LITMIR.BIZ

      In antiquity, males dominated society and women were segregated from men in almost all of the Greek city-states. Unlike boys and young men in classical Athens, women were completely absent from public life. Most women were not allowed an education and were kept in virtual seclusion from everyone but their immediate families. Because Greek society was male centred – that is, as a society created by and for men who took part in the public aspect of society (e.g. art, poetry, literature, politics), female homosexuality is all but invisible on vase paintings, in lyric poetry, and on the dramatic stage. Although female homosexuality did exist in antiquity, there are only a few writers and artists in the Greek world who dealt with the topic. Plato did make a passing reference to female homosexuality in his writings, presenting it in abstract philosophical terms through a parable about primeval androgynes, but saying nothing of its daily practice in society (Saslow, p.29). Aristophanes, too, also avoided the topic by collapsing it into a discussion of the role of women as hetaerae, or professional entertainers/courtesans in Greek society. There is a rare vase painting by Apollodoros showing two hetaerae in sexual intimacy. There is also one extraordinary vase painting showing two women in gestures of courtship.

      Although Athenian men were thoroughly disinterested in the sexual life of women, Greek law did permit a form of institutionalised female homosexuality in Sparta. It was within the thiasoi, or an educational and social community of women and girls, that female homosexuality was most prevalent. Thiasoi were schools where “older women trained teenage girls in music and dancing, charm and beauty” (Saslow, p.19–20). Like boys with their erastai, girls of high social standing were segregated from society and took part in rituals worshipping Diana, goddess of virginity and the hunt. Theoretically, thiasoi were schools to prepare young girls for marriage, but the woman-centred nature of their environment also fostered intimate emotional and sexual relationships among them. As part of a refined yet limited education, many girls were trained in the writing of poetry. The lyric poems (poetry accompanied by a lyre) of Sappho are the most famous and known for extolling the passionate love of women for one another.

      Sappho’s influence was so profound that Plato dubbed her as “the tenth Muse”. She was born during the archaic period in 612 BC in the city of Mytilene on the Aegean island of Lesbos, located near the western coast of what is today called Turkey. She was a thiasos educator of girls who came specifically from Lesbos and the Ionian coast. Her lyric poems spoke of the many loves in her life, including love of her own pupils. Her words are of longing and despair – extolling passion and jealousy driven by desire. Most of the poems are fragmentary and available only in ancient copies. Only one poem survives completely intact.

      Despite the obvious homoerotic nature of her poetry, most ancient writings about Sappho’s life only sporadically mention her homosexuality. During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, she was promoted as a married bisexual woman. The story of her dramatic suicide over a man named Phaon, a ferryman of great beauty, became legendary (Dover, p.174). Her suicide has given some writers a legitimising excuse for foregrounding her heterosexuality and playing down or completely ignoring her homosexuality. Still others have compared her intimate relationships with women with the erastes-eromenos setup in ancient Greece – a point that also shows to what extent women’s sexuality was seen only in relationship to that of men.

      There is no visual or verbal evidence recounting exactly what Sappho looked like. Her image on vases appears at least one hundred years after her lifetime and none of these, it has been observed, bear any resemblance to one another (Snyder, p.31). No identifiable statues of Sappho survive. There does exist, however, a red-figure vase dating around 450 BC that supposedly shows Sappho seated between two standing female figures, one of which holds up a lyre, the other, a garland.

      In addition to the person of Sappho as a legendary figure whose work acknowledges the presence of female homosexuality in antiquity, there is also mythology. Although Amazons are a myth about women created by men, they do speak to the existence and viability of female sexual independence apart from men in antiquity. The Amazons were a legendary tribe of equestrian women warriors who shunned the company of men and lived, hunted, and went into battle together in an all-female environment. Mythology has it that they were from Asia Minor, near the Black Sea, and that they worshipped Diana, goddess of the hunt. In art, Greek males are often shown fighting against the Amazon who was a useful manifestation of barbarism and the sexual threat of women. In myth, the Amazon subverts the ‘natural’ order by rejecting marriage and maiming or practising infanticide on her male children.

      27. Zeus and Ganymede, 470 BC.

      Museo Archeologico di Ferrara, Ferrara.

      28. The Tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogiton, c. 477 BC.

      Marble, h: 195 cm. Copy after a Greek original by Critios.

      Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.

      29. Scene of Kottabos, end of the 5^th century BC.

      Ceramic. The British Museum, London.

Rome from Republic to Empire

      Both the Etruscans and Greeks were eventually conquered and absorbed by the advancing forces of Rome in the second century BC. The Romans, attracted to Greek art and culture, absorbed some Greek and Etruscan practices into their own art and culture; in particular, their polytheistic religions, gods and goddesses. The Roman approach to sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular was, however, quite distinct.

      Under the Romans, male sexual dominance over both women and other men was taken for granted: wealthy Roman men frequently kept mistresses, slaves, and boys for sexual pleasure, and both male and

Скачать книгу