User:Yobmod/LGBT themes in classical mythology

Greco-Roman mythology feature male same-sex love in many of the constituent myths. These myths have been described as being crucially influential on Western LGBT literature, with the original myths being constantly re-published and re-written, and the relationships and characters serving as icons. In comparison, lesbianism is rarely found in classical myths.


 * Achilles and Patroclus
 * Achilles and Troilus
 * Ameinias and Narcissus
 * Apollo and Hyacinth
 * Apollo and Hymenaios
 * Chrysippus and Laius
 * Daphnis and Pan


 * Dionysus and Ampelus
 * Dionysus and Prosymnus
 * Euryalus and Nisus
 * Heracles and Abderus
 * Heracles and Hylas
 * Heracles and Iolaus
 * Ianthe and Iphis


 * Poseidon and Pelops
 * Polyeidos and Glaucus
 * Orpheus and the Thracians
 * Orpheus and Kalais
 * Silvanus and Cyparissus
 * Zeus (Artemis) and Callisto
 * Zeus and Ganymede

The patron god of hermaphrodites and transvestites is Dionysis, a god gestated in the thigh of his father Zeus, after his mother died from being overwhelmed by Zeus's true form. Other gods are sometimes considered patrons of homosexual love between males, such as the love godess Aphrodite and gods in her retinue, such as the Erotes: Eros, Himeros and Pothos. Eros is also part of a trinity of gods that played roles in homoerotic relationships, along with Heracles and Hermes, who bestowed qualities of Beauty (and Loyalty), strength, and eloquence, respectively, onto male lovers. In the poetry of Sappho, Aphrodite is identified as the patron of lesbians.

Function of myth
The literariness of myth, however, is but part of the story. Mythological scholarship has discerned many additional features and functions: Myths explain origins; the genesis of everything from the cosmos, the gods, or mankind to the emergence of a species of flower. They can accomplish in a non-abstractive mode some explanatory functions of philosophy or science; yet the physical sciences and philosophy tend to refute and reject myths, the literary and other arts to adopt, adapt, and invent them.

Variant versions are rather the rule than the exception. Myths may combine with rituals and cults to compose the religious experience of a community. Anonymous for the most part, myths are as if communal dreams emanating from the unconscious of a people. The truth-value varies, with myths believable as literally true within the orbit of the culture that spawns them and deemed erroneous or fictitious elsewhere; yet elsewhere they may also be viewed as imparters of archetypal and psychological verities. Finally, they may mirror, account for, and validate social institutions, such as, for example, the male pederastypederasty that prevailed in ancient Greece.

The Greco-Roman myths concerning same-sex love have been of crucial importance to the Western gay and lesbian literary heritage, both as texts and as icons.

Myth and literature are deeply interdependent and often indistinguishable. Being, in essence, the traditional tales told about gods and about human or semidivine heroes, myths generally take a narrative though sometimes a dramatic form. Usually they are first recorded in poetry, as Homer and Hesiod demonstrate with respect to the classical mythology that is to be focused on here.

The Iliad and Odyssey, from the eighth century, and Theogony, from around 700 B.C.E., are our prime and richest sources of the Greek myths, but the poems are themselves mythic, that is, they belong equally in the fields of the mythologist and of the literary scholar. Aristotle ranks plot--or muthos, the source of our word myth--as the first element of tragedy and epic.

In the Poetics (Chap. 6) muthos refers to "the combination of the incidents, or things done in the story," but the Greek tragedies and Homeric epics that Aristotle has in mind are mythic also in the sense of being "imitations"--or representations--of the legendary actions of divine and heroic agents. Thus Aristotelian poetics enables us to equate myth with the plot that is the "life and soul" of the poems in the two highest literary genres.

Pindar uses a lyric form, the ode, to draw upon and contribute to the treasures of Hellenic mythology. The Latin works that are most remarkable for being at once literature as (Greco-Roman) myth and myth as literature are Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses. Though reflecting the mores and religious beliefs as well as biases of the Greek and Roman ancients, these myths transcend their native civilizations to play a crucial role in the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

They do so in several ways: by bearing witness to awesome societies of the past wherein at least some forms of homosexuality were naturalized and exalted; by making a rich vein of positive images, tropes, and allusions available for textualizations of same-sex love; and by enabling Western writers of later periods to read and represent their lived experience of homoeroticism in the timeless light of classical mythology.

