Foucault’s volumes on the history of sexuality have been immensely influential in modern understandings of sexuality in the ancient world. Greek ideas of homosexuality continue to be at the core of several modern legal and moral debates on the rights of sexual minorities, as evidenced by Romer vs Evans (1996).[1] Foucault’s argument, clearly influenced by French Existentialism, that sexuality did not itself exist until discourse on sexualities appeared in the 18th and 19th centuries challenges the idea of sexual identities as essential and natural diachronically. Instead of a Classical ‘homosexuality’, Foucault posits the idea of the desiring subject and a concept of homoerotic behaviour based on pederasty and penetration. However, Foucault’s work presents a model of Greek homoeroticism that is much more limited than our surviving sources allow for. His understanding of pederasty is too narrow and his focus on penetration too emphatic. Indeed, Foucault’s promotion of the so-called ‘penetration model’ fails to encompass other important elements such as the legal, political, and social cultural norms in which homoeroticism occurred.
First, Foucault argues that a Classical Greek had no concept of sexuality. A man who had sex with men would not ‘feel homosexual’.[2] Foucault’s position was thus one of constructionism, arguing that same-sex desire in Classical Greece was so unlike that in the modern age that it is not part of the same historical continuum. Nonetheless, when faced with the need to explain this absence of an essentialist history of homosexuality, Foucault was confronted with an abundance of evidence of male homoeroticism from Classical Athens. He thus posits sexual identity in the ancient world as the expression of desire by a (always male) subject. This desiring subject is exemplified for Foucault by the erastes, a Greek adult man who would engage with a younger male, the eromenos, in pederasty, a relationship that may have educational, romantic, sexual, and mutually beneficial elements. Foucault believed that the eromenos was perceived as the passive subject, which was problematised by the Athenians as they did not wish a passive subject who had been dominated to grow to be an active participant in the city, evidenced by Foucault’s interpretation of Aeschines 1. Foucault argued that there “was a reluctance to evoke directly and in so many words the role of the boy in sexual intercourse”.[3] Pederastic relationships thus had expected behaviours for each participant including the desiring subject and the boy, the object, who could not actively identify with his part and so was meant to refuse, resist or flee (Plato, Symposium 184a).[4] Foucault’s interpretation of Classical Greek homoeroticism is therefore one of binaries: active/passive; subject/object. It is thus an inherently narrow view and too accepting of objectification of living beings. A red-figure kylix c.500 BCE by the artist ‘Peithinos’ (Persuasion/ Seducer) found in Vulci, Etruria (now in Berlin) might show a more multifaceted view of Classical eroticism. It includes heterosexual courtship, which Foucault altogether ignores, and shows cadets engaged in various levels of erotic pursuits with male striplings in various levels of entrapment.[5] The cup itself contained several desiring subjects but may also have been used to invoke desire at a symposium. Foucault’s interest and emphasis on power dynamics may have blinded him also to how those experiencing ‘passive’ roles could also have considered themselves as desiring subjects and enjoyed sexual pleasure in their roles.
There appears to be more ancient evidence for an essential form of sexual identity than Foucault accepts. In the speech of the comic Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium (189c-193e), the speaker recounts a myth of human creation that explains human desire in terms that would define sexuality as natural and essentialist. Plato’s Aristophanes recounts how the whole human being was once “round in form, with its back and sides in a circle, with four arms, an equal number of legs, and two faces” (189e). These creatures were male, female or androgyne. Zeus decided to split them in half, allowing them sexual desire so that they would not die out altogether (191c6-8). Those who were halves of male or female wholes seek partners of the same sex, while those of androgyne origin seek partners of the other sex (191d3-192a2). A myth which seemingly supports the timeless existence of heterosexuality, bisexuality and homosexuality, this story has been seen rather as a comic satire, appropriately voiced by that acclaimed comedian Aristophanes. Seemingly ignoring the passage’s apparent essentialism, Foucault focuses on the question of consent, claiming “Aristophanes gives an answer that is direct, simple, and entirely affirmative, and he thereby abolishes the game of dissymmetries that structured the complex relations between man and boy.”[6] Foucault however fails to see Aristophanes’ mythos as an elaborate joke and as part of Plato’s ordering of popular understandings of sex and gender.[7]And yet even if Plato is playing on this view and satirising it, does it not indicate that it was at least comprehensible and potentially prevalent in contemporary Athenian society?
