gender horror in W. H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles”

Hephaestus polishing Achilles's shield for Thetis

In the Iliad, Achilles’s goddess-mother Thetis asks the iron-forging god Hephaestos to make new armor for Achilles. Achilles needed new armor to rejoin the horrific violence against men of the Trojan War. About seven years after the end of World War II, W. H. Auden in his poem “The Shield of Achilles” recast Hephaestos making Achilles’s armor. Auden represented gender horror in a more subtle way than did the Iliad.

Auden’s poem begins with “she.” That “she” is Achilles’s goddess-mother Thetis:

She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign. [1]

Men have long revered a great mother goddess. Like a young child, Achilles revered his mother Thetis. He prayed to her for help. Hephaestos, who regarded himself as deeply indebted to Thetis, would do anything for her. He credited Thetis with acting courageously to save his life after his mother, the hateful head-goddess Hera, threw him off Mount Olympus because of his physical disability. In the Iliad, Thetis isn’t a demure, passive goddess who merely looks over men’s shoulders.[2]

inspecting shield for Achilles, Thetis sees herself reflected in it as Hephaestus polishes the other side

Auden represented Thetis according to the gender pieties of post-World War II men. Auden’s Thetis is pure, innocent, and moral:

She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The woman Thetis wants to see fruitful nature, well-governed, peacefully trading cities, and traditional religious beliefs and practices. The man Hephaestos represents the artificial, inorganic, cruelty of modern, bureaucratic society. The officials and sentries are men. The ordinary decent folk are women. The abstract, scarcely colored figures are men suffering penal punishment. One of those men would come to be in modern medieval scholarship the model for “WomanChrist.”[3] No one laughs.

Achilles with his pride died seeking glory in violence against men. In the honor culture of archaic Greece, pride and shame were the measure of men. That measure separates men from the ordinary joys of life. After World War II, ordinary men, like the three pale figures in Auden’s poem, faced the honor-culture measure of men:

The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes liked to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

The three pale figures bound to three posts died as men because they lost their pride. That isn’t like Jesus and one of the two thieves crucified with him.[4]

Gender stereotypes deny men’s feelings and obscure the emotional horror of violence against men. So it is in Auden’s poem:

She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept. [5]

Why did Auden write, “That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third”? The prevalence of boys being raped is about equal to the prevalence of girls being raped. Violence against males typically isn’t explicitly specified. The victim is merely “a third.” The mediated masses don’t weep because men are raped or men are killed. Famous poets, economists, and bureaucrats succeed with the same art. Their sense of social justice follows the logic and statistics of profit in competition for attention.

Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief. [6]

Hephaestus giving to Thetis the armor he made for Achilles at her request
Thetis presents Achilles with the new armor that she had Hephaestus make for him.

The Every Woman has never walked a mile in his shoes. She doesn’t know what it would mean to be for him.

The grim-lipped armorer
Thetis of the shining breasts
Rushed away to Achilles.
None cried out in dismay
At what the goddess had brought
To equip her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long. [7]

W. H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” depicts modern gender horror. That seems quite different from the massive slaughter of men in the Iliad. The Iliad and Auden’s poem, however, are part of the same old song.[8] Sing a new song of justice for men!

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Read more:

Notes:

[1] W. H. Auden, “The Shield of Achilles,” stanzas 1-2, quoted from Mendelson (2022) vol. 2. This poem was originally published in “Poetry, October 1952.” Fuller (1998) p. 449. Based on that citation, Poetry apparently is a periodical, probably published in Britain or the U.S. Alan Jacobs didn’t provide a better citation. Auden (2024) p. 79. Further research indicates that Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” was first published in Poetry, a magazine founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe in Chicago and published by the Modern Poetry Association (USA), which in 2003 became the Poetry Foundation. In 1952, Karl Shapiro was the editor of Poetry. For additional citation details, Auden (1952).

Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” was reprinted as the title poem and the first poem of the center section of Auden (1955). That book, The Shield of Achilles, won a National Book Award in the U.S. in 1956 and was reprinted in that year. Auden (1956). For a critical edition of the poem, Mendelson (2022) vol. 2, pp. 417-8; textual notes, id. pp. 956-7.

Hephaestos making a shield and other armor for Achilles at the request of the goddess Thetis is narrated in Iliad, Book 18. The description of Achilles’s shield in the Iliad is an early and influential example of ekphrasis — a detailed verbal description of a work of visual art. Hephaestos is more commonly named with the Latinate form, Hephaestus.

W. H. Auden is a very eminent poet. He was Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1954 until his death in 1973. For additional scholarly resources on Auden, the Auden Society. Auden is “generally considered the greatest English poet of the twentieth century.” Auden is at least comparable in status to T. S. Eliot. See, e.g. St. Amant (2018).

The Shield of Achilles is a major work of Auden:

It is the boldest and most intellectually assured work of his career, an achievement that has not been sufficiently acknowledged, in large part because its poetic techniques are not easily perceived or assessed. It is the most unified of all Auden’s collections, and indeed — once its intricate principles of organization are grasped — may be seen as the true successor of those long poems of the 1940s.

Auden (2024), Jacobs introduction, p. x. Its central, title poem, “The Shield of Achilles,” is according to Jacobs, “Auden’s staggeringly ambitious revision” of the ekphrasis of the shield of Achilles that Hephaestos makes in the Iliad, Book 18. Id. p. xxi.

Auden valued “The Shield of Achilles” highly enough to have made two recordings of him speaking it. He recorded the poem in 1968 for the Spoken Arts label in New Rochelle, New York. Here’s a edited version and a fuller version. He also recorded “The Shield of Achilles” in 1971 for Yale Series of Recorded Poets, issued by Westinghouse Learning Press, New York. Mendelson (2022) vol. 2, pp. 758-9. Others have also recorded the poem, e.g. Joshua Gibbs (2014) and Henry Blaine Silver (2022).

Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” has been widely discussed through to the present day. This poem “puts the post-war scene into just the kind of oblique and dramatically archetypal context that brings out both its full horror and its religious meaning.” Fuller (1998) p. 451. For a scholastic analysis of the poem, Reed (2021). Some have understood it to contrast implicitly the beauty, lyricism, and personal heroism of archaic Greece with the “martial horror” of modernity, “the anxious meaninglessness of modern life, the warfare engendered by it, and the cruel social realities that lie behind both.” Brown (nd). Without explicitly considering war gender-structured as violence against men, Belloncle read “The Shield of Achilles” as illuminating “the constancy of war throughout the ages.” Summers similarly perceived:

Auden’s point, then, is not that the Homeric idealization of war contrasts with contemporary militarism, but that the heroic age contained within it the seeds of modern dehumanization. … The poem thus exposes the disparity between the idyllic appearance of the Homeric world and the ugly realities that the appearance conceals, and it suggests a continuity of those realities into the contemporary world.

Summers (1984) p. 220. A central continuity is the gender position of men in relation to war.

Subsequent quotes above, except the final one, are similarly from Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles.” Those quotes are stanzas 4-5 (She looked over his shoulder…), stanza 6 (The mass and majesty of this world, all…), stanzas 7-8 (She looked over his shoulder…), and stanza 3 (Out of the air a voice without a face…).

[2] Discussions of Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” have considered gender only superficially when they recognize that Auden changed Thetis’s position. For example, a Homeric scholar declared:

One of the most significant changes that Auden has made to the original tale of the making of the shield is the role of Thetis in the scene. In Iliad 18 Thetis does not follow Hephaestus into his workshop (468 τὴν μὲν λίπεν αὐτοῦ ‘he left her there’). By introducing Thetis as an anxious viewer of Hephaestus’ making of the shield, Auden reminds us that the shield reflects not only the story of Achilles but also that of Thetis.

Yamagata (2023) p. 3. The shield also implicitly represents the story of the mass slaughter of men. Why don’t Auden and other elite authors remind readers about the horrific history of violence against men within structures of gender injustice that men have long endured?

[3] Newman (1995). See also Georges Duby’s study of medieval women. Cf. medieval ostentatio genitalium.

The central section of Auden’s The Shield of Achilles begins with “The Shield of Achilles” and ends with “Ode to Gaea.” In ancient Greek myth, Gaea / Gaia is a mother goddess who represents the earth and the origin of all life. She urged her son Cronos to castrate her husband / his father Uranus. “Ode to Gaea” ends with praise for Gaea as pure, unchanging truth:

And Earth, till the end, will be herself; she has never been moved
Except by Amphion, and orators have not improved
Since misled Athens perished
Upon Sicilian marble: what,
To her, the real one, can our good landscapes be but lies,
Those woods where tigers chum with deer and no root dies,
That tideless bay where children
Play bishop on a golden shore.

Auden (1955) pp. 58-9, “Ode to Gaea,” final stanza.

[4] Humility, not pride, characterized Jesus, e.g. Matthew 11:29 (Jesus calls himself gentle and lowly in heart), John 13:1-16 (Jesus washing his disciples’ feet), Luke 22:24-27 (Jesus teaches that leaders should be humble and serve others), Luke 14:7-11 (Jesus teaches that he who humbles himself will be exalted), Philippians 2:5-8 (Jesus obediently humbled himself on the cross). One of the thieves crucified with Jesus humbly asked for forgiveness. The other thief arrogantly demanded that Jesus save himself and them. Luke 23:39-42.

[5] Salter, who described “The Shield of Achilles” as “my own favorite among his midsized poems,” reads the ragged urchin as having never heard that “one could weep because another wept” as representing the “tragedy” of the poem. Salter (2023). Summers (1984) similarly interprets this verse as central and profound. Id. p. 232. The verse seems to me better interpreted as bathetic. Similar words of Paul to the Christian community at Rome are less cloyingly sentimental and more shocking:

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.

{ εὐλογεῖτε τοὺς διώκοντας ὑμᾶς εὐλογεῖτε καὶ μὴ καταρᾶσθε χαίρειν μετὰ χαιρόντων κλαίειν μετὰ κλαιόντων }

Romans 12:14-15 via Blue Letter Bible.

[6] Poets disparaging statistics now seems banal. Perhaps in 1952 contempt for statistics was a more interesting position:

Among the writers who most influence Auden in this period was the Austrian thinker Rudolf Kassner (1873–1959), especially in his 1919 book Zahl und Gesicht. The German phrase of his title generally means “quantity and quality,” but literally means “Number and Face,” and in 1950 Auden wrote a poem, “Numbers and Faces,” that resonated with Kassner’s ideas. Kassner’s distinction becomes a way for Auden to rearticulate the distinction he made in his 1946 poem “Under Which Lyre” between the followers of Apollo and the followers of Hermes: the Apollonians of the earlier poem live in the later poem’s “Kingdom of Number,” while Hermetics are drawn to particular human faces.

Auden (2024), Jacob’s introduction, pp. xxii-iii. In newspapers and popular journals, use of statistics is highly rhetorical. Like words, statistics can describe truth, but don’t necessarily do so. Apart from the logic of a particular moral framework such as utilitarianism, neither words nor statistics can prove a cause morally just.

[7] This stanza is a modified version of Auden’s final stanza in “The Shield of Achillles.” Auden’s original has the poor dear goddess Thetis crying in dismay and blaming the disabled man Hephaestos:

The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.

Auden thus significantly changed the song of the Iliad concerning Thetis and Hephaestos. Auden’s recasting of the Iliad perhaps served the emotional needs of men returning home after participating in the horrific violence against men of World War II.

Auden’s concern for time patterns is signaled in the The Shield of Achilles’s third section, entitled “Horae Canonicae {Canonical Hours}.” That’s a time pattern associated with early Christian communities. One specification of these hours occurs in the Rule of Saint Benedict, composed about 530 GC. Auden’s section “Horae Canonicae” has the epitaph, “Immolatus vicerit {Having been sacrificed, he conquered}.” That’s a reference to Christ. It’s perhaps taken from Venantius Fortunatus’s hymn, “Sing, my tongue, the strife of glorious combat {Pange lingua gloriosi proelium certaminis}.” Medieval Latin poets adapted “Pange, lingua” it to mock courtly love. It also provided the meter for Angelbert’s poem lamenting the horrific violence against men at the battle of Fontenoy in 841. Jacobs sees “The Shield of Achilles” as fulfilling “Immolatus vicerit.” Auden (2024), Jacob’s introduction, pp. xxiv-xxxiv. Auden, however, provides no critical perspective on men’s sacrificial gender position. It wasn’t the time for Auden to fill that negative space.