Mythical Originators of Same-Sex Love
Mythology is obsessed with origins; hence the focus on the provenance of same-sex love. A number of originators are designated in myths, either with respect to a particular locale, as Orpheus in the case of Thrace, or as radical innovators. Another Thracian bard, Thamyris, is regarded by some as the first to love another male, with Hyacinthus or Hymenaeus (both of whom Apollo loved too) and perhaps Narcissus as the objects of his passion; but he seems not to have won any of them, or at least we are never informed that he did.

Hellenic Pederasty
During the seventh century, the male pederastic practices characteristic of Hellenic civilization took root. In following the received code of conduct, a citizen of the polis, a man who had or could have a beard, was in his twenties or older, and either single or married, would amorously consort with a freeborn adolescent who was still without facial hair and might have been as young as twelve and was rarely over eighteen.

Each partner took--or at least was expected to take--a prescribed role: The man was to be active, the initiator, impassioned, the wooer with words and with gifts, a strong pedagogical influence, and the recipient of orgasmic pleasure by means of penile insertion from a frontal position between the closed thighs of the youth; he, in turn, was supposed to be passive, reluctant, unaroused, educationally benefited, and if he chose to grant his sexual favors, to do so standing, staring straight ahead, and without an erection or delectation.

Later, though the loverly aspect of the association faded when hair defaced the younger countenance, the two were likely to remain joined in friendship. The lover was the erastes, the beloved the eromenos. It was these conventions that governed the behaviors imputed to the deities and heroes in the post-Homeric and post-Hesiodic myths.

When the gods in classical mythology fall homoerotically in love, they never do so with other gods or with adult human males; rather they always do so with a mortal youth. They enter into liaisons in which they, like Zeus, act the part of the erastes to an adolescent who, like Ganymede, serves as the eromenos. The sexual acts imagined to be performed by the divine-human lovers, though not described in detail, can be assumed to conform, just as the structure of the relationship does, to the cultural ideal of pederastic unions.

The Oedipus Complex
Laius as founder of the paiderasteia, as the Greek institution of pederasty is called, is especially interesting in connection with the psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus complex. The informing and defining myth of this psychosexual process details the relations of the eponymous hero with his parents Laius and Jocasta. According to Freud, the father (the Laius ectype) has crucial functions in the sexual development of the son (the Oedipus ectype), and if he performs them successfully, the boy can move along a libidinal path toward the goal, reached at puberty, of choosing a female love-object (a Jocasta-substitute figure). Now what happens to this theory when the grand passion of the archetypal father turns out to be an adolescent boy? Could that paternal figure be effectual in helping to bring the conflict with the son to a heterosexual resolution? Discussions of the Oedipus complex in either its positive or negative forms rarely take into account Laius's pederastic libido.

The Relative Infrequence of Same-Sex Love in Greco-Roman Myth
This survey, though not exhaustive, covers most of the homoerotic myths of antiquity and the principal ones. Among some notable omissions are Virgil's mythoheroic young lovers Nisus and Euryalis in the Aeneid (9.176-449) and his mythopastoral Corydon whose love-complaint fills the second Eclogue. Yet what may surprise, in light of the ubiquity of boy-loving among the Hellenes, is not how many but how relatively few of the myths tell of same-sex love. About half of the major gods of the Greek pantheon have no intermale involvements, these being Ares, Hephaestus, Hades, and apparently Hermes, even though one obscure myth does suggest otherwise. Moreover, the heterosexual love stories of gods and heroes are far more numerous and on the whole better known than the mythic homosexual stories.

None of the extant Greek tragedies with their mythological plots dramatizes single-sex loves although some lost ones did, including Euripides's Chrysippus as well as Aeschylus's Myrmidones. If we had no other evidence than the myths themselves to go on, we would have quite an inadequate sense of how extensive the practice and approval of pederastic erotics really were.

