GREEK HOMOSEXUALITY

182 Ill Special Aspects and Developments
relationships were expressed hardly suffices to tell us whether Sappho,
the girls of Lesbos and the members of Aikman's choruses sought to
induce orgasms in one another by bodily contact. Sappho fr. 94 (p. 175)
and Plu. Lye. 18.9 suggest that they did, and that the male population of
Lesbos and Sparta in the archaic period knew very well that they did;
outside the Socratic circle it cannot have been very common for a Greek
to hear erotic language and not suppose that those who used it took
pleasure in genital acts when the opportunity presented itself. If I am
right in suggesting that in Attic art and literature female homosexuality
was, for all practical purposes, a taboo subject (p. 173 ), an important
variation between regions and periods becomes apparent; variation of
this kind will be discussed in Chapter IV Part A. The late date at which
adverse comment was passed on Sappho's homosexuality may be
explicable by reference to the part played by Athenian social, moral
and cultural attitudes (not forgetting the increasing importance of
-philosophical preoccupations in educated Athenian society of the
fourth century) in determining Hellenistic moral criteria. 33
One other consideration is relevant to this question. In discussing
Greek female homosexuality I have avoided the words 'lesbian' and
'lesbianism', and for a good reason. 34 In antiquity ·Lesbian
women' could connote sexual initiative and shamelessness
( cf. Pherekrates fr. 149, where it is taken in the sense laikastriaz) ; 35
Hesykhios A. 692 defines lesbiazein as 'fellate' (cf. Suda 306), and
when Philokleon in Ar. Wasps 1345f. says to the girl whom he has
brought home from a party 'I got you away pretty smartly when you
were just going to lesbiazein the guests' he is obviously not referring to
any conceivable homosexual propensities on the girl's part but
simply translating 'flirt with the guests' into the coarse and extreme
terms regularly adopted in comedy. 36 In Lucian's Dialogues of
33. On the growth of inhibition and sexual respectability in the fourth and third
centuries B.C. cf. p.151.
34. Cf. Kroll (1924) 2100. Symonds 71 misstates the facts about the term 'Lesbian'.
35. In imagining that the speaker comments on a proffered gift of Lesbian women
'with satisfaction' Gentili (1973) 126 overlooks the sarcasm of 'That's a fine gift!' (cf.
Eur. Cyclops 551 and Denniston 128).
36. To say, as Giangrande does (131f.), that 'Lesbian' necessarily implied fellation
to the exclusion of other sexual modes goes a little beyond the evidence; some
references to 'Lesbian' behaviour in comedy were so interpreted by later
commentators on comedy, and I am sure they were right in some of these cases, but
the comic passages themselves do not justify so narrow an interpretation (cf. in
particular Ar. Accl. 920, with Ussher's note ad loc.). It is also misleading to say
(Giangrande 132) that the verb khaskein, 'applied to girls in amatory contexts, is the
tenninus technicus denoting eagerness to fellare'. It means ~open the mouth', and
fellation is impossible without opening the mouth, but that is not the kind of thing