Greek Sex: Hearing It for The Boys

These female deities all subvert the usual relationship between men and women, and perhaps an obvious psycho-sexual interpretation could be that it reveals the desires of men to have relationships with women in which they are not the alpha. In fact, throughout the Ancient and Classical world there are goddesses which perform these functions to some degree, up to and into the early Medieval world of paganism, though here the societies which worshipped these deities were, as far as we can tell, more egalitarian due to the frontier nature of those societies.

Of course, the major female deities in the Greek pantheon also display characteristics which, rather than speak to repressed male desires, more openly function as a warning of unbridled (read, 'any') female power in society and might have confirmed the need (in the minds of men) for male control of women. The goddesses could be vain, vindictive and capricious, and were said to have acted irrationally for their own ends, particularly in gambling with the lives of innocents. For example, the Trojan War was said, at its foundation, to be the result of a quarrel between Athena, Aphrodite and the goddess Hera, in which the goddess of discord manipulated the desire of each of the goddesses to be seen as the most beautiful. In the end, Paris, prince of Troy, chose Aphrodite to be the most beautiful, and he was rewarded by Helen of Troy (nee Sparta) falling for him, with all the mayhem that then followed. Well played, goddess of discord...

The male gods in the Greek pantheon are also worth investigating. Most obviously, the chief god Zeus was noted for shape changing in his attempts to seduce/rape both goddesses and mortal women. There are at least eleven instances of Zeus shape changing for this purpose, and taking on divine, mythical, mortal human, animal, and even inanimate forms. The obvious reason for Zeus conducting his affairs in this manner is related to the violent Grecian attitudes towards adultery: it seems even a god would want to avoid exposing himself to the justified vengeance of a wronged man (or fellow god). Zeus is also, at points, trying to evade the oversight of his wife.

Another god with a very sexual nature was Pan. Half-human and half-goat, Pan really was a horny old goat, and interestingly, he was extremely heterosexual. Pan was a god of nature, and also of music, and he used music as a means of seduction. Pan, one of whose symbols was the erect phallus, was randy, pure and simple, but he didn't always succeed in his attempts to fuck shepherdesses, one of his main targets. Unfortunately, he had a habit of not taking no for an answer (though he stalked, rather than physically assaulted), causing other gods to intervene to stymie him on at least one occasion. The underlying message here is that it is not only female sexuality that needs to be regulated.

The other main god with serial sexual overtones is Apollo. This god was bisexual, and had lovers both male and female, semi-divine and mortal. He was seen as the champion of homosexuality due to his propensity to take male lovers. Apollo was said to be amazingly beautiful, and it is telling that, by and large, he didn't need to use the same kinds of tricks as Zeus, or creepy intensity of Pan to seduce his lovers. He also generally reacts better to rejection than other gods, who are willing to resort to sexual violence to achieve their ends.

This whirlwind tour of the sexual excesses of the gods (and there were many, many more) highlights one thing that the Greeks likely focussed on: sexual desire needed to be controlled, and that uncontrolled sex led to negative emotions (jealousy, anger and an addiction to lust) and negative physical effects (unwanted pregnancy, victimisation and, in the worst case, war). Clearly the Greeks viewed these as bad things, even when they accepted them as a desirable part of the human experience when tasted in moderation, in rather the same way that wine was diluted rather than drunk pure.

In my previous essays on the Romans and the Vikings the change in culture which brought about change in their attitudes towards sex was religious -- the conversion to Christianity. For the Greeks, whose culture was subsumed into the Roman Empire well before the conversion, the changes in their attitudes had a different cause. In one sense Greek civilisation endured, but this was because of the fascination the Romans had for it. The conquest of Greece by Rome was not rapid, but took roughly seventy years. However, even before the Romans conquered the Greeks, they had fallen prey to another neighbour, Macedon, a Hellenistic culture that the Greeks considered alien. This conquest, begun by Philip of Macedon in the 350s BCE, was confirmed by his son Alexander in the 330s. By some measures, this can be regarded as the end of the true Greek civilisation.

