Plato: ‘A Syracusan came in to provide entertainment. He had with him a girl who
was an expert flautist, another who was an acrobatic dancer, and a very attractive
boy who both played the lyre and danced extremely well’ (Symposium 2). There is
something of a cabaret, and at the end, after the climactic speech of Socrates on love,
a ballet dance representing the loves of Ariadne and Dionysus. In their different ways,
these two symposia suggest what might have been something of a reality in the more
aristocratic households. But doubtless they are the ideal and reality was usually rather
different. From vase paintings it is clear that the flute girls might provide more than
simply musical entertainment before the proceedings. Flute girls in fact worked as
prostitutes in the red-light district of Athens, the Kerameikos, in the east of the city
near the walls, which isn’t to say that there is any implication in these dialogues that
they offer sexual services to their guests.
A very different kind of Symposium from those in which Socrates features is
described by Xenophon in his history (Hellenika5,4,4). When some of the leaders of
Thebes participating in a symposium as they were celebrating the festival of
Aphrodite had become inebriated and asked for the women to be brought in,
assassins disguised as hetairaientered and effected a coup by giving the men more
than they bargained for.
‘Greek love’
The two Athenian symposia alluded to above broach the subject of what has
subsequently been called ‘Greek love’, or to give it its Greek name paederastia,
pederasty, a word of ill repute in English and suggestive of illegal practices even after
the sexual revolution. The love of boys is taken in this Greek context to involve not
pre-pubescent boys but boys from the dawn of adolescence when the down begins
to appear on the cheeks onwards until the youth is able to grow a full beard. We may
recall here the description of Hermes in Homer ‘looking like a princely youth at the
most graceful time when the beard first begins to grow’ (Iliad24, 339–340). Pederasty
naturally involves an age difference, the attraction of the older for the younger. The
mythical archetype is embodied in the seizure of the beautiful Trojan youth
Ganymede carried off by Zeus to become cupbearer to the gods. In doing this, Zeus
had not suddenly changed his sexual preferences; he carries on his liaisons with the
opposite sex. His erotic drive works in both, indeed in all, directions. In the sexual
sphere, Greek myth as a whole might be regarded as a manifestation of what Freud
called the ‘polymorphous perverse’. This mythical attraction of Zeus for Ganymede
(and the implied sex life that went with it) suggests a more general pattern in the
Greek world, where the categories of homosexual and heterosexual, often considered
tobe exclusive in modern times and a distinct and vital aspect of an individual’s
RELIGION AND SOCIAL LIFE 121