Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World

By Froma I. Zeitlin, John J. Winkler and David M. Halperin

A dream in which a man has sex with his mother may promise him political or commercial success--according to dream interpreters of late antiquity, who, unlike modern Western analysts, would not necessarily have drawn conclusions from the dream about the dreamer's sexual psychology. Evidence of such shifts in perspective is leading scholars to reconsider in a variety of creative ways the history of sexuality. In these fifteen original essays, eminent cultural historians and classicists not only discuss sex, but demonstrate how norms, practices, and even the very definitions of what counts as sexual activity have varied significantly over time. Ancient Greece offers abundant evidence for a radically different set of sexual standards and behaviors from ours. Sex in ancient Hellenic culture assumed a variety of social and political meanings, whereas the modern development of a sex-centered model of personality now leads us to view sex as the key to understanding the individual. Drawing on both the Anglo-American tradition of cultural anthropology and the French tradition of les sciences humaines, these essays explore the iconography, politics, ethics, poetry, and medical practices that made sex in ancient Greece not a paradise of liberation but an exotic locale hardly recognizable to visitors from the modern world. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Peter Brown, Anne Carson, Franoise Frontisi-Ducroux, Maud W. Gleason, Ann Ellis Hanson, Franois Lissarrague, Nicole Loraux, Maurice Olender, S.R.F. Price, James Redfield, Giulia Sissa, and Jean-Pierre Vernant.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691221335

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

THE ESSAYS collected in this volume are about sex, but they are not only about sex. Sex (as we understand the term) refers to the erogenous capacities and genital functions of the human body. Sex, so defined, is a natural fact; it is subject to study by the methods of natural, not social, science. As such, sex lies outside history and culture, and it also lies beyond the range of the various disciplines of cultural study—disciplines that deal with sex only insofar as bodily arousal becomes the focus of shifting human meanings in different times, places, and societies.

But if there can be no history of sex, there can certainly be histories of sexuality. For sexuality (as we use the term here) refers to the cultural interpretation of the human body’s erogenous zones and sexual capacities. As Jeffrey Henderson puts it, That the same two sexes occur in every society is a matter of biology. . . . That there is always sexuality is, however, a cultural matter. . . . Sexuality is that complex of reactions, interpretations, definitions, prohibitions, and norms that is created and maintained by a given culture in response to the fact of the two biological sexes.¹ The norms, the practices, even the very definitions of what counts as sexual activity have varied significantly from culture to culture.² It is this variety in the social meanings of sex that is studied by cultural historians, who look not at the unchanging (natural) functioning of the body but at its culturally shifting meanings.

Moreover, the contributors to this volume are not studying aspects of sex in Greek antiquity as if those aspects formed a subject apart, as if sex were an independent variable whose tremors and vicissitudes, ups and downs, ins and outs, could be described in a coherent, linear narrative with minimal reference to other areas of human interest. Rather, we take the multiple and competing significances of sex at any one time to be intelligible only in relation to the warp and woof of the whole social fabric. The designing interests, the competing perspectives of men and women of various ages, classes, and ways of life form an irregular web in which all parts are subject to the tension, loose or taut, of the whole. To recapture the significances of sex in Greek antiquity, then, we must explore many cultural areas in which sex is not predominantly featured, and we must discern extensions, analogies, and mirrorings of sexual experience that give point to the sexual meanings constituted within these other cultural configurations. Sexuality does not just happen to undergo change; it is an area of discussion in which many different social projects (marriage, luxury, politics, housework, inheritance, to name but a few) are contested. Sexuality, as cultural historians view it, is not so much a subject in and of itself—a unitary category of analysis—as it is one of the languages for defining, describing, interpreting, and (hence) transacting all manner of other business.

This broader understanding of what is happening in the construction of sexual meanings might be captured by the notion of a cultural poetics of desire. Cultural poetics refers to the process whereby a society and its subgroups construct widely shared meanings—behavioral conventions, social distinctions, conceptual schemes, aesthetic values, religious attitudes, moral codes, gender roles, and paradigms of sexual excitement. These meanings are jointly produced, distributed, enforced, and subverted by human communities. Literary critics, surveying the field of literary production, describe the prevailing (and the countervailing) artistic strategies for combining and ordering literary elements to construct various kinds, or genres, of literary artworks. Some cultural critics are now using analogous techniques to describe the procedures whereby meaningful forms of collective experience are socially constructed, often by a reconstitution of inherited components.

Cultural poetics is a process which includes the formation of sexual identities. We assume the interdependence in culture of social practices and subjective experiences. The erotic experiences of individual human beings are thus, in our view, artifacts that reflect, in part, the larger cultural poetics of the societies in which those individuals live. Feminist scholarship has taught us much about the cultural poetics of gender; the essays in this volume continue that analysis with respect to sex, looking at the bustling throng of (sometimes incompatible) conceptions which shaped the fundamental practices and experiences of erotic life in Greek antiquity.

So described, the project may sound very ambitious, perhaps even presumptuous, and so we hasten to disclaim any pretense of practicing some universal science of humanity. Indeed, we tend to be suspicious of claims to see and comprehend the whole, any whole; it will be quite enough if we are able to illuminate parts or aspects of our subject. This volume, then, does not aspire to provide a comprehensive survey of ancient Greek sex, much less sexuality. The sketches it contains are avowedly pluralistic, partial, and discontinuous—a series of glimpses, as it were, through different peepholes placed in the walls around a large construction site. Coming from different directions but working together, we hope to provide a series of progress reports on some of the major modes—religious, social, political, philosophical, medical, literary, and artistic—in which sexual experience was constructed and reflected by Greek-speaking peoples living in and around the Mediterranean basin from archaic times through the Roman Empire.

BEFORE WHAT SEXUALITY?

The title of our volume can be understood in two ways, and we leave it for each reader to choose which sense he or she prefers. Before Sexuality might be understood to mean "before our sexuality—that is, before sexuality as we understand it, suggesting simply that sexual meanings and practices in the ancient Greek world were constituted differently from our own, that Greek sexualities were unlike our current Western, predominantly middle-class sexualities. Or it might be taken to suggest that the very category sexuality" is a specifically modern construction, carrying with it implications that, when imported unwittingly into the ancient world by modern interpreters, seriously distort the meanings of sexual experience indigenous to that world. The latter view is now associated in particular with the work of the late Michel Foucault, whom most of the contributors to this volume would acknowledge as one of the most brilliant recent investigators of our subject, even when we have differing assessments of his views. (We believe that classicists should consider themselves lucky to have had as their collaborators such talented nonspecialists as Alvin Gouldner, Philip Slater, Martin Bernal, and Michel Foucault, intellectuals whose primary training has largely been in fields other than Greek philology, but whose insights into ancient cultures have proven to be immensely stimulating.)

