Also see the Interim Supplement at the foot of this article

Everyone at my dump of a school knows the ancient Greeks liked to give and take it up the bum. The fact that most boys there might struggle to identify Greece on a road map of Europe doesn’t lessen their assurance that every Greek worshipped at the ara voluptatis pathicae. The fact that I am (a) accomplished in both Greek and Latin, and (b) remarkably—indeed, devastatingly—good-looking, has brought on me the frequently unwelcome if opposite attentions from certain of my peers.

This is regrettable, but has given me the idea of investigating to what extent all-male sex really was popular among Athenians of the classical period—that is, from about 550 to about 300 BC. We all know, or should know, that the intellectual classes had no more visible prejudice against it than we have against people who prefer cats to dogs. But was this a universal acceptance? Or was it confined to the intellectual classes, who can be assumed also to have been the higher classes?

Well, after writing the above, I did a spot of research. As I should have expected, there is a mountain scholarship on this matter. Some of it is self-evident crap. Some is forbiddingly learned. Hardly any of it is in agreement. So what I do eventually say will be short and of necessity superficial. Indeed, so far as I can, I will base what I say on texts that I have read for myself in Greek—you can’t trust translations for something as controversial as sex. Before then, though, I’ll make these limiting points:

First, I’ve set boundaries of 550-300 BC, and not promised to stay inside them. Now, if we apply that to England, you get 1775-2025. At the beginning of this period, get caught with your stiffy a quarter of an inch up someone’s bottom, and you both swung for it. At the end, suggest The Bible may have something to say against two men getting hitched, and five slab-faced pigs will come knocking. If you look for consistency of response in this time, you’ll be disappointed.

Second, if we do have material for a details account of attitudes to all-male sex in England during the past 250 years, and how these have changed, we don’t have anything approaching that for the classical period of Greece. Most of what did exist hasn’t survived. Much of what has survived—Plutarch, for example—is historical writing as far removed from its period as we are from the Elizabethans. Even if you assume stability of response, you can’t extrapolate a statement in Plato to the entirety of Athenian society.

A further point, is that we can assume that whatever the Greeks did think about anything will surprise us. The reason so many of us are obsessed with them after several thousand years is that the Greeks as a whole, and the Athenians in particular, are the exceptional people in history. They achieved things that no one had before. They achieved things that no one, unless under their influence, did again. Even if we often claim to be their intellectual heirs, we exist in a moral environment of which they were ignorant. Most obviously, they had none of those “Thou Shalt Nots” from the various Jewish Patriarch and Church Fathers. This may have given them—and probably did give them—a different view of all-male sex from anything we have had in the past few hundred years. We cannot infer what they believed based on our own assumptions. We cannot perhaps say what they believed based on inferences from what they said, as understood by us in the light of our own assumptions.

This being said, the first may not be so important. The modern period has been a time of continual change in our beliefs about matters of right and wrong. It is unlikely that, until the establishment of Christianity—and perhaps not even then—there was this degree of change in the ancient world. A statement in Plutarch may therefore be applicable to four centuries earlier.

As for the second, that is a problem, and it may be an insuperable problem. So is the third that I have mentioned. However, we can take what information has survived, and press it very hard to see what else it may tell us. We can also try to set aside our own assumptions, and whatever we may want to believe.

So I will begin with the account presently fashionable, that classical Athens was some pederastic utopia. Boys were pursued by older men. Socrates flirted with Alcibiades. Plato wrote dialogues where love between men was not only accepted but ennobled. The most quoted passage is probably that from The Symposium, where Pausanias distinguishes between base and noble forms of love:

There is a Common Love, and there is a Heavenly Love… The love of youths is the Heavenly one, for it is of the male, and the male is by nature more capable of intelligence and virtue. (Symposium 180d–e; [Ἔστιν οῦν ὅυτος ἁ ἐρως οῦρανίου μῑν οῦδέν ἐχων, κοινῊ δὰ ἐπὐ τῐ σῶμα ἀφικνοῦμενος…])

This, according to the television documentaries, was the Greek attitude: not just acceptance of all-male sex, but its idealisation. To desire boys was not merely normal; it was moral. But this may be a partial reading of the evidence. The Greeks were not Christians. They had no word for exclusive sexual preference, and may have had no concept of it. As Kenneth Dover says:

The Greeks had no word for ‘homosexual’ because they had no concept of homosexuality as a condition. — Dover, Greek Homosexuality (1978), Introduction.

This does not allow us to say that acceptance of all-male sex, even in Athens during the time I have set, was general. Even on the evidence that we clearly have, it was structured, and status-bound. It was not the sexuality that mattered. It was the roles, the appearance, the age difference, and the preservation of one’s masculine dignity.