Auden included in The Shield of Achilles an obscure prefatory epigraph lamenting bad conditions and temporal disjointedness:

From bad lands where eggs are small and dear
Climbing to worse by a stonier
Track, when all are spent we hear it — the right song
For the wrong time of year.

Auden (1955), epigraph printed just below the dedication “For Lincoln and Fidelma Kirstein.” Cf. Ecclesiastes 3:1-11. The time of year, like the time of day, is a continually recurring event. If the right time of year exists, it will come. The right song for the right time of year will come.

[8] Within the same section of The Shield of Achilles in which “The Shield of Achilles” comes, Auden placed another poem, entitled “The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning.” Concerning the poet in relation to the generic human, gendered as male (“Man”), this poem concludes:

For given Man, by birth, by education,
Imago Dei, who forgot his station,
The self-made creature who himself unmakes,
The only creature ever made who fakes
With no more nature in his loving smile
Than in his theories of a natural style,
What but tall tales, the luck of verbal playing,
Can trick his lying nature into saying
That love, or truth in any serious sense,
Like orthodoxy, is a reticence.

Quoted from Mendelson (2022) vol. 2, p. 424. Randall Jarrell, an eminent poet, aptly commented:

I know that I ought to respond, “True, true! I’ll never tell the truth again. Anybody like to join me in some tall tales and verbal playing?” But what I really say is — but I’ll be reticent.

Jarrell (1955) p. 604. Jarrell wasn’t generally contemptuous of Auden’s poetry. Jarrell in various ways greatly admired Auden poetry, which had a large influence on him. On Jarrell’s relationship with Auden, Jarrell (1952 / 2005) and Monroe (1979), Chapter 5.

Auden was an acute and severe self-critic. He rejected some of his published poems as “dishonest.” In his preface to his Collected Shorter Poems: 1927-1957, Auden wrote:

A dishonest poem is one which expresses, no matter how well, feelings or beliefs which its author never felt or entertained. For example, I once expressed a desire for ‘New styles of architecture’; but I have never liked modern architecture. I prefer old styles, and one must be honest even about one’s prejudices. Again, and much more shamefully, I once wrote:

History to the defeated
may say alas but cannot help nor pardon.

To say this is to equate goodness with success. It would have been bad enough if I had ever held this wicked doctrine, but that I should have stated it simply because it sounded to me rhetorically effective is quite inexcusable.

Auden (1957) p. 15.

Auden eventually described his poem “September 1, 1939” as “the most dishonest poem I have ever written.” Just as for “The Shield of Achilles,” war is a central concern of “September 1, 1939.” Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” was first published in the U.S. public affairs journal The New Republic on October 18, 1939 under the editorship of Bruce Bliven. By the mid-1950s, Auden rejected this poem and refused to have it included in any of his poetry collections. On “September 1, 1939,” Mendelson (1999) pp, 477-8, Lenfield (2015), and Woo (2023).

Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” seems to me to be more dishonest than his “September 1, 1939.” Having interpreted “The Shield of Achilles” without regard for gender, Jarrell described it as an “impressive, carefully planned, entirely comfortless poem.” Jarrell (1955) p. 604. But Jarrell also observed, “a comfortable frivolity about much of ‘The Shield of Achilles.’” Id. p. 607. Was Auden comforting himself at the reader’s expense? Mendelson observed:

From the moment it appeared in print in 1952 “The Shield of Achilles” was welcome in anthologies for its sturdy unobjectionable sentiments against violence and war. Yet the moral and technical intelligence of Auden’s poem rests in its deeper inexplicit argument about the relation of language and act, and it is a greater and more disturbing work than even its admirers suggest.

Mendelson (1999) p. 375. Mendelson, who interpreted the poem without regard for gender, seems to me to have characterized it well in a way that he himself didn’t understand.

[images]

(1) Hephaestus polishing Achilles’s shield for Thetis. Painting by the Dutuit Painter on a two-handled amphora (wine/oil jar). Made in Athens about 470 BGC. Preserved as accession # 13.188 in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Credit: Bartlett Collection — Museum purchase with funds from the Francis Bartlett Donation of 1912. Source image via MFABoston under non-commercial Terms of Use. A Gorgon-head image (Gorgoneion) is a common shield device and appears on the shield of Achilles in the Sarti fragment of the Tabulae Iliaca. Hardi (1985) p. 22. Hephaestus forging armor for Achilles at Thetis’s request is a well-established theme in images crafted throughout history. Here’s an image collection for that theme.

(2) Thetis, inspecting the shield that Hephaestus made for Achilles, sees herself reflected in it. Hephaestus polishes the other side. A craftsman works on the helmet for Achilles. Fresco made 48-75 GC in the House of Paccius Alexander (IX 1, 7, triclinium e), Pompeii. Preserved in Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (MANN inv. 9529). Source image thanks to Marie-Lan Nguyen and Wikimedia Commons. Here’s another photo. This composition might have adapted a representation of Aphrodite seeing herself in the Shield of Ares. Hardie (1985) p. 19. Eight paintings of Thetis in the forge of Hephaestus have survived in Pompeiian wall frescos from before 79 GC. Id. Here are Thetis in the forge of Hephaestus in the House of Siricus {Domus Vedi Sirici} (VII.1.47) and in the House of Ubonus {Domus Uboni} (IX.5.2).

(3) Hephaestus giving to Thetis the armor he made for Achilles at her request. Painting by the Foundry Painter on an Attic red-figure caylix krater (wide-mouth jar used for mixing water and wine), made 490-480 BGC. Preserved as accession # F 2294 in the Altes Museum, Antiquities Collection {Antikensammlung}, Berlin, Germany. Credit: Formerly in the Schloss Charlottenburg. Source image thanks to Bibi Saint-Pol and to Wikimedia Commons. Hephaestus presenting Thetis the armor he made for Achilles at her request is a well-established theme in images crafted throughout history. Here’s an image collection for that theme.