Moreover, Foucault asserts that central to Greek homoeroticism was a discourse of domination and penetration, which he labelled “quite disgusting.”[8] He argued that “sexual relations – always conceived in terms of the model act of penetration, assuming a polarity that opposed activity and passivity – were seen as being of the same type as the relationship between a superior and a subordinate, an individual who dominates and one who is dominated.”[9] However, Foucault’s support of the ‘penetration model’ has been challenged.[10] Foucault had understood the Athenian law against he who had prostituted himself from holding a magistracy, becoming a herald, prosecutor, or slanderer as an Athenian distaste for being ruled over by any man who had been anally penetrated, even if he was “the most eloquent orator in Athens” (Aesch. 1.19-20). Timarchus, alleged Aeschines in 346/5 BCE, was such a disgraceful man. However, it was not relevant to the citizens of Athens whether Timarchus had been penetrated by another man. What Aeschines is at pains to stress here is that Timarchus is notoriously - “a man not unknown to you” (Aesch. 1.43) - a man of sexual excess, gluttony, and corruptibility and so totally unsuited to being active in political life in any way. Ancient Greeks viewed character as immutable and consistent. They could easily have believed that one who could sell his body for money might also be tempted by bribery and avarice to sacrifice the interests of the state. The Athenian jurors may have also been influenced by political motivations in condemning Timarchus, such as a knowledge of his opposition to the Peace of Philocrates. Nevertheless, there may have been some who found Timarchus’s sexual history highly distasteful and even offensive. And yet, that Timarchus was penetrated is not the charge Aeschines levies at him. Indeed, Aeschines makes no distinction between sodomy and intercrural sex and gives no details of sexual acts,[11] problematising, then, Timarchus’s character rather than any given sex acts or ‘sexuality’.
That the Classical Greeks problematised penetration less than Foucault suggests is further demonstrated by Lysias’ speech Against Simon, in which the speaker defends himself against the charge of premeditated murder towards Simon. The speaker notes that he and Simon “were both attracted, members of the Council, to Theodotus… I expected to win him over by treating him well, but Simon thought that by behaving arrogantly and lawlessly he would force him to do what he wanted.” (Lys. 3.5). Thus, what is at issue is not that Theodotus, who is described positively even if he is probably an enslaved person as indicated by the mention that he would have to be tortured to testify (Lys. 3.33), would have been penetrated by either the speaker or by Lysias. The problem is the alleged transgressions of Simon of the legal and cultural norms in Athens in stealing Theodotus (the speaker’s property) to court him improperly. Neither Aeschines nor Lysias problematise penetration; this is the preoccupation of the Foucauldian, not the Classical Greek. There were indeed problematic ideas and conceptions relating to homoeroticism, but these should be viewed within the cultural confines of Classical Athens. For example, Aristophanes demonstrates how it is not being ‘passive’ in sex that is generally a problem for Athenians, but a fear that one is corruptible and might take money in exchange for sex. In referring to “yawning-arsed Ionians”, Aristophanes is noting and condemning how easily they are corrupted by Persian gold (Ar. Arch. 106-7).[12] The centrality of penetration in Greek homoeroticism must therefore be seriously questioned, especially when anal penetration is rarely mentioned in the literature and never depicted on Classical vases.