Sexuality, according to the stronger argument, is a specifically modern production, a way of understanding experience (and therefore a way of experiencing) that is appropriate to a highly differentiated, industrialized, and modernized society. We now live, so the argument goes, with a model of personality centered on sex. Sexuality represents the most intimate feature of an individual, that dimension of the personality which it takes longest to fathom and which, when finally known, reveals the truth about much of the rest. A sexuality is a thing and I can have one. Indeed, each of us has his or her own sexuality, and we differ from one another partly because sexualities differ. Sexuality is a field with many compartments and subdivisions. Finally, sexuality is thought to provide a key to unlocking the mysteries of the self, even for my self: that is, I can explore and discover what my sexuality is.

Sexuality in this sense is not just the modern interpretation of sex, on a par with the (different) ancient interpretations of sex. It has become a new category—central and centralized; universally organized as a tool for understanding, placing, and controlling individuals; ramified into many branches so that everyone sits somewhere on the schematic tree. Sexuality is one of the strategies by which modern middle-class Europeans and Americans have learned to construct their experience, and it belongs specifically to what since the Enlightenment has been defined, with increasing sharpness, as the sphere of private life, and to the various sorts of subjectivity—moral, psychological, intellectual, erotic, emotional, and aesthetic—associated with it. To be sure, a certain degree of identification of the self with the sexual self can be noticed in late antiquity and was strengthened by the Christian confessional; however, it did not become complete, explicit, and authoritative until the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific construction of sexuality as a separate field of positivistic study.

As such, sexuality is intrinsic to the concept and set of practices focused on the self, the blank individual who is the subject of the modern social sciences. Those disciplines are themselves recent inventions, and they are increasingly seen by historians of culture to betray the urban, capitalist, and bureaucratic conditions that accompanied their rise. According to this analysis, we should not even try to study ancient sexuality given the multiplicity of ancient practices and notions concerning love, desire, intercourse, marriage, seduction, adultery, rape, reproduction, autochthony, inheritance, incest, ethical integrity, pedagogy, medical therapy, divine myths, human dreams, beast fantasies, religious cults, secular assemblies, trial speeches, serious drama, jokes and other playful sportings, lyric poetry, and erotic narrative. All these were relatively independent spheres of thought and behavior which variously employed sex and sexual meanings. They were not organized as sectors within a single field labelled sexuality and were not enacted by human beings whose individuality was crucially determined by their sexuality.³

In both of these senses of before sexuality, the study of classical antiquity offers us a special opportunity to test our assumptions about what aspects of our lives might truly be common to all human beings and what aspects are distinctive to the modern world. The interval of time separating the ancient from the modern world spans cultural changes of such magnitude that the contrasts to which they give rise cannot fail to strike anyone who is on the lookout for them. The cultural critic of classical antiquity, who does not begin with an all-too-reverent notion of Great Books and does not imagine that the Greeks, like white marble statues, had no body hair, no odor, no dirt under their fingernails, will find herself confronted in the ancient record by radically unfamiliar values, forms of behavior, and social practices, by ways of organizing and articulating experience that challenge modern notions about what life is like and that call into question the supposed universality of human nature as we currently understand it. Not only does this historical distance permit us to view ancient social and sexual conventions with particular sharpness; it also enables us to bring more clearly into focus the purely conventional character of our own social and sexual experiences. Furthermore, the extraordinarily articulate and voluble cultures of the ancient Greek-speaking world have left behind them a great quantity and variety of pertinent material, much of it (in the classical period, particularly) significant precisely because it is uncensored by the self-conscious or prudish instincts that compelled the reticence of later cultures. Or rather, it is differently censored, and the recovery of that difference can be profoundly enlightening about ourselves and about configurations of desire different from those we might have thought possible.

METHODS OF STUDY: HISTORY OF THE FIELD

The essays collected in this volume represent an attempt to combine two intellectual traditions. They bring together some of the theoretical and methodological concerns distinctive to the French practice of les sciences humaines and the descriptive and interpretative procedures developed in the Anglo-American tradition of cultural anthropology.

We may highlight the character of the various methods employed here by first contrasting them with some significant works of earlier classical scholarship. Many of the issues concerning organization, evidence, and objectivity with which we are still grappling are raised by these earlier studies in ways that are distant enough from us to be amusing, yet close enough to be revealing. Further, it can be salutary to be reminded of the all-too-human motivations that led our predecessors to the study of sex. What we are about to recount is a curious, little known, and sometimes disreputable history, whose high points we here single out without attempting to explore them in any real detail.

These works, beginning with those of Fredrich-Karl Forberg in 1824, illustrate the growing nineteenth-century sense that sexuality can be organized as a field of study. They also show a peculiar embarrassment at the fact that a fair proportion of Greek (and Latin) texts had been either expurgated or tacitly left in obscurity, undoubtedly because those texts played such an important role in the nineteenth century’s myths of origin about itself and also because they were so widely used in the education of upper-class boys.⁴ As the nineteenth century’s academic study of ancient culture became ever more detailed, the gap between other areas so extensively documented and that of sex (where even advanced scholars were sometimes ignorant of the meanings of basic terms) became ever more glaring.

Friedrich-Karl Forberg (1770–1848), after a short career as a philosopher at Jena and Saalfeld, took up a library post in Koburg. Following his interest in the Latin erotic poets, he decided to publish a proper edition, with commentary, of the Hermaphroditus, an infamous collection of obscene epigrams in the style of Martial and the Priapea, written by Antonio Beccadelli (Il Panormita) in the 1420s. The material he collected to illustrate Greek and Latin sexual practices proved to be too abundant for a commentary, so he gathered it into a separate Latin treatise entitled Apophoreta (Party Favors, after Martial’s Book 14), published as an appendix to his edition of Hermaphroditus in 1824.⁵

Apophoreta consists largely of quotations, with minimal commentary, from all the ancient authors who had anything to say about sexual intercourse, with special attention paid to the erotic poets and Suetonius. This anthology is arranged in eight chapters according to the body parts involved⁶ and their conjunctions.⁷ The ultimate goal was to compile an exhaustive catalogue of sexual positions, which Forberg lists at the end.⁸ As the English translator notes, the contrast between this scientific apparatus, and the facetious matters subjected to the rigorous laws of deduction and demonstration, is not the least amusing feature of the book. Probably no one but a German savant could have conceived the idea of thus classifying by categories, groups, genera, variations, species and subspecies all known forms of natural and unnatural lust, according to the most trustworthy authors.⁹ Indeed, by the later standards of Theodor Hopfner (1938; see below), Forberg’s scientific categorizing is rudimentary, and serves more as a polite mask to disguise his delectable survey of how to enhance lasciviousness.¹⁰