According to the limited evidence we have that is reasonably clear, sexual acts between males were acceptable within a tightly defined structure. The dominant role—the erastēs (ἐραστής)—was occupied by an adult man, typically in his twenties. The passive role—the erōmenos (ἐρώμενος)—was a beardless adolescent, usually between 12 and 17. This relationship was publicly visible, even celebrated in vase-paintings and literature, but it was bound by elaborate social codes.

The boy had to be beautiful. He had to be respectable. He had to be pursued rather than seduced. The erastēs had to show restraint and discretion. The boy, once reaching adulthood, was expected to become an erastēs himself and never again take the passive role.

To violate these roles was to invite ridicule, suspicion, or even exclusion. The primary evidence comes from forensic oratory. Consider Aeschines’ prosecution of Timarchus in 346 BC, where he accuses his opponent of having prostituted himself as a youth:

No Athenian, no foreigner, no slave is left who has not known your shame. (Against Timarchus 1.131; [οὐκ ἐστῐν Ἀθηναῖος, οὐ ξένος, οὐ δοῦλος, ὅς οὐχ ἄισχυνταῖ σου τ\uἐν ἀκολασίαν])

Was all-male sex outside this tightly defined structure generally acceptable? I think it was. At the same time, not all sexual acts between males were as acceptable as they now are among the British authorities and those who take their morality from what is established by the authorities. There seems to have been a strong condemnation of those who were seen as too passive, too available, too feminine. To use was fine. To be used was shameful. To be the active party in anal intercourse with a slave or a foreigner seems to have been morally indifferent. To be the passive party was a cause of disgrace, and often had legal consequences.

The term kinaidos (κίναιδος) was the most common insult for an effeminate man. It denoted one who was not only sexually receptive, but who enjoyed the passive role. The kinaidos danced, painted his face, wore soft clothing, and—most unforgivably—failed to embody andreia, manliness.

The insult appears frequently in forensic oratory. Demosthenes, in Against Conon, describes how his opponent struck him in the face and called him a kinaidos:

He slapped me and shouted, ‘You’re a kinaidos, you’re a whore, I’ll show you how to behave.’ (Against Conon 54.17; [ἐπἀράσθαι ἐκέλευεν λέγων ὅς εῒς κίναιδον καῖ πόρνην καῖ παῖδα ἀσελγῆ])

So there is one limit to acceptance. If this was a general prejudice—and I suspect it was—it made the Athenians less tolerant than many of us now are. Our prejudices are about preferences not acts. Whether we approve or disapprove of all-male sex, I am not aware of any distinctions between giving and taking. Among the Athenians, there may have been no cognizance taken of preferences. But there was a clear distinction between those who gave and those who took. We see evidence for this in the language. The verb used for penetration is different depending on role. The active role used aphrodisiazo (ἀφροδισιάζω) or sunousiazomai (συνουσιάζομαι); the passive might be marked with hupεchο (ὑπέχω—to submit) or terms implying shame.

Is there another limit? Could it be that all-male sex was a custom among the higher classes, but not among the people at large? For example, incestuous marriage was a custom among the Greek kings of Egypt: among all other Greeks, incest was clearly seen as disgusting, and even polluting to the whole community. Can we make a similar case for the acceptance of all-male sex?

There may be some evidence that we can. Aristophanes gives us access to popular attitudes. He often satirises pederasty and its trappings—long-haired youths, eccentric philosophers, inappropriate fondlings. In Clouds (1054–1070), the character of the Weaker Argument defends debauchery with grotesque relish, saying that boys should be taught “to run in and out of the baths, to get rubbed down, to have lovers, to sleep with their legs in the air.”

In Wasps (1297), he mocks young men who lisp, swing their hips, and fuss over perfume. The implicit standard is moderation and masculine self-control. Similarly, in Frogs (1030–1035), the Chorus praises an earlier generation who “kept their thighs unshaven, their voices low, and their passions in check.”

Even among the educated classes, acceptance was not uncritical. Xenophon, in his Symposium, presents a more restrained vision. Socrates in that dialogue praises love between men, but only when it is chaste and directed at virtue:

I find nothing so noble as the friendship of a noble soul for one who is becoming noble. (Symposium 8.12; [ἐγὼ δέ γε οὐδὲν οὕτως εὐγενὲς ἡγοῦμαι ὡς φιλίαν εὐγενεστάτου πρὸς εὐγενῆ γιγνόμενον])

Plato, despite his idealisation of male love, shows in the Laws a growing suspicion of physical passion. By Book VIII, he calls for restrictions on all sexual activity not directed at reproduction.