(4) Thetis presents Achilles with the new armor that she had Hephaestus make for him. Painting by the Alamura Painter on an Attic red-figure calyx krater, made 470-460 BGC. Preserved as accession # 48.262 in the Walters Art Museum. Credit: Acquired by Henry Walters, 1925. Enhanced source image via Wikimedia Commons. The Walters describes this image as a generic departure scene in which a young man heading off to war stands by his family’s altar and receives armor from a woman. The shield here contains an image of a long, sinuous snake. That’s a common feature on representations of the shield of Achilles in Pompeiian frescoes. Hardie (1985) p. 28, n. 119. The snake on the shield of Achilles probably represents “the constellation of the serpent, Draco, which separates the two Bears of the poles.” Id. p. 19. Thetis presenting armor to Achilles might well have become a generic image of a man departing for war.

(5) Shield of Achilles as imagined by John Flaxman, c. 1810-1817, and crafted in silver gilt by Philip Rundell for Rundell Bridge & Rundell. Completed in 1821 for George IV’s British coronation banquet. At the center is the god Apollo riding a quadriga. Preserved as RCIN 51255 in the Royal Collection Trust, Britain.

References:

Auden, W. H. 1952. “The Shield of Achilles.” Poetry (Chicago, IL, by the Poetry Foundation). 81 (1): 3-5.

Auden, W. H. 1955. The Shield of Achilles. New York, NY: Random House.

Auden, W. H. 1956. The Shield of Achilles. New York, NY: Random House.

Auden, W. H. 1966. Collected Shorter Poems: 1927-1957. London: Faber and Faber.

Auden, W. H. 2024. The Shield of Achilles. With preface, introduction, and notes by Alan Jacobs. W.H. Auden: Critical Editions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Introduction (alternate web presentation). Review by Steve Donoghue.

Belloncle, Sophia. 2024. ‘He Would Not Live Long: The Postwar World in W.H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles.”’Voegelin View. Essays. Online.

Brown, Rick. nd. ‘A Bloody Torpor: The Banality of Violence in Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles.”’ Modern American Poetry Site. Online.

Fuller, John. 1998. W. H. Auden: A Commentary. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hardie, P. R. 1985. “Imago Mundi: Cosmological and Ideological Aspects of the Shield of Achilles.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies. 105: 11–31.

Jarrell, Randall. 1952 / 2005. Randall Jarrell on W.H. Auden. Edited by Stephanie Burt and Hannah Brooks-Motl. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Jarrell, Randall. 1955. “Review: Recent Poetry.” The Yale Review: A National Quarterly. Summer, 1955, pp. 598-608. Includes Jarrell’s review of Auden’s The Shield of Achilles.

Lenfield, Spencer. 2015. ‘Why Auden Left: “September 1, 1939” and British Cultural Life.’ Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. Posted online Dec. 9, 2015.

Mendelson, Edward. 1999. Later Auden. New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

Mendelson, Edward, ed. 2022. Poems. Vol. 1: 1927-1939. Vol. 2: 1940-1973. The Complete Works of W. H. Auden. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Review by Steve Donoghue and Salter (2023).

Monroe, Hayden Keith. 1979. An Ornament of Civilization: The Literary Criticism of Randall Jarrell. Ph.D. Thesis, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Newman, Barbara. 1995. From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Reed, Monique. 2021. “The Shield of Achilles by W.H Auden – Teaching Presentation – Analysis of context, poem and language.” YouTube video.

Salter, Mary Jo. 2023. “Our Auden.” Literary Matters. 15.2. Online.

St. Amant, E. A. 2018. “W H Auden versus T S Eliot.” Online post at eastamant.com.

Summers, Claude J. 1984. ‘“Or One Could Weep Because Another Wept”: The Counterplot of Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles.”’ The Journal of English and Germanic Philology. 83 (2): 214–32.

Woo, David. 2023. “Review: Auden in the 21st Century (on The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, Volume I: 1927–1939 and Volume II: 1940–1973, edited by Edward Mendelson).” The Georgia Review. Sprint, 2023, online edition.

Yamagata, Naoko. 2023. “Thetis and the Shield of Achilles – Reading the Iliad with Auden.” Chapter 16 (pp. 395-410) in Maciej Paprocki, Gary Vos, and David John Wright, eds. The Staying Power of Thetis: Allusion Interaction and Reception from Homer to the 21st Century. Sovereign of the Sea: the Staying Power of Thetis in the Greco-Roman World and Beyond (Conference). Berlin: De Gruyter. Cited by pdf page number in the open research online version.

Catullus on bridging the gender divide for Colonia

Disparaging men’s sexuality contributes to the social construction of the gender divide. The Roman poet Catullus, writing about 60 BGC, considered this matter personally in relation to a fellow-citizen of his home city of Verona. That fellow-citizen was utterly failing to fulfill his sexual responsibilities to his young wife. Catullus’s proposed action for Colonia superficially adheres to the obtuse, yet common, penal principle of dysfunctional social groups: “the beatings will continue until morale improves.” However, with keen insight into bridges and connecting, Catullus subtly identified and sought to remedy a structural gender problem underlying men’s sexual failures.

Catullus harshly disparaged his fellow-citizen for a sexless marriage. Sex between lively, loving persons is sensual. According to Catullus, his fellow-citizen is wholly insensate:

He’s a most tasteless man and doesn’t sense to the extent of
a two-year-old child, asleep in his father’s rocking arms.
Though he’s married to a young woman, the freshest flower,
a young woman more frisky than a tender little goat,
needing to be watched more carefully than the ripest grapes,
he lets her play around as she pleases. He doesn’t make the smallest bang,
doesn’t raise himself in his part, but lies like a soft tree-trunk
in a trench, hamstrung by a Ligurian axe,
feeling everything as much as if it never existed at all.
The dullard is like that. He sees nothing, he hears nothing,
what he himself is, whether he is or is not, that he doesn’t even know.

{ insulsissimus est homo, nec sapit pueri instar
bimuli tremula patris dormientis in ulna.
cui cum sit viridissimo nupta flore puella
et puella tenellulo delicatior haedo,
adservanda nigerrimis diligentius uvis,
ludere hanc sinit ut lubet, nec pili facit uni,
nec se sublevat ex sua parte, sed velut alnus
in fossa Liguri iacet suppernata securi,
tantundem omnia sentiens quam si nulla sit usquam,
talis iste merus stupor nil videt, nihil audit,
ipse qui sit, utrum sit an non sit, id quoque nescit. }[1]

Husbands oblivious to their beautiful wives are scarcely alive. Compassion for them is nearly inconceivable with ordinary sense.