Forberg’s organization of sexual positions may in some sense adumbrate the later development of the scientific study of sex, but the issue dominant in his survey is not the discrimination of persons, or even types of activity, but rather the pursuit of libidinous luxury. In the professional identity of a scholarly librarian, of course, he distances himself from all personal involvement in the subject, attributing any mistakes he may make to his own ignorance of the less common formats of lust (insolentiorum libidinum imperitia) and to the bourgeois mores of small-town life, amusingly called mentularum Melocabensium, si placet, probitati (the uprightness, if I may so put it, of the cocks in Koburg). While professing, in the name of simple humanity, to avoid both false prudishness and exhibitionism, Forberg’s work actually occupies a more specific zone of tension between images of upper-class luxury and middle-class modesty. The cultivation of variety and intensity in sexual pleasure is seen as characteristic of ancient elites, and it is implicitly defended against the strictures and sheer ignorance of the new bourgeois regime. The French and English translations were themselves luxury products, each limited to one hundred copies for a small circle of acquaintances.¹¹

Two further revealing aspects of Forberg’s work are his mingling of Greek and Latin sources and his omission of paederasty. Most of his citations are Latin, though Greek authors, mainly poets, are also quoted at some length. Yet there is little sense in Forberg that he is dealing with two cultures that might be quite different from each other, much less that he is hopping from one period of time and from one genre of writing to another. The dominant axis of contrast is simply the ancients, understood as a relatively free and pleasure-loving community, versus the crabbed present. Given the relative prominence of paederasty in both the Greek and Roman literatures of luxury, Forberg’s neglect of it might seem surprising, perhaps even indicative of his personal tastes. Actually, it is another consequence of his focus on the mechanics of pleasure. His second chapter deals not with the social institution of paederasty, the courting of young men by slightly older men, but rather with pedication, the insertion of the penis into any anus, male or female. In the same chapter he discusses depilation, beating (with quotations from Rousseau), cosmetics, and contemporary national characters.¹²

Both these measures of Forberg’s distance from ourselves had changed by the time of Paul Brandt (1875–1929), whose Sittengeschichte Griechenlands (1928), translated into English as Sexual Life in Ancient Greece by J. H. Freese (1932) and frequently reprinted, has been the standard introduction to the subject for most readers in the twentieth century. Brandt, who began his career with commentaries on Ovid’s Ars amatoria (1902) and Amores (1911), is not above citing Martial and Catullus to illustrate some aspects of his Greek material, but he operates within a clear framework of Greek history, social institutions, and literary genres. This framework is set out in great detail in Part

I

before he deals with sexual acts in the slightly shorter Part

II

.¹³ The proportions and categories of his Part

II

are notably different from Forberg’s. The Love of the Man for the Woman comes first in the order of topics but receives (in English translation) only six pages. Prostitution, by contrast, takes up eighty-three pages, and paederasty (Knabenliebe) eighty-eight pages. Sexual topics are conceived socially, in terms of gender and status, rather than as conjunctions of body parts.

Though Brandt’s major work is well known, the really interesting story of its development is buried in the pages of now obscure journals that composed the academic wing of the movement for sexual liberation in Germany. Beginning in 1906, Brandt published a series of studies of paederasty in the various genres of Greek literature.¹⁴ In this intellectual movement, a prominent place was held by Magnus Hirschfeld, the founder and editor of the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Annual for Sexual Intermediates, intermediates being Hirschfeld’s competing conception for what others termed homosexuals or inverts). Hirschfeld was a well-known physician, sex researcher and activist in the cause of homosexual liberation (Wolff [1986]). Brandt’s labors for more than two decades, during which he read extensively in the byways of Greek literature, were supported by a growing social movement for the reform of sexual laws, directed particularly at the infamous paragraph 175 of the German penal code, which outlawed sexual acts between males.

Brandt’s own inclinations are fairly clearly revealed in the introduction to his Beiträge zur Antiken Erotik (1924), a work of intentionally limited circulation.¹⁵ In it he develops his view of sex as nature’s joke on our species, an intrinsically grotesque and ridiculous affair. Beneath the female pubic hair, impresario Nature has placed nothing but a pair of curtains (the labia majora), behind which (on the stage, as it were) one finds only—another pair of curtains (the labia minora) (25–30)! However, when one goes around backstage, one finds Nature’s objective masterpiece, the field of Glutäenerotik (buttocks-erotics), celebrated in the famous statues of sleeping Hermaphroditos and Aphrodite Kallipygos (31–34). For in actual fact, viewed from an aesthetic standpoint, nothing more beautiful or more perfect can be imagined than the form of the human buttocks (34). However, the defecatory function of this body part subsumes it too under the general theory that sex is grotesque and laughable (35). One is left with private fantasy and masturbation, the most perfect form of all eroticism (36). Brandt concludes with an extended plea for the tolerance of homosexual men, who have filled the ranks of genius since ancient Greece, who were valiant officers and soldiers in the Great War, and whose only fault is that they do not as a rule marry and produce little consumers for the state and cannon-fodder for the Kaiser (39–40).

In this private work, the personal is decidedly political. In Brandt’s summa, however, published under his usual pseudonym Hans Licht, both the political and the personal are muted.¹⁶ It was not easy or safe for Brandt to speak frankly, even under a pseudonym. Ferocious opposition to the German movement for sexual liberation came from the growing right wing of national politics, culminating in the Gestapo’s invasion of Hirschfeld’s Institute and the burning of its library in May 1933.

The decade before the outbreak of the Second World War saw two other important scholarly works devoted to ancient sex, Theodor Hopfner’s Das Sexualleben der Griechen und Römer (Prague, 1938) and Euios Lēnaios’ Aporrhēta (Thessaloniki, 1935). Both are clearly products of many years of research, and both were originally conceived as extensive projects but were aborted after a single volume. Hopfner, best known for his work on the Greek magical papyri, organized his Sexualleben as a scientific handbook, emphasizing the physiology, biology, and pathology of the human genitals. Critical of Brandt’s exclusive reliance on literary texts representing high culture, Hopfner read widely in the ancient medical writings, which he used as a framework of knowledge into which tidbits of information from literary writers were inserted. Volume 1, part 1, which was the only one published, reviews everything that any Greek or Roman, from the earliest times until the very late Empire, said about the form, function, or vicissitudes of the penis and the vagina. Whereas Brandt presented literary material in social terms, Hopfner subordinated both literary and social structures to the impersonal sciences, reducing culturally relative notions of gender to the absolute terms of secondary sexual characteristics. The prospectus for volume 1, part 2 (xxi-xxii), indicates that sexual desire and courtship were to be treated in similarly physiological terms, with careful assessments of the contribution of each of the five senses to sexual arousal. Hopfner’s preference for scientific rather than social (or natural rather than cultural) presentation leads him to criticize Brandt for dealing only with Greek sources. Since he takes physiology to be a universally valid set of truths, Hopfner’s task is to measure how much the ancients, Greek or Roman, knew of the total picture. It is significant that Hopfner did not use a pseudonym: the carapace of a supposedly universal framework of physiological knowledge evidently had the effect of protecting him when dealing with controversial material.