These are not prohibitions—but they are signs that even among the elite, the enthusiasm had limits.

On the other hand, I do not think any of this is evidence of popular disapproval of all-male sex in itself. Plato is easily dismissed. He seems to have been rather old when he wrote The Laws. Notoriously, men become more puritanical in proportion to the waning of their potency. The greater the intelligence, the greater the ingenuity with which envy is rationalised.

But I turn to the alleged evidence of Aristophanes. If we approach this with the prejudices of the early 20^th century, we can assume a certain level of popular disgust. But set aside these prejudices, and a different picture comes in view. Nothing that we have really suggests disapproval of all-male sex in itself. It only suggests disapproval of excessive passion. I quote Aristotle:

Every virtue lies between two vices. (Nicomachean Ethics II.6 [ἡ  ἀρετὴ μέσον ἐστὶν ἀνὰ δύο κακίας])

What popular audiences sneered at was not all-male sex in itself, but excess and effeminacy. A man who desired boys was tolerable. A man who acted like a boy, or who failed to return to proper adult masculinity, was a kinaidos and worthy of contempt. The kinaidos is not mocked for loving men, but for doing so to excess, or in the wrong way, or too obviously. The humour in Aristophanes comes not from the idea that boys are sexually desirable, but from the absurdity of excess. As with our prejudice against drunkenness, the distaste was for the abuse, not the use.

But I wading into an ocean of contested interpretations. I will only repeat—there there is no word in classical Greek that corresponds to “homosexuality.” There were sexual acts, there were roles, but there seem to have been no sexual identities in the modern sense. This makes it difficult to imagine a prejudice against male preference as such. What one finds instead is a widespread dislike of certain forms of behaviour.

So classical Athens was no queer utopia? It was a society with a complex set of norms—some of which permitted al-male sex, some of which were indifferent to it, but only in structured and hierarchical ways. Step outside those bounds, and you were a joke, a whore, or worse.

If there is a lesson here, it is that the past—like the present—is morally stratified and socially coded. To say “The Greeks accepted homosexuality” is like saying “Victorians accepted empire”: true, but not in any straightforward or uncomplicated sense.

Primary Sources (Greek Editions)

• Aeschines. Contra Timarchum. Edited by Friedrich Blass. Oxford: Oxford Classical Texts, 1908.
• Aristophanes. Comoediae. Edited by F.W. Hall and W.M. Geldart. Oxford: Oxford Classical Texts, 1907.
• Demosthenes. Orationes. Edited by S.H. Butcher. Oxford: Oxford Classical Texts, 1903.
• Plato. Opera, Vol. 2. Edited by John Burnet. Oxford: Oxford Classical Texts, 1901.
• Xenophon. Opera Omnia. Edited by E.C. Marchant and O.J. Todd. Oxford: Oxford Classical Texts, 1921.
• Aristotle. Ethica Nicomachea. Edited by I. Bywater. Oxford: Oxford Classical Texts, 1894.

Translated Editions

• Aeschines. Against Timarchus. In The Speeches of Aeschines, translated by Charles Darwin Adams. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919.
• Aristophanes. Thesmophoriazusae, Clouds, Frogs, Wasps. Translated and edited by Jeffrey Henderson. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
• Demosthenes. Against Conon. In Demosthenes II: Against Meidias and Others, translated by A.T. Murray. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939.
• Plato. Symposium. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989.
• Plato. Laws. Translated by Trevor J. Saunders. London: Penguin Classics, 1970.
• Xenophon. Symposium. Translated by O.J. Todd. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923.
• Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926.
• Modern Scholarship
• Bednarek, Bartlomiej. “Ancient Homophobia: Prejudices against Homosexuality in Classical Athens.” Humanitas 69 (2017): 47–62.
• Cantarella, Eva. Bisexuality in the Ancient World. Translated by Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
• Davidson, James. The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007.
• Dover, K.J. Greek Homosexuality. London: Duckworth, 1978.
• Halperin, David M. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality. New York: Routledge, 1990.
• Hubbard, Thomas K., ed. Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
• Lear, Andrew, and Eva Cantarella. Images of Ancient Greek Pederasty: Boys Were Their Gods. London: Routledge, 2008.
• Vattuone, Ruggero. Il mostro e il sapiente: Studi sull’erotica greca. Bologna: Patron, 2004.

