Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by Eric Berkowitz Page B

of treason, i.e., taking payoffs from Philip. Everyone on the jury knew the players by reputation, so it must have been quite a shock when Aeschines managed to change the subject from his own alleged corruption to Timarchus’s prior sex life.
    Aeschines accomplished this by filing his own suit against Timarchus. He had only a few hours to speak, so he delivered his twenty-thousand-word speech at warp speed, steamrolling the jury with details about how Timarchus had, in his youth, bounced from house to house, giving his “well-developed, young” body to hungry men and even to a slave. “This foul wretch here was not disturbed by the fact that he was going to defile himself,” boomed Aeschines, “but thought of one thing only, of getting [the slave] to be paymaster for his own disgusting lusts; to the question of virtue or of shame he never gave a thought.” A man so weak, so willing to turn himself into a “creature with the body of a man defiled with the sins of a woman,” he said, could neither accuse him of treason nor show his face in court.
    Undoubtedly it was the seriousness of the treason charge that made Aeschines strike back so hard. He must also have been concerned that because Timarchus’s wrongdoing had occurred so many years earlier, the jury might be prone to making light of the issue. Whatever the reason, he smeared his opponent as one who had not only done wrong but was, in light of his past, incapable of ever doing right.
    The strategy worked. Aeschines won by a narrow margin, and Timarchus later hanged himself. In the fray, the critical question of whether Athens had indeed been sold out to a dangerous enemy was subordinated, at least for a while, to the popular fascination with dirty sex. This was not the last time a public figure’s sex life would be hauled out of obscurity to wreck him politically, but in its scope and effect Against Timarchus remains a milestone. Prominent men like Timarchus, who lived in the public eye, were probably subject to stricter behavioral standards than the average citizens sitting on the jury. Still, the law forbade all men who “feminized” themselves for money, or who seemed to enjoy it too much, from public life. The defeat of Timarchus was a lesson in caution for all Athenians. 9

FINDING A BALANCE
     
    Given this minefield of punishment and shame, how were male-male relationships to be managed? Could anyone ever have passive sex and still have a civic profile? Not likely, if he was an adult. For a boy it was still risky, as Against Timarchus shows, but possible, if rigid courtship rules were followed.
    “A love affair in itself is neither right nor wrong, but right when it is conducted rightly and wrong when it is conducted wrongly,” said Plato. A good male lover was supposed to be “constant” in his feelings, and love the boy’s character as well as his body. When this noble purpose was matched by the boy’s interest in acquiring wisdom, the union was “heavenly.” “[T]hen and then alone is it right for a boyfriend to gratify his lover.”
    Homoerotic love was almost a zero-sum equation in which a man’s honor in winning a boy was equaled, potentially, by the boy’s dishonor in being taken. If the boy submitted too readily, he risked being viewed as woman-like or even bestial. If he resisted too much, he stood to lose the sponsorship of an elder who could help him get ahead in the world. His ambition was, in a sense, achieved at the potential cost of his status.
    That said, adolescent boys were the main objects of desire for Athenian men, and they did submit. Greek boys (at least those belonging to the elite) were taught to accept sexual intercourse in the same way that respectable Victorian ladies were taught to put up with it: not as a pleasure, but as a duty. It was wrong to be caught quickly, and boys were supposed to maximize their advantages by playing suitors off one another. The cat-and-mouse process bestowed honor on the successful