Euios Lēnaios, which means Bacchus Winepress, was the pseudonym of K. Kharitonides, a professor at the University of Thessaloníki. His study of Greek erotic vocabulary, Aporrhēta (Unspeakable Words), is not widely known or used in western Europe and America, probably more because of the chauvinism that discounts works in modern Greek than because of its subject matter. Aporrhēta is a careful, scholarly, and witty survey of sexual vocabulary, organized according to body parts, sexual acts, foreplay, and defecation, with careful attention to social level (euphemism, vulgarism), historical development, and textual criticism. Because Lēnaios is interested in the history of the Greek language, he extends his net much further forward in time than does Hopfner, and pays correspondingly less attention than does Brandt to social institutions. A second volume, promised on page 229, was to have concerned itself with kinaidoi (on which term see the essays by Winkler and Gleason in this volume), prostitutes, and erotic writers, but it was never published.¹⁷

We have set out these earlier intellectual projects concerning ancient sex to help the reader (and ourselves) see some of the implications of choosing one or another method of study or principle of organization. There is something to praise and something to criticize in each of them. Most of the authors in this collection would probably agree with Forberg and Brandt, against Hopfner, that scholars are not impersonal assemblers of information but are interested in their subject. Those interests are both lascivious (or personal) and political, we now recognize; in this regard, as in many others, our thinking has been decisively shaped by the evolving insights of feminist and gay scholarship.

Our thinking has also been informed by the more recent and more sophisticated scholarly studies of sexual matters which have begun to flourish under the more permissive, less censorious, climate of the last twenty years. Some of these studies have been undertaken by our contributors; in what follows, we propose to survey the work of others to whom we are indebted.

Jeffrey Henderson’s study, for example, of obscene language in Attic comedy, The Maculate Muse, made available a taxonomic lexicon that demonstrated the extent of Athenian humor and inventiveness with regard to the sexual body and its libidinal activities.¹⁸

Sir Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality, to take another example, was a pioneering study of the varying aspects of homoerotic behavior and attitudes in ancient Greece; it also provided an invaluable analysis of the iconographical representations of such activities, representations culled from the extensive repertory of Attic vase painting.

Otto Brendel’s long article, The Scope and Temperament of Erotic Art in the Greco-Roman World, was perhaps the first effort to take seriously the notion of an overtly erotic (and nonritualized) art and to instruct us that such artistic production is a very circumscribed historical phenomenon. If we search in the known history of art for the places and periods in which, for a time at least, erotic situations were depicted directly and factually as well as with a degree of frequency, originality of variation, and on a level of quality sufficient to command attention . . . erotic art . . . would appear to be the exception. Its examples are concentrated in a relatively small group of locally limited aggregations, widely separated from one another in geography and time. Brendel points to four specific areas: the classical world, pre-Columbian Peru, medieval India, and Japan during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Of these, as he remarks, the classical instance . . . appears to be the earliest (6).

There are many other works which might be singled out, especially those pertaining to the literary genres of lyric, tragedy, and comedy, and to the wider imaginative and practical fields of mythic and ritual formations. We shall concentrate here, however, on the particular achievements of the French-speaking scholars to whose practice of les sciences humaines we alluded earlier. Attentive to the importance of sex and gender as significant structuring principles of social systems, these scholars have focused on the deep connections between the institution of marriage and the two other ideological bases of ancient Greek culture: sacrifice and agriculture. In particular, Marcel Detienne’s study, Les jardins d’Adonis (The Gardens of Adonis), with its long introduction by Jean-Pierre Vernant, began with a study of the uses of aromatic spices in Greek mythology and went on to explore, through the myth and festival of Adonis, the central position of legitimate marriage and regulated feminine sexual behavior, which Detienne saw as an opposition in myth and cult between the two goddesses, Aphrodite and Demeter.¹⁹ In La panthère parfumée (The Perfumed Panther), which is included in his Dionysos mis à mort (Dionysos Slain), Detienne continued his investigations of the boundaries of licit sexual activity by charting its transgressions in the space of the wild, in the haunts of hunters and the goddess Artemis.

Forests and mountains compose a masculine landscape from which the woman/wife is radically absent; so too, are excluded the socio-political values that define the proper use of the female body. In the space where social rules are silent, deviance is articulate, and transgressions come to pass. . . . As a result of its position between war and marriage, the hunter’s terrain gains its capacity for becoming the privileged place in myth for marginal sexual behavior, whether it be masculine or feminine denial of marriage or, inversely, experimentation with censured sexual behavior. As a liminal place where socially dominant sexual relations are as if suspended, the land of the hunt is open to the subversion of amorous pursuits, whatever their process or modality. (25–26)

Alain Schnapp has pursued the erotic ideology of the hunt in its icon-ographical manifestations, this time from the point of view of paederastic gifts of game animals and birds presented by lovers to their younger male beloveds. A sample of his work on the developmental changes in representation and what these might signify is Eros en chasse in La cité des images (A City of Images).

Two Swiss scholars also deserve mention. Claude Calame’s Les choeurs de jeunes filles en Grèce archaïque took as its starting point the partheneia (maiden songs) of the seventh-century Spartan poet Alkman (fragments 1 and 3), in order to investigate the social and ritual institution of choruses composed of adolescent girls on the verge of marriage. Extensively documented and informed by sophisticated methodologies, Calame’s study is an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the socialization of these girls into their future roles as wives and mothers through ritual, poetry, and myth. In particular, Calame emphasized the significance of the specter of sexual violence and aggression that continually menaces the virginal feminine body in Greek poetry and myth; he also discussed the pedagogical functions of female homoeroticism in the relationship between the choral group and its leader.

Finally, Philippe Borgeaud’s Recherches sur le dieu Pan (The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece) traces the ambiguities and historical development of the mythic figure who is perhaps best known to the later Western world as the embodiment of pagan libidinal freedom. First introduced from Arkadia into Athens as late as the fifth century

B.C.E.

(to be precise, after the god was said to have made a mysterious epiphanic appearance to the Athenians at the battle of Marathon, in 490, to command their worship of him), the goatish god enjoyed an increasing popularity in the following centuries, even after the famous anecdote recounted by Plutarch of another mysterious voice heard at sea during the reign of Tiberius (14–37

C.E.