Ya’an-Kangding Highway Bridge Crossing the Dadu River in China

Catullus figured his sexually failing fellow-citizen as a dilapidated bridge for Colonia. His poem begins with a direct address to Colonia:

O Colonia, you who desire to folic on a long bridge
and are ready to dance, but fear the unfit
legs of the little bridge standing on its reused wood —
that it might fall supine and sink into the encompassing mud.
May you get a good bridge made fit for your passion,
on which could be undertaken even sacred service for the dance god,
if you would give me, Colonia, the gift of greatest laughter.

{ O Colonia, quae cupis ponte ludere longo,
et salire paratum habes, sed vereris inepta
crura ponticuli axulis stantis in redivivis,
ne supinus eat cavaque in palude recumbat
sic tibi bonus ex tua pons libidine fiat,
in quo vel Salisubsili sacra suscipiantur:
munus hoc mihi maximi da, Colonia, risus. }[2]

Colonia is a young, lively, passionate wife and a place with a faulty bridge. Colonia etymologically centers on farming / plowing. Her bridge’s faults — being small and weak, with unfit legs and old wood — suggest her husband’s sexual failure. Colonia’s bridge is both a bridge and her husband’s genitals failing to bridge the gender divide.[3]

Like the double referents of Colonia and the bridge, the gift that Catullus personally requests from Colonia — “the gift of greatest laughter {munus maximi risus}” — also has double referents. The subsequent four verses elaborate on one referent and hint at another:

From your bridge I want a certain fellow-citizen of mine
to go headlong into the mud, by both head and feet tumbling,
truly where the whole wine-vat and stinking swamp
is the most discolored and deep abyss.

{ quendam municipem meum de tuo volo ponte
ire praecipitem in lutum per caputque pedesque,
verum totius ut lacus putidaeque paludis
lividissima maximeque est profunda vorago. }

A man tumbling off a bridge could be “the gift of greatest laughter” only in a vicious and narrow sense. Scholars have rationalized the man tumbling off the bridge as a propitiatory sacrifice to make the bridge satisfactory for Colonia.[4] That interpretation lessens the viciousness and eliminates a fitting context for laughter. In his diction elaborating on his fellow-citizen falling from the bridge, Catullus uses language associated with disparaging the vaginas of some old women.[5] Compared to penises, vaginas typically are highly and warmly regarded in ancient literature. For the passionate and outrageous Catullus, “the gift of greatest laughter” plausibly encompasses sex with his fellow-citizen’s wife.[6] Catullus thus associates the husband-cuckold with unappealing sexual intercourse and himself with appealing sexual intercourse. The double referents of “the gift of greatest laughter {munus maximi risus}” are thrusting the husband from the bridge and having sex with the husband’s lovely wife.

Akashi Kaikyo Bridge in Japan

Showing unusual concern for the sexually inert husband, Catullus figured his own strong, independent sexuality as redemptive. Catullus explained to Colonia that he himself would from the back side thrust her bent-over husband from the bridge:

I want to thrust him bent over right now from your bridge,
if I can, to arouse him suddenly from foolish lethargy
and to leave behind a backwards spirit in the rank filth,
as a she-mule would leave behind an iron shoe in a tenacious abyss.

{ nunc eum volo de tuo ponte mittere pronum,
si pote stolidum repente excitare veternum
et supinum animum in gravi derelinquere caeno,
ferream ut soleam tenaci in voragine mula. }

Men’s tonic masculinity can confer the seminal blessing of abundant life, avert sickness and death, and even arouse a man from sexual lethargy. Myths of gender oppression imagine women being compelled to become domestic service animals with iron shoes on their hooves so that they can undertake heavy burdens. Catullus understood that men such as his fellow-citizen actually experience such a mulish position. The tenacious abyss abstractly represents oppressive demands gynocentric society imposes on men. To shed their lethargy and become fully alive, men must leave behind the iron shoes, the iron shackles, and the iron cages imposed on them, along with other metaphorical fecal matter. Catullus isn’t being gratuitously cruel to his fellow-citizen, but imagining himself providing harsh, necessary character reformation.[7]

Men’s impotence has long been regarded as an epic disaster. One should not simply blame the man-victim, nor of course rape him and thrust him from a bridge into the mud. Like everything else in the cosmos, men’s impotence is socially constructed within structures of dominance and oppression. Difficulties in bridging the gender divide are structural. Unsatisfying bridges, ideologically weakened by institutions of penal punishment and myths of patriarchy and misogyny, cruelly oppress women and men. Women and men must help to arouse men and to liberate men from the iron shoes weighing them down. Catullus imagined liberating a man. You should, too!

We don’t need to build bridges. The bridges we have are sufficient for us. We merely need to deploy our bridges well.

Golden Gate Bridge in California, USA

* * * * *

Read more:

Notes:

[1] Catullus, Poems {Carmina}, Poem {Carmen} 17, vv. 12-22, Latin text (modified insubstantially) from Thomson (1997), my English translation. Many translations of Carmen 17, e.g. Smithers (1894), Burton (1894), Cornish (1904), Rau (1999), and Kline (2001), are freely available online.

I’ve translated “blackest grapes {nigerrimae uvae}” as “ripest grapes.” In context, the blackest grapes mean the most desirable grapes. While skin-color racism existed in ancient Rome, it apparently didn’t color the meaning of this phrase here.

Catullus wrote Carmen 17 in the rare Priapean meter. That meter “combines two ‘aeolic’ cola, a glyconic followed by a pherecratean.” Morgan (2010) p. 35. Some other verses in Priapean meter are attributed to Catullus:

This enclosure I dedicate and consecrate to you, Priapus,
at Lampsacus, where your house and sacred grove are, Priapus,
since you are chiefly worshiped in the cities of the coast
of the Hellespont, which is richer in oysters than other coasts.

{ Hunc lucum tibi dedico consecroque, Priape,
qua domus tua Lampsaci quaque silva Priape,
nam te praecipue in suis urbibus colit ora
Hellespontia ceteris ostriosior oris. }

Here oysters perhaps alludes to men’s testicles. The only other surviving text in Priapean meter attributed Catullus is: “there is the desire to lick from my … {– ⌣ – ⌣⌣ de meo ligurrire libido est}.” Catullus, Fragments 2 and 3, Latin text of Eisenhut (1956) and English translation (modified) from Cornish, Postgate & Mackail (1913) pp. 182-3. Id., like most scholars, regards the attribution of these verses to Catullus as doubtful.

