Greeks much admired tricks of this sort. Guile was seen as a virtue and its “patron saint” was Odysseus, who devised the wooden horse at Troy and whose foxiness got him out of trouble more than once on his way home after the city’s fall.
The ambush did not win the war, which carried on bloodily for some time. The two parties were so exhausted by the fighting that they agreed to submit the quarrel to the Spartans, who were the acknowledged if informal leaders of the Greek world. Apparently Solon thought of yet another device to help their cause. In the sixth century there was no agreed text of the Homeric epics. The revered lawgiver slipped two lines into the famous catalogue of the ships that the Greeks sent across the Aegean Sea to Troy. They referred to the flotilla of Ajax, king of Salamis.
Ajax brought twelve warships from Salamis
And beached them close to the Athenian army.
The couplet helpfully emphasized the close relationship between the islanders and Athens. And so it was to Athens that, after careful consideration, the Spartans awarded Salamis.
—
Solon and Pisistratus were very fond of one another. We are told they entered into a love affair when Pisistratus was a good-looking lad in his teens. Despite a wide gap of thirty years between them, this is not implausible. Solon was highly sexed, if we may judge from his poetry, where he writes of the delights of falling in love “with a boy in the lovely flower of youth,/Desiring his thighs and sweet mouth.”
However, it would be wrong to believe that either man was necessarily, in our modern sense, gay. This is because from the eighth century onwards the Greek upper classes established and maintained a system of pederasty as a form of higher education. A fully grown adult male, usually in his twenties, would look out for a boy in his mid-teens and become his protector and guide. His task was to see him through from adolescence into adulthood and to act as a kind of moral tutor.
Sex was not compulsory, but it was under certain strictly defined conditions allowed. The older man was the active lover/partner or erastes and the teenager was the loved one, or eromenos. Buggery was absolutely out of bounds and brought shame on any boy who allowed it to be done to him. It could have the most serious consequences, as the fate of Periander showed. This famous tyrant of Corinth in the seventh century unwisely teased his eromenos in the presence of other people with the question: “Aren’t you pregnant yet?” The boy was so upset by the insult that he killed Periander.
A popular and acceptable technique for achieving orgasm was intercrural sex: both participants stood up and the erastes inserted his erect penis between the thighs of the eromenos and rubbed it to and fro. The youth was not meant to enjoy his lover’s attentions or show signs of arousal; rather, he was making a disinterested gift of himself to someone he admired.
The great Athenian writer of tragic dramas, Aeschylus, wrote a play about the love between the two Greek heroes, Achilles and Patroclus. It was called The Myrmidons, after the warriors whom Achilles commanded during the Trojan War. Achilles is presented as the erastes, and reproaches his lover, in rather roundabout terms, for declining an intercrural proposition.
And you rejected my holy reverence for your thighs,
Spurned our many kisses.
These same-sex unions were perfectly respectable provided that the conventions were observed, and that the teenager developed into a good man without disgracing his erastes, and so had been worth the trouble. Fathers would give couples their blessing. Just to the north of Attica in neighboring Boeotia, man and boy lived together as if they were married. In time of war lovers might fight alongside each other. A memorial stone found in the countryside outside Athens survives, in which an eromenos sadly records his lover’s death.
Here a man solemnly swore for love of a boy
To take part in strife and tearful war.
I [i.e., the memorial stone] am sacred to Gnathios, who lost his life in battle.
The romantic phase of a pederastic relationship did not last long, and once an eromenos had started to shave, sexual relations were felt to be improper.
—
The gods gave pederasty their blessing. They routinely had affairs with attractive young human beings and quite often their eyes lighted on pretty boys. Theognis, a lyric poet from Megara who flourished in the sixth century, argued that the king of the gods set his seal of approval on same-sex love by having numerous affairs with handsome youths.
In fact, he was not averse to committing rape, as the case of Ganymede goes to show. He was a Trojan shepherd whom Zeus fell for. Turning himself into an eagle, the god swooped down, grabbed him, and flew him off to his palace on Mount Olympus, where he appointed him his cup-bearer—in effect, chief sommelier.
There is a certain pleasure in loving a boy, for even Zeus,
The son of Cronus, king of the immortals, fell in love with Ganymede,
And snatching him up took him to Olympus, and made him
A god, keeping forever the lovely bloom of youth.
Couples were expected to graduate to marriage and children, those without a gay orientation doubtless heaving a sigh of relief. In fact, most of them will have been heterosexual and not much wanted sex with one another. These pederastic relationships were essentially adopted for cultural reasons. They often evolved into a lifelong friendship and, like marriages, were a useful means by which families could form connections and alliances.
There was, of course, a routine spread of homosexuals throughout the population, and evidence has survived of energetic sexual activity that seems to have had little association with the erastes/eromenos ideology.
High up a rocky promontory on the volcanic island of Thera in the southern Aegean Sea some curious inscriptions have survived, probably dating to the early or mid-seventh century. They were carved into the mountainside in large, deeply scored letters. The spot appears to have been a rendezvous for archaic sex. The messages evoke a distant erotic past with touching immediacy. One of them reads: “I swear by Apollo of Delphi, right here Krimon fucked [So-and-So…the name is missing], the son of Bathykles.” Another boy praises his partner: “Barbax dances well and he gave me pleasure.”
Greeks would not understand the language of modern psychology. So far as sex was concerned they thought in terms of a man’s acts not of his essence, of what he did rather than what he was. He might have sex with another man, but that did not make him a homosexual, for neither the concept nor the word had been invented. However, to have sex only with someone of the same gender aroused stern comment. One was expected to spread one’s favors.
Particular disapproval was reserved for effeminacy, and there was a name for it. A cinaedus was a man-woman, soft, degenerate, and depraved. He allowed himself to be penetrated and, worse, enjoyed it. He was regarded as not far off from being a male prostitute.
—
Solon and Pisistratus cherished the memory of their love, long after the passion had died. This was fortunate, for they came to disagree sharply on political issues. It was evident that Solon’s reforms had not quelled the regular disruptions of daily life in Athens, and intelligent minds turned to the desirability of a tyranny. Pisistratus, with his successes in the war with Megara behind him and as leader of a major political movement, believed he was the man for the job.