The Absence of Lesbianism in Greco-Roman Myth
Nevertheless, the gay heritage from this great body of Western mythology is rich, and much richer, sad to say, than the lesbian heritage. Lesbianism hardly exists in the myths. No goddess ever has sexual relations with another goddess, or with a nymph, or with a girl. Nor, at the human level, do women fall in love with women. Not even the Amazons, through living in an exclusively female society and warriors in a female army, did so. They had sexual unions once a year with men of neighboring tribes for the purpose of breeding daughters (sons they destroyed), but they did not become lovers to one another.

Ovid writes of a girl-loving girl, but in a narrative that views lesbian feelings with abhorrence. Iphis was brought up as a boy because her Cretan father would have killed a daughter at her birth. At thirteen, she was betrothed to Ianthe, whom she loved passionately but with the sense that such same-sex love was unnatural and monstrous. On the eve of the wedding, a merciful goddess solved her desperate dilemma with a miraculous sex-change, turning her actually into the boy she had always seemed (Metamorphoses 9.666-797).

The Rape of Ganymede
Of all the myths from Greco-Roman antiquity that treat of male homoeroticism, the rape of Ganymede deserves first place. The youngest son of Tros, eponymous king of Troy, he excelled in physical beauty, and that determined his fate. He was tending flocks or else hunting game one day when Zeus, having fallen in love with him, swooped down in the form of an eagle (or, in a variant, sent an eagle), seized him, bore him to Mount Olympus, and there made him the cup-bearer of the gods--in place of Hebe--and his own ever-youthful beloved. Tros was grief-stricken at his loss, until Zeus sent him some superlative horses as a compensatory gift and the message that his son would never age or die, whereupon his sorrow turned into joy. Hera (the Romans' Juno) was doubly offended, as mother of the displaced Hebe, also goddess of youth, and as the chief god's ever jealous wife.

Zeus was an inveterate womanizer, and "goddessizer," but his way with female partners was to impregnate them and leave; he had never brought any of his women to live on Olympus nor granted any of them divine immortality. Ganymede may have been his only masculine love, but he was special. Eventually he was celestialized as the constellation Aquarius, the "water-bearer."

The Ganymede legend goes all the way back to the Iliad, where, however, it differs significantly from the more familiar later version. The boy was already the son of a Tros recompensed with horses (5.265-269), but no eagle abducts him. Some unnamed gods, finding him "the loveliest born of the race of mortals," do so instead, and they take him up to dwell with them and to be the wine-pourer of Zeus (20.230-235). He is not said to be enamored of the youth, to whom the divinities apparently respond aesthetically rather than erotically. Neither Homer nor Hesiod ever explicitly ascribes homosexual experiences to the gods or to heroes. The sexualization of Zeus's role in the myth came later, possibly not before the sixth century. The exaltation of Ganymede as inamorato of Zeus gives male homosexuality its most celebrated myth--and one of far-reaching effects. This myth particularly, if not uniquely, has proved a godsend to gay artists and writers ever since the Italian Renaissance. That the supreme god exemplifies and sanctions homoerotic love has been taken as classic paganism's answer, alternative, and antidote to the harsh, vindictive, and, in the usual exegesis, antihomosexual story of Sodom and Gomorrah at Genesis 19 (whence "sodomysodomy" and "sodomite"), which is all that Judeo-Christian mythology has to offer lesbian and gay culture.

And in the area of ordinary language, from the Middle Ages until well into the seventeenth century a ganymede--the name turned into a common noun--was a "sexually submissive or kept boy" or a "catamitecatamite," a sixteenth-century synonym from the Latin catamitus, which in turn is said to derive from the Greek name Ganymedes.

Poseidon and Pelops
Poseidon desired the young Pelops, ivory-shouldered and the son of Zeus's son Tantalus. The sea-god came to him by chariot, took him off to Olympus, and made him his beloved. That was before the arrival of Ganymede, who, however, remained there, whereas Pelops after a time was returned to the world of mortals. In adulthood, he wished to wed Hippodamia, but her kingly father would give her only to the suitor who could defeat him in a chariot race. None had. So Pelops sought help from his powerful friend, reminding Poseidon of the joy he had found in their love, and obtained from him, also the god of horses, a chariot of gold drawn by winged steeds with which to win the race and bride. (In a variant, he wins by trickery.)