Catullus wrote three other poems “focalized through the generic perspective of Priapus.” Uden (2007) abstract. These poems are Carmina 16, “I with my dick will bang up your crapper and stuff your mouth {Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo}”; 46, “Porcius and Socration, two left hands {Porci et Socration, duae sinistrae}”; and 57, “O rem ridiculam, Cato, et iocosam {O, Cato, what a ridiculous and funny thing}.” Priapus poems (Priapea / Priapeia) of antiquity critically concern men’s sexuality and often parody grotesque stereotypes of men’s genitals and men’s gender. For some relatively uncritical analysis of these poems, Uden (2007).

In one Priapea, Priapus appears as a crude wooden form protecting a bountiful garden from thieves. Men are gender-associated with crudeness and gender-directed to relatively dangerous jobs. This Priapus, however, maintained his self-esteem and recognized his importance. He explains to a traveler:

On me is placed in spring a decorated garland,
on me in the fervid sun red grain,
on me sweet grapes with green vines,
on me an olive hardened by frigid cold.
From my pastures the tender little she-goat
carries to the city her udders matured with milk,
and from my sheepfold the plump lamb
sends home the strong hand heavy with coins,
and a young calf amid its mother’s mooing
spills forth its blood before the gods’ temples.

{ Mihi corolla picta vere ponitur,
mihi rubens arista sole fervido,
mihi virente dulcis uva pampino,
mihi gelante oliva cocta frigore.
meis capella delicata pascuis
in urbem adulta lacte portat ubera,
meisque pinguis agnus ex ovilibus
gravem domum remittit aere dexteram,
tenerque matre mugiente buculus
deum profundit ante templa sanguinem. }

The traveler, not a thief, apparently desires Priapus sexually, or the fruits of the garden. However, in another horror of castration culture, Priapus is violently castrated:

Traveler, you therefore should revere this god
and hold your hands high. This advantages you,
for see, a fierce penis stands prepared.
“I’d like, by Pollux” you say, but by Pollux, see the bailiff
is coming! With his strong arm he breaks off
my penis, which becomes an apt cudgel for his right hand.

{ Proin, viator, hunc deum vereberis
manumque sursum habebis. hoc tibi expedit;
parata namque trux stat ecce mentula.
“velim pol” inquis at pol ecce vilicus
venit, valente cui revulsa bracchio
fit ista mentula apta clava dexterae. }

Priapea 2 (85 Bücheler, from the Appendix Vergiliana), Latin text from Fairclough (1918) vv. 6-15 and 16-21 (of 21), my English translation, benefiting from that of id. and those of Burton & Smithers (1890), who wrongly attribute the poem to Catullus. Here are some Latin reading notes for Priapea 2. The phrase “and hold your hands high {manumque sursum habebis}” could mean “keep your hands off the fruits growing close to the ground,” but hands held high is also a gesture of reverence. Similarly, “for see, a fierce penis stands prepared {parata namque trux stat ecce mentula}” has an erotic, non-masochistic sense. In contrast, the bailiff’s “apt cudgel {apta clava}” is brutalizing figure of the penis and purely punitive. Priapea 2 (85 Bücheler, from the Appendix Vergiliana) isn’t part of a poetic collection conventionally known as Carmina Priapea.

Priapea 2 signals the expansion of castration culture over time. The generic trajectory of Priapus poems regrettably droops toward infertility:

The generic narrative that is developed for the priapeum moves from the fertile and productive visions of nature in the genre’s code models to a partially urban landscape suffused with artificiality, leisure, indulgence and infertility.

Uden (2010) p. 215. Literary scholars should recognize that castration culture and associated infertility is socially constructed and not immutable or inevitable. Authors such as Catullus, Maximianus, and Rabelais have sought to promote penal justice and renew appreciation for men’s penises.

Subsequent quotes above are sourced similarly from Catullus’s Carmen 17. Those quotes are vv. 1-7 (O Colonia, you who desire…), 8-11 (From your bridge I want a certain fellow-citizen…), 23-6 (I want to thrust him bent over…). The above quotes thus cover all the verses of Carmen 17.

[2] Despite obvious figurative use of “Colonia,” Colonia has tended to be interpreted only as a specific, real town:

Colonia: usually identified since Guarinus with the modern village of Cologna, a few miles eastward from Verona, the marshy situation of which fits well with the description in the text.

Merrill (1893) p. 37, note to v. 1. More recently, scholars have identified Colonia with Vorona. Watson (2021) p. 38, with review of relevant scholarly literature in footnotes 6-7. Much more important is Colonia’s double referent as a place with a bridge and the wife of Catullus’s fellow-citizen.

Salisubsili, translated above as “dance god,” is not otherwise known. That word apparently is the genitive singular of Salisubsilus, It might be a variant of Salisubsalus or Salisubsalius. The name of this god seems to be rooted in dance: “to jump {salire / salio}.” Cf. Catullus, Carmen 17.2. Salisubsilus is perhaps associated with the god Mars. Salii were priests who did ritual war dances. They are known to have existed in Rome and Verona. Merrill (1893) p. 37, note to v. 6, and Adamik (2019) p. 321.

[3] Rudd observed:

There is something very strange about crura. Merrill tells us what it is. “The noun,” he says, “is unique in this humorous application to inanimate objects, pes being commonly used in such connections.” In other words your legs are crura, but the legs of your chair are not.

Rudd (1959) pp. 239-40. Rudd astutely recognized the bridge as representing the husband’s sexual failure, and Colonia, the sexual vigorous wife. Watson asked:

In making a bridge central to the mise en scène of a piece involving the jesting humiliation of a husband, is Catullus alluding, in a kind of Alexandrian footnote, to Greek γεφυρισμός, derived from γέφυρα ‘bridge’, in its transferred sense of ‘subjecting someone to mockery and abuse’?

Watson (2021) p. 39. That’s possible abstractly, but the bridge’s most specific alternate referent is best regarded as the husband’s genitals.