Further Reflections on All-Male Sex in Ancient Greece
An Interim Supplement to My Earlier Essay

After finishing the original article, I returned to the subject with more care. I read Dover’s Greek Homosexuality in full and worked through the essential selections in Hubbard’s Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents. The evidence isn’t always tidy, and it never tells a single story. But I’m getting a better feel for the terrain. I can now say, with more confidence, that the Greeks had no principled objection to all-male sex.

They didn’t think in terms of identity. They didn’t separate people into straight and gay. What mattered was role, not orientation. They expected men to behave like men. If you maintained your dignity, you could sleep with women, boys, or both—and no one would call you deviant.

Athens did regulate sex between males—but only in very specific cases. A male citizen could be barred from public life if he had allowed himself to be penetrated or had prostituted himself for money. This wasn’t about the act. It was about the perception of softness. A man who acted like a woman forfeited his credibility. He could no longer speak in court or vote on matters of war. His sexual history became a political liability.

But this didn’t mean the act itself was despised. It meant that being seen to enjoy submission was damaging to a citizen’s honour. If a foreign boy did the same thing, no one cared. If a slave did it, that was expected. The Greeks did not draw moral lines around all-male sex. They drew status lines. They policed behaviour that brought shame on a man’s position, not behaviour that offended a sense of divine law.

The figure of the kinaidos appears across comedy, oratory, and anecdote. He was not just a man who had sex with other men. He was a man who acted like a woman. He used perfume. He curled his hair. He walked with affected grace. He took the passive role with obvious pleasure. In short, he enjoyed what free men were supposed to endure only in youth, or not at all.

It is easy to mistake the Greeks’ mockery of the kinaidos for an attack on all-male sex in general. It wasn’t. The kinaidos was a stock figure—something like a television caricature. His appearance in court speeches or plays functioned as a shorthand for absurdity. He wasn’t a symbol of sin. He was a punchline.

All-male relationships that followed the erastēs/erōmenos pattern were mostly confined to the elite. They required time, money, and a social setting like the symposium. An older male citizen would court a boy with gifts, music, and sometimes poetry. The boy was supposed to be flattered but restrained. He might give in, but not quickly. And if he did, he had to avoid the appearance of eagerness.

This model was idealised, but it was not universal. Poorer citizens didn’t have access to symposia. They worked long hours and lived in small homes. They may have pursued boys informally, or visited prostitutes, or simply done without. What they didn’t do, so far as the record shows, is campaign against elite sexual culture. The orators who attack men like Timarchus or Demosthenes use class resentment—but not on moral grounds. They accuse their enemies of behaving like women, not of lusting after boys.

Aristophanes and other comic writers give us glimpses of Athenian street opinion. They ridicule effeminacy and lavish courtship, but they never treat all-male sex as outrageous in itself. The plays assume that older men desire boys. They assume that boys try to manage this attention. They treat both as part of the landscape.

The fact that such jokes could be made at all tells us something. All-male sex was normal enough to be mocked without scandal. There was no need to explain it, let alone justify it.

Some inscriptions and paintings show pairings outside the formal erastēs/erōmenos type. Boys of the same age, men with servants, soldiers with each other—these appear without commentary. There is no sign of disapproval. The same goes for the graffiti recorded in Thera and the tomb epigrams collected in Hubbard’s Sourcebook. These show affection, even grief. They don’t read like coded shame.

This confirms that the idealised model was one of several, not the only one. The Greeks accepted variety. They expected norms to be observed, but they also knew that people didn’t always conform.

Plato’s Laws does contain a voice of dissent. The Athenian Stranger calls all-male sex “unnatural” and unworthy of honour. But the rest of Plato’s work doesn’t echo this. In the Symposium, male love is the route to wisdom. In the Phaedrus, it is the soul’s response to divine beauty. Socrates resists Alcibiades not because he finds him disgusting, but because he doesn’t want to be distracted.

The Laws is an outlier. Its call for restraint belongs to a later age—a time of decline and fear, not confidence. It doesn’t reflect Athenian practice. It reflects anxiety over disorder.

I no longer think it’s quite right to say the Greeks “accepted” all-male sex, because that suggests they saw it as a moral question. They didn’t. They assumed it happened. They expected it to follow certain rules. They punished it only when it brought dishonour or disorder.

The moral categories we reach for—tolerance, repression, identity—don’t quite fit. Greek culture was permissive, but also deeply concerned with reputation. You could love boys, so long as you didn’t act like one. You could pursue beauty, so long as you retained your composure. You could express desire, but you couldn’t grovel.

In short, what mattered wasn’t whom you wanted. It was what you looked like while wanting him.

Main Sources Consulted

• Kenneth James Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Harvard University Press, 1978)
• Thomas K. Hubbard (ed.), Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents (University of California Press, 2003)