ashamed to be base in the sight of their lovers, and the beloved before their lovers,
willingly rush into danger for the relief of one another’ (Life of Pelopidas, 18, 3). He
also has a record of Philip’s reaction when on inspecting the dead after the battle he
was told that he was looking at an army of lovers and beloveds: ‘he wept and said
“May those who suspect these man of doing or suffering anything shameful perish
miserably!”’’ (Life of Pelopidas,18, 7). It is unlikely in a permanent force that the
eromenoiwere all adolescents, suggesting that these relationships carried on into adult
life consistent with the judgement of Pausanias above concerning more open practice
in Sparta and Boeotia than in Athens. It is perhaps relevant to recall here that one of
the most solemn Spartan festivals celebrated over three days at the sanctuary of
Apollo at Amylcae just south of Sparta was the Hyakinthia. Hyacinth was a beautiful
youth beloved by Apollo who accidentally killed him with a discus. However, this
festival was attended by both sexes. Whatever the sexual attitudes and practices of
Spartan men, like the other Greeks, they were expected to do their duty to the gods,
the state, and the ancestors by marrying and producing children. Indeed at Sparta
there were penalties for not doing so, just as there were incentives for reproduction.
A Spartan who fathered three boys became exempt from military service, and exempt
from taxes if he fathered four.
Women
From these two relationships – husband and wife, master and slave – the house-
hold takes its rise. Hesiod aptly says: ‘First a wife, then an ox [the poor man’s
servant] for the plough.’ The household, therefore, is an association established
by nature for the supply of men’s everyday needs.
(Aristotle, Politics, 1252b)In the household (oikos) comprising the inhabitants and their possessions is the same
hierarchical structure that we see writ large in the polisitself, in which all power rests in
the adult male citizenry. In Aristotle’s thought it is possible to argue that this hierarchy
reflects basic biology wherein man is the active principle in the act of generation:
Further, a boy actually resembles a woman in physique and a woman is, so to
speak, a sterile male; the female, in fact, is female on account of an incapacity of
sorts, by being unable to concoct semen from the final stage of nutriment.
(On the Generation of Animals, 728a)But the separation between the sexes seems typical throughout Greece and through-
out time. Although it has often been said the women have more freedom and are
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