[4] E.g. Quinn (1969) p. 24, Morgan (2010) pp. 39-40. For additional relevant references, Watson (2021) pp. 38-9. A propitiatory sacrifice suggests piety rather than laughter, at least in traditional Greco-Roman religion.

[5] Specific words Catullus uses invoke disparaging figures of the vaginas of particular old women. Consider “mud {lutum}.” In a classical poem, a man harshly disparages his impotent, “villainous penis {scelestus penis}.” He condemns his penis to a highly unattractive woman — “a two-toothed woman-friend resembling old Romulus {bidens amica Romuli senis memor}.” Like Catullus’s aim for his fellow-citizen, this man’s penis faces mud, which figures the vagina of the old, unattractive woman: “you will immerse your wandering penis-head in her noisy mud {vagum sonante merseris luto caput}.” Priapea 4 (83 Bücheler, from the Appendix Vergiliana), incipit “What is this strange occurrence {Quid hoc novi est}?”, vv. 19 (villainous penis), 26 (two-toothed woman friend…), 37 (you will immerse), Latin text of Fairclough (1918), my English translation. Watson credited this reference to a referee. The referee suggested that the verse from Priapea 4 “may be indebted to and consciously ‘stain’ the concluding lines of Catullus 17.” Watson (2021) p. 50, ft. 84. Whatever the specific case, the figure of mud in relation to the vagina (or possibly the anus) seems more general.

In relation to the “deep abyss {profunda vorago}” of Catullus’s Carmen 17, Priapea 4 (83 Bücheler, from the Appendix Vergiliana), v. 32, refers to a “deep trench {profunda fossa}” in figuring the old, unattractive woman’s vagina. Sourced as previously. Catullus 17.18-9 refers to a soft tree-trunk in a “trench {fossa}” in an apparent figure of the husband’s sexual failure. In harsh invective against the eunuch Baeticus, Martial disparages him for not engaging sexually with men’s anuses. In a contrast with masculine anuses, Martial refers to the vagina as “the feminine abyss {femineum barathrum}.” Martial, Epigrams 3.81.1. The association of whirlpool / abyss {vorago} with women is probably rooted in the ancient Greek myth of the women-monsters Scylla and Charybdis.

[6] Catullus in another poem describes an unfeeling husband as a mule. In particular, he addresses Lesbia’s husband: “you mule, not feeling anything {mule, nihil sentis}.” Carmen 83.3. Catullus loves Lesbia. See, e.g. Carmen 92. Zarker argues that Lesbia’s husband, Q. Metellus Celer, is also the mule of Carmen 17. That would make Colonia a code name for Lesbia, and create a stronger association between the “gift of greatest laughter” and Catullus desire to cuckold the husband / fellow-citizen of Carmen 17. Identifying Q. Metellus Celer as the husband in Carmen 17 isn’t necessary for reasonably interpreting the gift as having a referent to cuckolding the husband.

[7] For simplicity of exposition I equate the ego of Carmen 17 with Catullus. In the surviving anthology of Catullus’s poetry, Carmen 17 is paired with Carmen 16. The ego of Carmen 16 expresses strong, independent sexuality. That ego is plausibly understood not as Catullus, but as Priapic persona that Catullus critically assumes. Uden (2007). The ego of Carmen 17 might similarly be a persona dramatically acting to change a man’s gender position. That ego could be a sophisticated exponent of Priapus in a particular literary representation. Cf. Kloss (1998) pp. 64-6.

In Carmen 17, the husband, Catullus’s fellow-citizen, has been interpreted as both an anti-Priapus figure and a Priapus figure. Anti-Priapus, Morgan (2010) pp. 36-40; Priapus, Watson (2021) pp. 43-51. Those starkly contrasting interpretations highlight lack of critical understanding of Priapus.

[images] (1) Ya’an-Kangding Highway Bridge Crossing the Dadu River in China. From photo made on June 13, 2019. Source image thanks to 来斤小仓鼠吧 and Wikimedia Commons. (2) Akashi Kaikyo Bridge in Japan. From photo made on June 26, 2005. Shared by Aurelio Asiain on flicker under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0 license. (3) Golden Gate Bridge in California, USA. Photo made on October 12, 2014. Source image thanks to Wa17gs and Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Adamik, Tamás. 2020. “Vocabulary of Catullus’ Poems: Hapax Legomena as Vulgar Words.” Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae .59 (1-4): 317–25.

Burton, Richard Francis, and Leonard C. Smithers. 1890. Envocation to Priapus Priapeia, or, Sportive Epigrams on Priapus. Cosmopoli. 1995 reprint.

Cornish, F. W., J. P. Postgate, and J. W. Mackail, ed. and trans. 1913. Catullus. Tibullus. Pervigilium Veneris. Revised by G. P. Goold (1988). Loeb Classical Library 6. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Fairclough, H. Rushton, revised by G. P. Goold. 1918. Virgil. Aeneid: Books 7-12. Appendix Vergiliana. Loeb Classical Library 64. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kloss, Gerrit. 1998. “Catullus Brückengedicht (c. 17).” Hermes. 126 (1): 58–79.

Merrill, Elmer Truesdell. 1893. Catullus. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.

Morgan, Llewelyn. 2010. Musa Pedestris: Metre and Meaning in Roman Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Quinn, Kenneth. 1969. “Practical Criticism: A Reading of Propertius I. 21 and Catullus 17.” Greece & Rome. 16 (1): 19–29.

Rudd, Niall. 1959. “Colonia and Her Bridge: A Note on the Structure of Catullus 17.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association. 90: 238–42.

Thomson, D. F. S. 1997. Catullus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Uden, James. 2007. “Impersonating Priapus.” The American Journal of Philology. 128 (1): 1-26.

Uden, James. 2010. “The Vanishing Gardens of Priapus.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology. 105: 189–219. Alternate source.

Watson, Lindsay. 2021. “Catullus’ Priapean Poem ( c . 17).” Antichthon. 55: 35–52.

Zarker, John W. 1969. “Mule, Nihil Sentis (Catullus 83 and 17).” The Classical Journal. 64 (4): 172–77.