But this dividing line is political. In other respects, Greek civilisation continued, even thrived, with Athens as the go-to city in the eastern Mediterranean for anyone seeking to further their education (at least until Alexandria overtook it in late Antiquity). And Corinth was still a city of refined art and exquisite sex, but only until 146 BCE. As part of a series of wars against Macedon the Romans had sponsored a league of free Greek cities. What the Romans didn't want, however, was the natives they'd sponsored getting ideas beyond their station, and by the 140s BCE that's precisely what the Greeks were doing from the Roman point of view. Cue an invasion, under the Roman general Lucius Mummius.

Following a devastating victory, the Romans turned up outside Corinth, and after waiting three days turned the soldiers loose on the city. When the Romans decided on sacking a city, they really went to town, and Corinth was a rich prize indeed. As part of the horrors which followed all the men who hadn't used the three-day interval to escape were killed, and all the women and children enslaved. Given what we know of Corinth and the temple prostitution practised there it's a pretty safe guess that many of the women who found themselves aboard the Roman transports heading to Italy were exchanging one form of sexual slavery for another. Whether it was worse is open to question, though a safe bet would probably be yes, as it was transformed from something with at least some religious justification into something purely commercial. What effect the Corinthian sex workers then had on the Romans is also pure speculation, but at a guess, for Roman men it was a very happy turn of events.

Following this Roman invasion Greece became part of the Roman Empire. The nation and culture, as opposed to the political entities, didn't disappear as such, but many of the most intelligent Greeks either lay dead on the battlefield, or were slaves in Rome (and some, it was true, would rise under their Masters). But to be Greek now, was to be secondary compared to the new Masters of the Mediterranean. How this affected Greek male attitudes to women is unclear -- did the oppressed kick downwards? Or did the loss of status lead to an awakened understanding of what it meant to be a second-class citizen? One suspects the former, mostly.

For the rest of the duration of the classical Roman Empire (that is, until the wheels began to come off in the Third Century CE), any Greek with ambition needed to leave Greece and head to Rome, or increasingly Alexandria, to make their fortune. The effect of this was a slow decline in Greek culture, rather than a sudden collapse -- the best left, never to return, and there were fewer teachers for each succeeding generation. By the time the Roman Empire divided into western and eastern halves in the late Fourth Century CE Greek culture was Romanised, and yet interestingly, eastern Roman culture now began to be Hellenised.

Byzantium, at the time a Greek city but now Istanbul, the European cultural centre of Turkey, was re-founded by the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, renamed Constantinople, and became the capital of a new Greco-Roman empire, the Byzantine Empire, which lasted another one thousand years. But by then any concept of the Greece we have been examining was long dead. The Byzantine Empire was deeply Christian, with all the chauvinisms that came with monotheism at that time. This had a massive impact on the love lives of men, who now found homosexuality defined as a capital crime by the Sixth Century CE Laws of Justinian, as well as pronounced a mortal sin by the Church.

Women, however, may have seen little difference from the change: their status was still secondary, and apart from a handful of women associated with the Byzantine imperial family the only women able to escape the tyranny of arranged marriage followed by enforced motherhood were those in religious institutions. For society as a whole, discussions and depictions of sex were now frowned upon, at best -- sex for pleasure was no more, went the official line, and procreation was the only justifiable purpose for physical relationships.

Readers who wish to further investigate Greek culture and Greek attitudes to sex will find there is a wealth of literature available. The Greek writers Homer, Herodotus and Thucydides are a good starting point to understanding Troy (Homer), and the growth of Classical Greece (Herodotus and Thucydides). Other writers, both Roman and Greek, can provide a wealth of background to the civilisation, in particular Plutarch, Strabo, Ptolemy, Pliny, Polybius and Xenophon. Modern authors have also provided whole shelves of books for the interested reader, but John Mann, Tom Holland, Terry Buckley, Ian Worthington and Paul Cartledge have provided valuable recent popular contributions. Those preferring documentaries should look no further than the excellent series on many aspects of Greek life, including sexuality, by Bettany Hughes. These are mostly uploaded on YouTube.