), bidding the pilot of a ship to announce that the Great God Pan was dead (Moralia 419d). Borgeaud follows the paradoxical paths of this errant god of primitivism especially as he inhabits a strange world at the spatial (and psychological) frontiers of civilization, where familiar signs are obliterated or made illusory (as in the inexplicable onset of panic among armies, or in the phenomenon of individual possession). Pan figures at the intersection of terror and desire. As an erotic ithyphallic god, he promotes fertility among the flocks in the fields and mountains; in his stimulation of dangerous and unregulated desire in others (and himself), he functions as a figure of the repressed who incarnates the idea of a hallucinatory and undirected sexuality. Borgeaud’s portrait of this sinister side of Pan offers an important corrective to the popular image (even among classicists) of the happy and free pagan libido of a homo naturalis; it maps out a physio-psychological territory of eroticism which is of central importance for reconstructing the nature and history of Greek sex and sexuality. This Pan is situated at the furthest extreme from the Greek prescriptive texts which Foucault studied—or perhaps he embodies the anxiety that underlies and fuels the masculine determination in these texts to master the self through a corresponding mastery of free-ranging erotic impulses.

We have limited our collection to Greek material, but the exclusion of both Near Eastern and Latin subjects does not provide us with a cultural unity. Greek speakers lived and thought in quite different times and places; they belonged to quite different statuses and classes. Some of the essays here are wide-ranging studies of topics that cross over local boundaries, such as Nicole Loraux’s essay on Herakles, which examines the femininity of that very masculine cultural hero, and Maurice Olender’s study of the odd assortment of items, archaeological and literary, in the dossier of Baubo, the old woman who made Demeter laugh. François Lissarrague looks at satyrs as staged and painted, asking what these images of male sexual aggression represented to their audiences. Both Olender and Lissarrague study representations of sexual organs, and both assume that the verbal and iconographic languages of sex are forms of cultural representation whose codes are culture-specific and cannot be deciphered by means of the cultural lexicon furnished by more recent societies. Instead, those languages must be carefully reconstructed, with proper respect for what may be untranslatable differences.

Most of Lissarrague’s material happens to come from Athens, but the significance of satyrs could be explored with reference to many other Greek communities. Similarly, James Redfield’s study of a myth and rite at Patras examines a local cultural configuration with unique features and at the same time inquires into the fundamental social patterns informing rites of passage preparatory to marriage. Anne Carson also considers weddings in a wider, pan-Hellenic context, showing how the suspicion of wives as strangers in a patrivirilocal society is reinforced by scientific, poetic, and mythological conceptions generated by husbands and fathers.

Many works about ancient Greece are in fact almost exclusively about Athens, but in this collection only three essays focus specifically on Attic culture and society. John Winkler studies the sexual norms for proper male citizenship and the procedure, known as dokimasia (scrutiny), whereby those norms were selectively applied to politically active citizens. Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux and François Lissarrague review a series of Attic vases depicting bearded men in apparently feminine apparel at symposia. Where the modern eye sees drag and suspects orgies, the ancient viewer saw luxury and playfulness. David Halperin asks of Plato’s Symposium Why Is Diotima a Woman? and analyzes the various strategies by which Plato and his contemporaries spoke about women by speaking for women.

Where Hopfner could aspire to an impersonal, disinterested view of ancient sex through the use of the categories of physical science, contemporary scholars have become much more alert to the culturally shaped ideologies that underlie supposedly objective inquiries, whether into bodies or into societies. Ann Hanson and Giulia Sissa investigate medical writings about women. Hanson studies the intersection in medical thinking of traditional social assumptions and the requirements of a rational theory for the management of reproduction. Sissa examines more specifically the shifting meanings of virginity, highlighting the marginal and debated role of the hymen in determining a maiden’s status.

Two other forms of ancient science, as reputable in their own day as they are disreputable in ours, are dream analysis and physiognomy. S.R.F. Price compares the systems of Freud and Artemidoros for their different assumptions about sex. Contrary to the Freudian biologically based and sex-centered model of personality, Artemidoros assumes that what is basic is not the dreamer’s sexual formation but his social role; hence, dreamed acts and objects (including sexual ones) signify social events rather than private, sexual vicissitudes. Maud Gleason expounds the subtle art of deciphering a man’s true gender from his appearance; she reconstructs the ways that men practised, faked, and impugned masculinity in late antique town life.

The volume concludes with three essays that take a farsighted perspective on the sweep of Greek antiquity. Froma Zeitlin sees in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe not just a simple pastoral romance but a kind of encyclopedia of the multiple erotic arts, tropes, and conceptions that had informed the various genres of earlier Greek literature. Longus took advantage of his position as heir to an extended tradition of poiēsis (literary production) about passion to compose a text in which the recognition of and admiration for erotic poetry mirrors and structures the lovers’ own learning how to love. Jean-Pierre Vernant looks at the underlying equations that produce Hesiodic, Orphic, Platonic, and Plotinian erōs, setting out a broad map of the intellectual options open to the ancient genealogists and theoreticians of desire. Our closing essay, by Peter Brown, traces some of the deliberately antisocial practices (such as lifelong virginity, seen as an emblem of freedom) that characterized the sexual austerity of certain educated pagans and which were advanced to a radical state by certain Christian groups in the third century

C.E.

Many of the topics treated in earlier essays recur in Brown’s pages—the meaning of weddings, the practical resonances of fiction, the symbolic aspects of medical theory and practice (in this case, the heart and kidneys)—but with new and, from the perspective of earlier Greek times, barely recognizable twists.

If we had aspired to create a comprehensive, multifaceted view—as in a fly’s eye—of ancient Greek sex and sexualities, we would have had to include essays on many topics not treated here. Among them would be the varieties of prostitution and prostitutes, from the cultured and powerful Athenian courtesans of the fourth century, to the professional dancer performing at men’s symposia, to the poor streetwalker;²⁰ marriage, arranged or romantic, between citizens or across city lines, properly formalized with rights or as concubinage;²¹ the stories and images of Aphrodite, Pan, and Priapos; the kalos-inscriptions on Attic vases; and the practical recipes for erotic influence found in the Greek magical papyri.²² We would also have had to pay more discriminating attention to life-stages, there being all the difference in the (ancient) world between boy, man, and old gaffer, between maiden, wife, and widow.

