederasty & Intercrural Intercourse

Pederasty was a key aspect of society in Ancient Greek culture, in which an older male citizen of the polis (the city state) would form a relationship with a younger man of the same class. The relationship was overtly sexual, but was broadly considered to be educational too, as the older man would teach the younger all about war and citizenship and so on. The older aristocrat had to provide the younger with gifts and poetry, as well as cultural education. The older man was called the lover, erestes, and the younger was called eromenos, the loved - and, yes, there are top/bottom implications there, if you wish to make them.

The sexual aspect of their relationship would likely have been intercrural. Intercrural intercourse involved placing the erestes' penis between the younger man's thighs and, indeed, there are many accounts of men's thighs inciting lust in Classical literature. For instance, in Aeschylus' Myrmidons, Achilles says of Patroclus 'I did respect the intimacy of your thighs / by lamenting you' (fr. 136); Diogenes of Sinope said that Alexander the Great was 'ruled by Hephaestion's thighs'. Conversely, other evidence suggests that pederastic intercourse was typically anal, for instance Aristophanes' ridicule of the receptive party in the relationship as lakataproktoi, cistern-assed (Aristophanes, in Lear & Cantarella 2008: 20). And, yes, I did include "cistern-assed" in my thesis. This was a source of shame because the recipient was considered to be taking on a submissive, feminine sexual role, and they were called malakos (soft, effeminate) in mockery; since women were broadly considered to be inferior to men in Ancient Greece, for men to be compared to women was insulting. 

I am SO GLAD we have progressed past this... 

The glorification of pederastic same-sex relationships were represented in Classical art and myth. As Kampen asserts, 'images of same-sex courtship, pursuit, and sexual intercourse survive, especially on Greek vases'; because Roman culture did not include institutionalised pederasty and sex between men and boys was penalised, there is no evidence in Roman art of same-sex relationships; while there is no evidence on the Etruscan stance on homosexuality, there survives art that depicts anal sex between men (2002; 2015: 1-3). The Greek vases often depicted homoerotic scenes between the gods and their male lovers, which is seemingly ubiquitous in Greek myth.

Intercrural sex on a Greek vase
Most likely Eros or Zephyrus, with Hyacinthus 

Queer Myths: A Random Selection 

Let me tell you about Zeus & Ganymede. Zeus, in the form of an eagle, swooped down on young Ganymede while he was tending cattle and carried him off to Olympus. There, he made Ganymede eternally young and employed him as the cupbearer to the gods. Ganymede's father was, in some accounts, Tros, who they supposedly named Troy after; or his father is called Ilus - another name for Troy was Ilium, from which the Iliad gets its name. Ganymede's name, meanwhile, is derived from the Greek ganumai (gladdening) and medeôn (genitals). Interestingly, Zeus gives Ganymede's father two godly horses as a sort of "I've stolen your son, my bad" gift, and the descendants of these horses become a really important asset in the Trojan War. Hector, crown prince of Troy, is often described in relation to his skill with horses, and his cousin Aeneas has the descendants of Zeus' horses (until Diomedes steals them).

Or I could tell you about Pelops. Pelops was the son of Tantalus, who was a son of Zeus. Tantalus wanted to prove that the gods weren't omniscient, so he did the most reasonable thing: killed his son, chopped him up, cooked him, and invited all the Olympians over for dinner. His (frankly, flawless) logic was that the greedy gods would eat the food, thus proving that they didn't know everything. All of them could tell something was wrong, however, except Demeter, who was depressed because she couldn't find her daughter. The gods put Pelops back together except for his shoulder, which Demeter ate, so fashion him a new one from marble; they put his father Tantalus in hell, tormented by constant thirst and hunger, with food and drink just out of reach. It is from Tantalus that we get the word & concept 'tantalising'. It is from his son, Pelops, that we get the Peloponnese. 

Pelops was most beloved of Poseidon, who took him up to Olympus to be his lover. In fact, the poet Pindar said that the gruesome feast was simply a cover story to account for Pelops' absence. Pindar did our work for us, in describing Pelops as 'mounted in [Poseidon's] glorious chariot to the high hall of Zeus whom all men honour, where later came Ganymede, too, for a like love, to Zeus' (trans. Conway: Olympian Ode 1.40 ff). 

'The Death of Hyacinthus' 
Italian school, c17th

I'll probably end by telling you about Apollo and Hyacinthus, who was a beautiful boy that attracted the love of Apollo. Unfortunately, his beauty also attracted the attention of the wind-god Zephyrus (or Boreas). One day, Apollo and his eromenos were throwing a discus; the jealous wind blew the discus off-course, so that it struck Hyacinthus in the head, killing him. Out of his blood grew a flower, that was named in his honour. 

You may be thinking that it seems unlike me to miss an opportunity to talk about Achilles and Patroclus, or even Alexander the Great and Hephaestion. To that let me say: great things come to those who wait.  

Header image source: NASA 

(top points to anyone who can tell me the relevance of that moon to this blog post)