In addition, Foucault’s categories of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ and their associated cultural roles and meanings are too regimented. Poster acknowledged that “Foucault assumes that a sexual relation in which one partner is required exclusively to play an active role and the other partner exclusively to play a passive role is possible, as if the fact of “activity” and “passivity” were not ambiguous from the start.”[13] Not all homoerotic relationships within Athens fit into a strict Foucauldian model of pederasty and penetration. For example, the notoriously beautiful but traitorous Alcibiades noisily gate-crashes into Plato’s Symposium (212) and proceeds to claim that it was he who had tried unsuccessfully to seduce Socrates. This therefore effectively inverts the roles of the erastes and the eromenos and of who pursues whom. Socrates’ moderation and self-control is also demonstrated here (217aff). However, Plato sets his famous text precisely in 416 BCE, as the symposiasts are celebrating the first victory of Agathon at the Leneia. Alcibiades is about 34 by this time, certainly a full-grown man. This instance, even if exaggerated to show Socrates’ self-restraint, suggests that the model of pederasty was not as rigid as Foucault would argue.
Additionally, homoeroticism was no more monolithic outside of Athens. Cartledge argues that Spartan pederasty was institutionalised especially within the agoge system. Plutarch records that “erastai began to frequent the company of those of the reputable boys who had reached” twelve (Plu. Lyc. 17). In Sparta some elements of homoeroticism such as the cult of the nude male body seem to have been taken to further extremes, particularly in the gymnasium. Thucydides (1.6.5) notes, for instance, that it was the Spartans who created the custom of exercising fully nude and rubbing down with oil.[14] On the contrary, Link has argued that pederasty was publicly institutionalised in Crete, but certainly not in Spartan education.[15] In Sparta, it appears that to be cast in the passive role was not as problematised as Foucault would argue it was in Athens. Indeed, pederasty could have acted in Sparta as a means of recruiting the political elite,[16] which would not have had the same context in democratic Athens. For example, Xenophon tells us that when the Spartiate Sphodrias was arraigned on a capital charge, he was acquitted by king Agesilaos (Hell. 5.4.20-33). The sons of the accused and the king were involved in a pederastic relationship. Spartan pederasty could therefore also be politicised in a very different context than in Athens. Foucault’s model, it would seem, fails to allow for such variation.
Thus, in his attempt to define sexuality and homosexuality as not universalizable, a constructionalist, existentialist phenomenon created out of discourse, Foucault ends up with a model of homoeroticism that is too narrow and monolithic. He fails to account for significant geographical and temporal disparities in treating Classical Greece as a single moment in history that expresses one behavioural model. His work does not give scholars the tools to understand the complexities and varieties of desire and human relationships in Classical Greece or the modern world.
Jessica Hoar is currently in her 3rd year of a BA in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Oxford (Lincoln College)
Notes: [1] J. Davidson, ‘Dover, Foucault and Greek homosexuality’, Past and Present, Vol. 170 (2001), p. 5. [2] Ibid., p. 35. [3] M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (New York, 1984), pp. 223-4. [4] Ibid., p. 224. [5] J. Davidson, The Greeks & Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece (London, 2007), pp. 428-436. [6] Foucault, Sexuality, p. 233. [7] J.S. Carnes, ‘This myth which is not one: construction of discourse in Plato’s Symposium’ in D.H. J. Larmour (eds.), Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity (Princeton, 1998), pp. 106-7. [8] P. Rabinow, The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth, 1986), p. 346. [9] Foucault, Sexuality, p. 215. [10] See, for example: Davidson, The Greeks & Greek Love. [11] Davidson, The Greeks & Greek Love, p. 19. [12] Ibid., p. 21. [13] Poster, Foucault, p. 213. [14] P. Cartledge, ‘The politics of Spartan pederasty’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, No. 27 (1981), p. 27. [15] S. Link, ‘Education and pederasty in Spartan and Cretan society’ in S. Hodkinson (ed.), Sparta: Comparative Approaches (Swansea, 2009) p. 92. [16] Cartledge, ‘Spartan pederasty’, p. 28.