Our study also departs from many of the formulas of traditional handbooks. There is no attempt at a strict periodization (preclassical, archaic, classical, Hellenistic, Roman), no attempt to impose on the material a developmental scheme. Nor do the favorite characters who people the usual accounts of daily life in ancient Greece find much of a place here (the accomplished hetaira or courtesan, the romantic youth, the threatening mother or demanding wife). We have not divided topics between men and women; we avoid the tendency of speaking about marriage or sex as if these were somehow centrally women’s issues. And there is no single study of Greek paederasty—the phenomenon normally understood by the coded phrase Greek love. For we see paederasty not as a problem in need of isolated treatment and special historical explanation but rather as part of the fabric of Greek life, one of the many elements involved in the composition of sexual meanings in the ancient Greek world.

The relative neglect of high literature in this collection is deliberate but also regrettable: nothing on the intriguing public portrayals of erōs in Attic tragedy and comedy, little on lyric and that from an untraditional, but very poetic, perspective (Carson). This is, in short, not a handbook but a collection, one whose contents were partly determined by what was available and known to us. We hope that its gaps and unanswered questions will stimulate further discussion of ancient Greek sex and sexualities and will produce further insights, therefore, into our own.

* BIBLIOGRAPHY *

Adams, J. N. 1982. The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Baltimore).

Borgeaud, P. 1979. Recherches sur le dieu Pan (Geneva). Tr. Kathleen Atlass and James Redfield under the title The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece (Chicago, 1988).

Brandt, P. [Hans Licht, pseud.]. 1924. Beiträge zur Antiken Erotik (Dresden).

——. 1928. Sittengeschichte Griechenlands (Zurich). Tr. J. H. Freese under the

title Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, ed. L. H. Dawson (London, 1932).

——. 1929. Kulturkuriosa aus Altgriechenland (Dresden).

Brendel, O. J. 1977. The Scope and Temperament of Erotic Art in the Greco-Roman World: 3–107 in Studies in Erotic Art, ed. T. Bowie and C. V. Christenson (New York).

Calame, C. 1977. Les choeurs de jeunes filles en Grèce archaïque. 2 vols. (Rome).

Chorier, N. 1910. L’œuvre de Nicolas Chorier: Satyre sotadique de Luisa Sigea sur les arcanes de l’amour et de venus. Introduction and notes by B. de Villeneuve (Paris).

Davidson, A. I. 1987–1988. Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality. Critical Inquiry 14:16–48.

Detienne, M. 1972. Les jardins d’Adonis (Paris). Tr. J. Lloyd under the title The Gardens of Adonis (Sussex, 1977).

——. 1977. Dionysos mis à mort (Paris). Tr. M. and L. Muellner under the title

Dionysos Slain (Baltimore, 1979).

Dover, K. J. 1978. Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge, Mass.)

Forberg, F.-K. 1824. Antonii Panormitae Hermaphorditus, with Apophoreta (Koburg). Apophoreta, tr. J. Smithson, under the title Manual of Classical Erotology. 2 vols. (Manchester, 1884; repr. New York, 1966).

Halperin, D. M. 1989a. The Democratic Body: Prostitution and Citizenship in Classical Athens in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York).

——. 1989b. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York).

Henderson, J. 1975. The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy (New Haven).

——. 1988. Greek Attitudes toward Sex: 1249–63 in Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean: Greece and Rome, ed. Michael Grant and Rachel Kitzinger (New York).

Hopfner, T. 1938. Das Sexualleben der Griechen und Römer. Vol. 1, part 1 [no more published] (Prague).

Lēnaios, E. [Kharitonides, K., pseud.]. 1935. Aporrhēta (Thessaloniki).

Padgug, R. A. 1979. Sexual Matters: On Conceptualizing Sexuality in History. Radical History Review 20:3–23.

Patterson, C. B. (N.d.) Those Athenian Bastards. Classical Antiquity. Forthcoming.

Richlin, A. 1983. The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor (New Haven).

Schnapp, A. 1984. Eros en chasse, 67–83 in La cité des images: Religion et société en Grèce antique (Paris and Lausanne). Tr. D. Lyons, under the title A City of Images (Princeton, 1988).

Slater, P. 1968. The Glory of Hera (Boston).

Winkler, J. J. 1989. Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (New York).

Wolff, C. 1986. Magnus Hirschfeld: Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology (London, Melbourne, and New York).

1 Henderson (1988), 1250. For an even more radical distinction between sex and sexuality, see Davidson (1987–1988), 23–25.

2 See, e.g., Henderson (1988), 1251: A Manchu mother, for instance, would routinely suck her small son’s penis in public but would never kiss his cheek. For, among the Manchus, fellatio is a form of sexual behavior except in the context of mother and small son, whereas kissing of any kind is always sexual. We are perplexed because, in our culture, fellatio is always sexual, whereas cheek-kissing among kin never is.

3 For fuller versions of this argument, see Padgug (1979); Halperin (1989b).

4 "Our second motive was to provide some satisfaction, however little, to the claims of those readers who very often find themselves disconcerted by the unconventional raciness of Ancient authors and their out-spoken witticisms, and justly complain of the prudish brevity or entire silence of the Commentators who leave their difficulties unexplained. Of course these latter wrote for the young; and no one can blame them under the circumstances for not having dwelt carefully and curiously on shameful secrets (obscenis voluptatibus)" (Forberg [1884], 7).

5 Alcide Bonneau translated Forberg’s Apophoreta into French under the title Manuel d’érotologie classique (1882, one hundred copies printed by Isidore Liseux, with accompanying Latin text), and the same was done in English by the Viscount Julian Smithson (Manchester, 1884, 2 vols.).

6 Aut per mentulam aut sine mentula, either with a penis or without a penis.

7 Aut cunno, aut culo, aut ore, aut manu aliisve cavis corporis, in a vagina or in an anus or in a mouth or in a hand or in other body cavities; aut lingua aut clitoride aut alia quacumque re virili veretro simili, with tongue or with clitoris or anything else similar to a male sex organ.

8 They number ninety; forty-eight deal with intercourse between one man and one woman, eighteen with threesomes and moresomes, while the remaining twenty-four are distributed rather stingily among male-male intercourse, fellatio, cunnilingus, masturbation, and bestiality.

9 Page xv. Most of the foreword, along with the English title, is a translation of the French edition, but these sentences are only in the English.

10 This is made particularly clear by his inclusion of long extracts from Nicolas Chorier’s Satirae Sotadicae de arcanis Amoris et Veneris (Sotadic Satires on the Secrets of Cupid and Venus, 1659), a series of dialogues supposedly composed by a Spanish maiden named Aloisia Sigaea, who describes in great detail her steamy bouts of sexual passion with various men, and also by his references to d’Hancarville’s Monuments de la vie privée des douze Césars (1780) and Monuments du culte secret des dames Romaines (1780), two collections of engravings illustrating the sexual adventures of noble Romans in the high Empire. (A selection of these is included in the French and English editions of Forberg.) Neither Chorier nor the engravings could conceivably be considered serious reconstructions and analyses of ancient mores.