Here the divine erastes is impassioned at first and takes the initiative, then keeps the beloved only during his adolescence, and afterward proves to be an amicable and dependable benefactor. Pindar created this homoerotic myth in an ode, Olympian I, to substitute for another myth, wherein Pelops is cannibalized by a deity, that the poet disapproved of as impious.

The Homosexual Loves of Phoebus Apollo
Phoebus Apollo--with his eternally smooth and splendid body the very model of the ephebe--had many male loves, more than any other god, but the two of his romances we know most about are those with Hyacinthus and Admetus.

Hyacinthus was, like Ganymede, preeminently handsome and the teenaged youngest son of a king--here king of Sparta. At least two gods sought his affection, as did a man, Thamyris, a legendary bard of Thrace. He boasted that he could outdo the Muses in song, and when they heard about that--some say from Apollo with malice toward a rival--they punished him by depriving him of his sight, voice, and art. Zephyrus, the West Wind, was another who desired Hyacinthus. This rivalry of gods for the love of a youth may be singular. Hyacinthus chose Apollo. One day they stripped and oiled themselves and the divine erastes demonstrated how to throw a discus, but it somehow miscarried and struck his eromenos a fatal blow on the head. In some versions, Zephyrus was so smitten with jealousy that he blew the discus on its killing way.

The death, whether or not accidental, was devastating to Apollo. He was unable to save the boy but caused a flower to spring from his blood--the hyacinth, and traced on its petals were letters, whether his Greek initial Y or else AI AI to signify his lover's cry of "woe." Apollo's loves tended to wind up plants. Daphne became the laurel, for another example, and the cypress came from Cyparissus, a boy dear to the god. This eromenos, having accidentally killed a favorite stag, was so distraught that he wished to mourn forever. The gods obliged by changing him into the mourning tree.

As a punishment for slaying the Cyclopes, Apollo once had to spend a year in servitude to Admetus in Thessaly. He burned with desire for the fair young king and made him his beloved. During that year of love, the royal livestock increased phenomenally. Later Phoebus exerted his supernatural powers on behalf of Admetus, as an ex-lover should, for example in enabling him to perform an impossible task set by Alcestis's father as a condition for marrying her, or in inducing the Fates to spare his life if someone would agree to die in his stead.

But a problem arises over whether the erastes-eromenos relationship can be compatible with that of servant and master. Would the god have been conceived of as socially inferior while sexually on top? Some mythologists recently have doubted that Apollo could have been the erastes. But with no ancient evidence to the contrary, the mythic anomaly remains intact.

Dionysus and Ampelus
The first love of Dionysus (the Latin Bacchus), according to a myth from the fifth century C.E., was a boy named Ampelus. The two wrestled, swam, and hunted together. Ampelus befriended animals, and one day encountering a bull, he mounted it, only to be thrown from it, gored, and killed. The god was heartbroken and shed his first tears, and was comforted only on learning that the beloved body would turn into the vine. This metamorphic consequence of male-male love both gave the world wine and enabled Dionysus to fulfill his destiny to be its god.

A truly eccentric theistic myth is another one, likewise late, concerning Dionysus; we cannot tell how old it was when Clement of Alexandria recorded it in the second century C.E. Dionysus wanted to go to Hades to rescue his mother Semele but did not know the way. He asked someone called Polymnus for help. The man agreed to direct him there if on his return he would submit to him sexually.

The god swore to do so, but when he came back he could not find Polymnus, who meanwhile had died. Dionysus located his grave, there carved the branch of a fig tree into the shape of a phallus, and sat upon it to keep his promise. Here the god is decidedly not an erastes, and he breaches the classical Greek pederastic ethic in two ways: by the willingness both to accept anal penetration and to give his body to pay a debt. The tale is no doubt for purists an instance of Hellenistic decadence.

The Satyrs and Pan
Fellatio was just not Greek, except when done by female prostitutes in the social order and by male satyrs in the mythic. The latter were part-human and part-animal figures, with equine tails, ears, sometimes legs, and genitals, which were massive in a culture where the model human physique was graced with a small penis. Satyrs were polymorphous in their sensuality, and their diverse lascivious activities pictured on vases include, besides fellatio, masturbation. Pan, the pastoral and nature god, with his pipes and the horns, legs, and tail of a goat, would indulge in autoeroticism too; and though a compulsive nymph-chaser, he also liked shepherd boys--in particular Daphnis.

