Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

170 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
out his wife to another man for the purpose of impregnating her.
Given the extreme emphasis that was placed both on virginity
and on women’s fidelity, it would have required much ingenuity
and not a little luck to conduct a sexual liaison with a well-bred
woman. Perhaps for this reason, the image of a Don Juan is alien
to Greek culture, other than in the person of Zeus. In myth, even
the Trojan prince Paris, the most notorious of all philanderers,
remained faithful to the woman he seduced. The exception that
proves the rule is Alkibiades, who was much admired by men and
women, and who boasted that he had bedded (and impregnated)
a Spartan queen.
At the same time, there was open acknowledgement of the fact that
male sexuality could not be contained by marriage. Both married
and unmarried men were, therefore, free to engage in sex with prostitutes
or slaves. The famous myth of Pandora (“All-gifted”), told by
Hesiod in Theogony, defines women as “a beautiful evil” which men
cannot resist, evidently because of their sexual appetite and vulnerability
to female charms. These characteristics are made comic sport
of in Aristophanes’ masterpiece Lysistrata, which presupposes that
an international sex strike by women (or more accurately, by wives)
will bring about peace by reducing all the combatants to another
kind of impotence. The popular notion that men were slaves to their
sexual appetites was balanced by the medical belief that women
needed to have sexual intercourse for their physical and mental
well-being (see section on Health and Sickness in this chapter).
Nakedness
The Greeks were remarkably unabashed about the depiction of
male genitals in art. Statues of naked youths in the guise of Apollo
served as funerary markers. Herms, stone pillars with carved heads
and phalluses, marked the boundaries of properties. Giant phalluses
were borne aloft by Athenian virgins in Dionysiac processions.
In the performance of comic plays, actors wore oversize phalluses
made out of padding to draw attention to their sexual organs. It was
also acceptable for a man to display himself naked before other men,
particularly in a religious context. Male athletes practiced naked at
the gymnasium—the word means “the place of nakedness”—and
they also performed naked at the festival games. It was evidently
for this reason that women were not allowed to approach the sanctuary
of Olympian Zeus during the Olympic Games or indeed any
other sanctuary where men were competing naked.