11 One Hundred Copies only of this volume have been printed (all on the same paper and the type distributed) for Viscount Julian Smithson M.A., the Translator, and his Friends. None of these Copies are for Sale. Note facing the title page.

12 In almost all the great cities of Europe there are to be found plenty of people who, either being satiated with the ordinary pleasure, or afraid of infectious diseases, prefer the posterior to the anterior Venus—the English always excepted, who abominate this practice (1.179).

13 An earlier version of what became Part II appeared as Liebe und Ehe in Griechenland (1925).

14 Lyric and bucolic (1906), epigram (1908), comedy (1910), Homer, tragedy, and Ar-temidoros (1911), Philostratos’ erotic letters (1912), Lucian (1921), non-Homeric epic and Hesiod (1922–1923). These (with the exception of his work on Lucian, which was published as a book) appeared in the journals Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (1906: 619–84; 1908: 213–32), Anthropophyteia (1910: 128–79; 1911: 216–24; 1912: 291–300, 300–16, 316–28), and the Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft (1922–1923: 53–56, 65–74; 1925–1926: 278–80; 1926–1927: 245–56, 380–83).

15 On the page preceding the frontispiece is printed PRIVATDRUCK,

DIESES WERK DARF NUR AN BIBLIOTHEKER, GELEHRTE UND SAMMLER ABGEGEBEN WERDEN

(PRIVATE IMPRESSION, this work may be distributed only to librarians, academics, and collectors).

16 Not muted enough for Herbert Lewandowski, who reedited Brandt’s Sittengeschichte in 1959, reducing the scholarly apparatus and removing Brandt’s anti-Christian remarks, his complaints about the modern political order, and generally the author’s personal involvement in the material (22).

17 One might also mention several less scholarly works in the lexicographical mode antedating Lēnaios. Three dealt with Latin erotic vocabulary: Pierre-Nicolas Blondeau, Dictionnaire Erotique Latin-Française (seventeenth-century ms.; published by Isidore Liseux [Paris, 1885], with an introductory essay by Alcide Bonneau); Pierre Pierrugues, Glossarium Eroticum Linguae Latinae (Paris, 1826; pirated by Karl Rambach, Stuttgart, 1833, 1836–1837; repr. Karl Reinecke, Berlin, 1908, 500 copies); and finally, Hans Welter’s Supplementum et Index Lexicorum Eroticorum Linguae Latinae (Paris, 1911), a collation of Blondeau, Forberg, and Pierrugues, with some additions. Gaston Vorberg’s Glossarium Eroticum (Stuttgart, 1932; repr. Hanau am Main, 1965) includes Greek and Latin words in an encyclopedia of short articles with many illustrations. Like that of his homonym, Vorberg’s work is centered on the supposed sensuality and lustiness of antiquity, which he contrasts to the fig-leaf modesty of later ages poisoned by Christianity (1).

18 For the Latin language, see Richlin (1983) and Adams (1982).

19 For a critique of Detienne’s androcentrism in this analysis, see The Laughter of the Oppressed: Demeter and the Gardens of Adonis in Winkler (1989).

20 See, now, Halperin (1989a).

21 On the latter, see Patterson (forthcoming).

22 See The Constraints of Desire: Erotic Magical Spells in Winkler (1989).

1

HERAKLES: THE SUPER-MALE AND THE FEMININE

Nicole Loraux

You were born for that virile excellence

which is the glory of man, aretē;

you must conquer it, and it is won only

at the cost of life itself.

—Wilamowitz

There is a sanctuary dedicated to mortal man

in his female aspect (thēlyprepēs phōs),

undoubtedly Herakles.

—T. Wiegand¹

THE RELATIONSHIP between myths and psychoanalysis, between psychoanalysts and myth, would seem to be an intimate one, and the formula myth and psychoanalysis would seem to come quite naturally to the analyst, if it is true that (in André Green’s phrase) he feels at home in mythology, especially when that mythology is Greek. ² But there is always a third party ready to slip in and spoil intimate relationships that are too happy, and, in this instance, such is the role of the historian of the imaginary.

Within this dialogue in which analysts and Hellenists confront the nature of the questions they ask of myth, I take the position of a historian of the imaginary, a reader of myths, but one concerned less with deciphering their message than with using their discourse to interrogate the collective speaker we call the Greeks. What I want to ask the Greeks is what was at stake when they told each other myths, when they returned endlessly to the immensely galling recognition that there are two sexes and not one, and when they dealt with their disappointment by establishing a regulated interaction between masculine and feminine. In what follows I propose to examine this interaction by exploring those aspects of the Greek hero of virility—namely, Herakles—which suggest a close relationship to femininity.

Of course, by focusing on Herakles in the context of a meditation on myth, one leaves oneself open to the suspicions that have been repeatedly aroused, from Aristotle to modern historians of Greek religion, by any attempt to impose unity on a hero of such complexity and such manifestly diverse attributes. Aristotle’s warning about Herakles is well known: "The mythos is not single by virtue of having only a single hero. . . . The authors of the Lives of Herakles seem to be mistaken . . . insofar as they believe that, simply because there is only one hero, there is necessarily unity in the story" (Poetics 1451a16ff.).³ And, echoing Aristotle, Walter Burkert has recently refused to unify, under the rubric of Herakles, the shifting play of differences in the tales of the hero.⁴

Nevertheless, I shall not hesitate to treat Herakles as a whole, in spite of Aristotle—who, more than any other Greek thinker, tended to reject totally the contradictory logic of mythic discourse⁵—and in spite of Burkert and his desire to dissolve Herakles into a heterogeneous series of discursive patterns. I propose, on the contrary, to treat the heroic temperament as unified in its contradictions and, indeed, as constituted by those very contradictions. The unity of Herakles, then, should be sought less in a biographical narrative—in spite of the interesting work Dumézil has done along these lines—than in an ethos: a character, or better, a figure.

A figure rather than a character. Not an interior whose hidden deviations might simply be exposed to the light, but an actor constituted by his acts, the exterior of an exceptional body. By insisting on this definition, I mean to exclude from the start the facile tendency to endow the mythic hero with a character in order better to analyze him.