Heracles and Hylas and Iolas
The boyfriends of heroes generally have the same qualities as those of gods--adolescence and astonishing pulchritude, along with royal blood or divine forebears. Hylas, whose parents were a king and a nymph, had these properties; and Heracles (the Roman Hercules), after slaying his father Thiodamas in a dispute, took him away and became his surrogate father and erastes, teaching him all that a hero should know. Master and pupil were mutually devoted and inseparable. They joined Jason, in quest of the golden fleece, aboard the Argo. At Chios, the Argonauts disembarked and began to prepare a meal. Hylas wandered off by himself to fetch water for his lover, and as he bent over a spring to fill his pitcher, the nymph of the water was dazzled by his beauty and grace and pulled him into her element to be her paramour. He cried out, but to no avail.

Heracles frantically sought his lost eromenos and got the local inhabitants to join in the fruitless search. While it was going on, the Arognauts, with the winds favorable, set sail and left the bereft hero behind. Iolaus, Heracles' nephew, the son of his half or twin brother Iphicles, was initially his eromenos and afterward continued as a lifelong companion who shared in many of the hero's exploits and adventures. Here the pederastic eros of uncle for nephew grew into deep and abiding philia, in contrast to the love between Heracles and Hylas that was aborted when the love was still in an erotic phase.

Orpheus and Male Love
Orpheus, the Thracian singer and classical pattern of the poet-musician, was woebegone after failing at the very last moment to regain his wife Eurydice from Hades. Thereafter, whether from a continuing commitment to her or from the pain of losing her twice, he resolved to shun women (and was later butchered for so doing by resentful maenads). Instead, he gave "his love to tender boys . . . enjoying the springtime and first flower of their youth." He introduced pederastic behavior into Thrace, but his mode of conduct as represented in Ovid's Metamorphoses (10.83-85) may be criticizable from an Hellenic viewpoint for being rather promiscuous and nonpedagogical.

King Laius of Thebes as the Originator of Homosexuality
Although other scattered and peripheral stories may deal with the initiation of homosexuality, the most widespread Hellenic traditions were that it arose in Crete or, alternatively, that Laius, the king of Thebes and the father killed by his son Oedipus, deserves credit for its invention. When the Theban throne was usurped for a time, Laius was exiled to the court of Pelops in Pisa, where he was hospitably received. Of Pelops' many sons, the youngest and favorite was Chrysippus, whose mother was not the queen Hippodamia but a nymph. He was a young beauty, and Laius, when teaching him to drive a chariot, fell passionately in love with him, thus bringing pederastic eros into being.

Later when Laius was recalled by his subjects, he abducted the youth, who was the great love of his life, and returned with him to Thebes. The aftermaths vary considerably. In one version, Chrysippus killed himself for shame; in another, Hippodamia killed him sleeping in Laius's bed and used Laius's sword to pin the crime on him, but the dying boy cleared his lover of suspicion. Or else was he murdered by his half brothers Atreus and Thyestes? The Sphinx may have been sent to Thebes by Hera as a punishment for the king's abduction of Chrysippus.

Achilles, Patroclus, and the Love of Heroes
Does Achilles make love with Patroclus in the Iliad? The text does not expressly say so, and that settles the matter for most classicists and mythologists. Yet there are dissenting voices, some holding that the love of the heroes is tacitly sexual, and others persuasively arguing that their attachment is homophilichomophilic in the sense of loverlike feelings without carnal intimacy. For nearly all Hellenic writers and commentators, however, the question was not were they lovers--they were; rather it was which one took which sexual role. Achilles, the younger but dominant one, was commonly deemed the erastes.

In Myrmidones, a lost play by Aeschylus that survives only in two brief fragments, Achilles, contemplating Patroclus dead, recalls "our frequent kisses" and dotes on the eromenos's thighs, for it would have been between them that he derived his genital pleasure. In the Symposium, Plato has Phaedrus disagree with Aeschylus and contend that Patroclus, as the older one and less fair, should be the erastes. The Greeks of the classical period had to assimilate the relationship of the archaic heroes to their own pederastic categories, however inappropriate these were when the lovers were both past adolescence.

Narcissus and Same-Sex Love
The exquisite Narcissus was the desired of many, male and female alike, but was sexually unmoved by one and all. In a Greek myth, he sent a sword as a gift to Ameinias, a young man who wooed him and was spurned. The would-be erastes plunged the blade into himself outside the house of the cruel Narcissus and died cursing him. A little later Narcissus looked into water and was captivated, at last, by the person he found therein. But it was, alas, himself, and so in frustration he committed suicide. Out of the bloodshed, the first narcissus bloomed.

In Ovid's later and far better known version, (Metamorphoses 3.341-510), Narcissus, at sixteen, was again indifferent to suitors of both sexes. His most pathetic victim was the nymph Echo who, on being repudiated, wasted away to a mere voice. When Narcissus lay beside the pool and, looking in, fell in love with the face he beheld, he thought it was someone else's, that of a youth of his own age who appeared to be returning the love. He could not comprehend why the two of them, though they stretched out their arms to each other, could not embrace. Then all at once it dawned on him that he and the other were one and the same. This recognition made him so despondent that he pined away with thwarted desire and succumbed. His corpse metamorphosed into the narcissus.

It is a pity that Narcissus, when self-infatuated, never found the obvious outlet of autoeroticism. Was it because male masturbation was too grossly satyric to be tolerable to Ovid and his Roman readers? Then again, when Narcissus says, "What I desire I have" (quod cupio mecum est), the words would seem to denote satisfaction, which is what he should attain, if one listens to Freud. Freud makes narcissism a major factor in homosexual orientation. Accordingly, inverts "are plainly seeking themselves as a love-object," and a narcissist may love "what he himself is (i.e. himself)." Just so with Narcissus; he does in fact have the male love-object he seeks, does possess what he loves (himself).

But that possession of the loved self does not bring the fruition anticipated in the theory, bringing instead despair and self-repudiation: "O that I might be parted from my own body." Narcissus, then, at best but partially exemplifies Freudian narcissism.

Sappho, Plato, and Lesbian Love


Between Sappho in the early sixth century and Plato two centuries later, Hellenic writing was silent on the subject of lesbian sexuality.

Sappho of Lesbos, the island that yielded our elegant term for the love between women that she wrote about, was so highly regarded as a poet as to be dubbed "the tenth muse"; she habitually appeals to Aphrodite in her amatory lyrics, thereby establishing the goddess as the patroness of lesbian as she is of other types of love.

Plato composed for the Symposium and assigned to Aristophanes a myth to account for sexual orientations. Once upon a time the human race consisted of people whose shape was round and whose bodily parts were like ours but doubled and somewhat rearranged; and each person was a member of one of three sexes: male, female, and male-female.

They were so powerful that the gods felt threatened, and Zeus hit upon the expedient of weakening them by cutting them in half. The result was that each thereafter sought to unite with the missing half through love: The homosexual desired his other male half, the lesbian her other female half, and the formerly androgynousandrogynous one desired his or her counterpart of the other sex.

This myth is truly remarkable. It shows that the notion of a sexual identity innate to the human personality is very old, and thus it roundly refutes the contention of those gay theorists who insist that homosexual identity is a concept that could not possibly have predated the invention of the word homosexual in the later nineteenth century.

Besides, this myth legitimates lesbian love by putting it on the same level as male-male and opposite-sex love--a radical move in the Athens of that time.

Society as organized within the Greek polis was indeed phallocentricphallocentric. The virile member was highly privileged--if, that is, it belonged to a freeborn adult, for his sexual hegemony extended over eromenoi and wife, as also over slaves and prostitutes. However honorable their paiderasteia may have been to the Greeks, they were severely homophobichomophobic when it came to lesbianism, Sappho and the Symposium notwithstanding.

The Romans had a different erotics of pederasty: The boys they made love with were slaves, but they were just as averse to romances between women. The classical myths manifest cultural biases in their ignoring and ignorance of lesbian love.