There are two reasons for such insistence. First, because to impose on the hero an excess of psychology is to do violence to the facts and to be guilty of what Jean Starobinski has rightly called interpretive supplementation.⁶ Starobinski was discussing the role of character in tragedy and was warning us against the temptation to treat dramatic characters as actual beings . . . endowed with actual childhoods . . . whereas they have no existence beyond the words attributed to them—and, I would add in the case of the mythic hero (and specifically in the case of Herakles), no existence beyond the acts they perform.⁷ Second, in deciphering the psychic life of a hero, one should proceed as if setting out to interpret the thoughts of the persons who figure in a dream, persons endowed with the inner life of the dreamer. If, as Freud thought, myth is actually something like the collective equivalent of a dream, Herakles is not the proper object of our analysis; we should rather be analyzing the workings of the Greek imagination that produced the figure of the hero. Because I am convinced that there are other questions for psychoanalysis to ask about myth besides the interpretation of the inner life of Oidipous, I have chosen to discuss a figure whose principal characteristic is the fact that he is constituted from the outside. Identified with his body, and specifically with his invincible strength, Herakles has no interior. Even when he appears in tragedy, it would be sheer fantasy to attempt to endow him with one. Existing exclusively in the fortunes of his career as a warrior, from birth to death he is delivered over to the will of others, subject to a destiny that was imposed on him in his mother’s womb.

It is essential to my interpretation that no Greek hero was more popular than Herakles. This means that, from archaic epic to the Hellenistic period, the figure of Herakles underwent constant reevaluation. But because no city was able to appropriate him definitively, the process of reevaluation took place not in the political field, with its multiple identifications and inevitable distortions,⁸ but rather within the logic that presides over the Greek concept of the powerful hero.

No politics, no inner life? Here is a golden opportunity for psychoanalysts and historians of the imaginary to meet on neutral ground. . . .

THE CONTRADICTIONS OF HERAKLES

Let us begin with the essential ambivalence of Herakles: even laid low by suffering and drowned in tears, the hero is invincible. The matter can just as well be put the other way round by saying, for example, that the radiant hero is simultaneously slave, woman, and madman.⁹

Drawing up a list of the contradictions inherent in the figure of Herakles, G. S. Kirk recently pointed to the opposition between the civilized and the bestial, the serious and the burlesque, the sane and the insane, the savior and the destroyer, free and slave, divine and human.¹⁰ I propose to add to this list the virile and the feminine. But we must not leap ahead of ourselves; the list makes no claim to be exhaustive. To add yet one more contradiction to it, we may recall at this point that Greek thinkers had equally credible traditions of a Herakles who is the hero of ponos, that is, of pain as glory, and of a Herakles who is the hero of pleasure, the great marrier of virgins, the great fatherer of children, fond of warm baths and soft couches.¹¹

More generally, ever since Homer, the primary ambivalence of Herakles resides in the fact that the powerful hero of many exploits is inseparable from the hero who suffers, who is reduced to helplessness, to that amēkhania from which, in Homer and Aiskhylos, Athena and even Zeus come to save him at the last minute. With his fondness for the literary gloss, a fondness characteristic of Hellenistic writers, the poet Lykophron evokes one of the most spectacular of these inversions of power when he lingers over the adventures of Herakles (himself a shameless swallower) swallowed up by a sea monster, in whose stomach he spends three days before returning to the light of the living. When he does return, he has lost the hair that was the symbol of his power.¹² Here, for once faithful to the Indo-European ideology of war, the heroic thought of the Greeks represents strength as intrinsically ambivalent. The hero is constantly on the brink of ruin from an excess of the strength that gives him his identity¹³—except when he is experiencing madness, his body driven to delirium by the effects of melancholy or black bile.¹⁴

In the Greek world of war and adventure, power is in essence and by definition virility. This brings me back to the contradiction that emerges in the relationship of Herakles—of this compulsively masculine Herakles¹⁵—to women and to femininity.

What one sees first in Herakles is the assertion of the most virile sexuality. The very type of the super-male, he eagerly deflowers virgins—fifty in a single night, according to the most enthusiastic version of the story. In his wanderings he marries along the way, begets offspring, and then goes off; the huge number of his wives earns him the title philogynēs (lover of women).¹⁶ The female body as an object of conquest and pleasure is continually new for him, and allegorizing erotic interpretations of his amorous career were current in the banquets of the Hellenistic period. For example, when someone was bragging about his own sexual prowess a standard deflationary tactic was to point out that Herakles had done better, moving on as he did from Omphale to Hebe. Omphale is the queen of Lydia who reduced the hero to slavery, Hebe (Youth) the divine spouse he obtained on his apotheosis. But in colloquial speech hēbē was also used to refer to the sexual organs, and the name Omphale was connected to omphalos (navel) as well as to the umbilical cord and the source of procreative power.¹⁷ Thus, the life of Herakles is turned into a journey across the female body.

But this philogynēs hero is also—to the great delight of austere classicists such as Wilamowitz—a determined misogynist. He has this institutional title at Delphi, where no woman is allowed to enter his temple, and in more than one Greek city the exclusion of women figures among the specific traits of the cult of Herakles.¹⁸ The Hellenistic period endows this misogynistic Herakles, who lends religious sanction to the rigorous segregation of the sexes, with a literary dimension. In the Argonautika of Apollonios of Rhodes, the hero keeps his distance from women and, on Lemnos, refuses to give himself up to the debilitating pleasures of love, summoning his companions to return to a fiercer standard of virile valor.¹⁹ There is another tradition that avoids this explicit misogyny and takes an indirect approach—it lists only the sons in the (vast) catalogue of the hero’s offspring, as if the male must engender only the male. But there is another, more powerful and more ingenious version, in which the exception confirms the rule: now Herakles has one daughter—one alone, as against seventy-two sons—who is thus the exception, the absolute anomaly.²⁰

This is not the last of the paradoxes. Herakles has another surprise in store, if not for psychoanalysts, at least for classicists who may be amazed already that such a lover of women should be such a misogynist. Herakles, the advocate of the separation of the sexes, has a tight marriage bond, both in life and in cult, and anyone who does not resolve the difficulty by postulating the existence of two radically different Herakleses must give some explanation of why the hero is so compulsively matrimonial (Georges Dumézil has recently emphasized the fact that the recurrence of marriage in the career of Herakles is structural).²¹

We come now to another dimension that needs to be added to the portrait of Herakles. The myths take insistent delight in putting Herakles at the service of women, or at least at the service of a female will. One thinks first of Hera, of course, but there is Omphale as well—all the texts agree in making him her slave, though they differ on the question of whether or not his servitude is erotic (which comes down to assigning to the hero of marriage the role of bride).²² Let us stop for a moment at this image of Herakles, slave of women, placed under the yoke of tyrannical female power, an image which thrills certain anthropologists of Greece who, in search of a primitive gynaecocracy or matriarchy, latch onto this precious news as an irrefutable piece of evidence.²³ But the comic poets of the age of Perikles, fond of devaluing the authority of a chief of state who was subject to the will of a woman, had already thought this out, and they had gone further. When they see in Aspasia a new Omphale, a Deianeira, and even a Hera, all at once, they reveal the logic by virtue of which, from birth to death, women presided over the destiny of the