Greek women warriors danced Pyrrhic victory for gender equality

Men historically have been burdened with fighting in wars gender-structured as violence against men. Women warriors, however, have achieved prominence in public discourse throughout history. In ancient Greek culture, the goddesses Athena and Artemis were eminent women warriors, as were the Amazons. Moreover, men in ancient Greece delighted in viewing nearly naked women performing Pyrrhic war dance. Mortal women warriors did not, however, contribute significantly to Greek military action. As thoughtful Greek military and civic leader Xenophon recognized in his story about conflict between Greek mercenaries and Paphlagonians, women Pyrrhic dancers in ancient Greece show men’s propensity to credit women imaginatively apart from women’s actual responsibility. That propensity impedes actual progress toward gender equality.

ancient Greek woman Pyrrhic dancer and aulos-player

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato argued that women should have significant military responsibility. He declared that girls as well as boys, and women as well as men, should receive military training:

We are establishing gymnasiums and all physical exercises connected with military training, including the use of the bow and all kinds of missiles, light skirmishing and heavy-armed fighting of every description, tactical deployments, company-marching, camp-formations, and all the details of cavalry training. In all these subjects there should be public instructors, paid by the State. Their pupils should be not only the boys and men in the State, but also the girls and women. The women will understand all these matters — being practiced in all military drills and fighting while still girls. When grown to womanhood, they will take part in deployments and rank-forming and the piling and shouldering of arms. They will do this, if for no other reason, at least for this reason: if ever the guards of the children and of the rest of the city should be obliged to leave the city and march out in full force, these women should be able at least to take their place. If, on the other hand — and this is quite a possible contingency — an invading army of foreigners, fierce and strong, should force a battle around the city itself, then it would be a sore disgrace to the State if its women were so badly raised as not even to be willing to do as do the mother-birds. Mother-birds fight the strongest beasts in defense of their broods. If, instead of facing all risks, even death itself, our women would run straight to the temples and crowd all the shrines and holy places, they would drown humanity in the disgrace of being the most craven of living creatures.

{ γυμνάσια γὰρ τίθεμεν καὶ τὰ περὶ τὸν πόλεμον ἅπαντα τοῖς σώμασι διαπονήματα τοξικῆς τε καὶ πάσης ῥίψεως καὶ πελταστικῆς καὶ Επάσης ὁπλομαχίας καὶ διεξόδων τακτικῶν καὶ ἁπάσης πορείας στρατοπέδων καὶ στρατοπεδεύσεων καὶ ὅσα εἰς ἱππικὴν μαθήματα συντείνει. πάντων γὰρ τούτων διδασκάλους τε εἶναι δεῖ κοινούς, ἀρνυμένους μισθὸν παρὰ τῆς πόλεως, καὶ τούτων μαθητὰς τοὺς ἐν τῇ πόλει παῖδάς τε καὶ ἄνδρας, καὶ κόρας καὶ γυναῖκας πάντων τούτων ἐπιστήμονας, κόρας μὲν οὔσας ἔτι πᾶσαν τὴν ἐν ὅπλοις ὄρχησιν καὶ μάχην μεμελετηκυίας, γυναῖκας δὲ διεξόδων καὶ τάξεων καὶ θέσεως καὶ ἀναιρέσεως ὅπλων ἡμμένας, εἰ μηδενὸς ἕνεκα ἄλλου, ἀλλ᾿ εἴ ποτε δεήσειε πανδημεὶ πάσῃ τῇ δυνάμει καταλείποντας τὴν πόλιν ἔξω στρατεύεσθαι τοὺς φυλάξαντας παῖδάς τε καὶ τὴν ἄλλην πόλιν, ἱκανοὺς εἶναι τό γε τοσοῦτον, ἢ καὶ τοὐναντίον, ὅγ᾿ οὐδὲν ἀπώμοτον, ἔξωθεν πολεμίους εἰσπεσόντας ῥώμῃ τινὶ μεγάλῃ καὶ βίᾳ, βαρβάρους εἴτε Ἕλληνας, ἀνάγκην παρασχεῖν περὶ αὐτῆς τῆς πόλεως τὴν διαμάχην γίγνεσθαι, πολλή που κακία πολιτείας οὕτως αἰσχρῶς τὰς γυναῖκας εἶναι τεθραμμένας, ὡς μηδ᾿ ὥσπερ ὄρνιθας περὶ τέκνων μαχομένας πρὸς ὁτιοῦν τῶν ἰσχυροτάτων θηρίων ἐθέλειν ἀποθνήσκειν τε καὶ πάντας κινδύνους κινδυνεύειν, ἀλλ᾿ εὐθὺς πρὸς ἱερὰ φερομένας πάντας βωμούς τε καὶ ναοὺς ἐμπιπλάναι καὶ δόξαν τοῦ τῶν ἀνθρώπων γένους καταχεῖν ὡς πάντων δειλότατον φύσει θηρίων ἐστίν. }[1]

Orosius and other ancient historians recognized that women could be fierce and brutal fighters. Nonetheless, in ancient Greece, as in most other societies throughout history, boys but not girls were trained to fight in wars. Almost exclusively men fought and died on battlefields of institutionalized violence.

women Pyrrhic dancers in erotic context

Despite Greek women not fighting in ancient Greek military actions, Greek men enjoyed watching naked or nearly naked women dance the Pyrrhic war dance. Pyrrhic dance consists of movements like that of a soldier engaged in close, armed fighting.[2] After 460 BGC, numerous ancient Greek vases show paintings of women doing Pyrrhic dance. The majority of these women are naked. The vases seem to be associated mainly with men’s symposia (banquets), the hiring of women dancers, or the training of women dancers. Based on surviving artifacts, vase paintings of women doing Pyrrhic dance apparently were most popular from 440 BGC to 420 BGC.[3] Like accounts of Amazon women warriors, women doing Pyrrhic dance seem to have pleased men’s erotic imagination in democratic Athens.

ancient Greek woman dancer / acrobat

About half a century after ancient Greek vase paintings of women doing Pyrrhic dance were most numerous, the Athenian military and civic leader Xenophon included in his Anabasis {Ἀνάβασις} a story about a woman performing a Pyrrhic dance. The Anabasis recounts the experience of a large Greek mercenary army (the Ten Thousand) hired to help the Achaemenid prince Cyrus the Younger seize the Achaemenid throne from his brother Artaxerxes II. As the Greek mercenaries traveled back to Greece from Persia, they plundered food in Paphlagonia along the Black Sea in present-day Turkey. The Paphlagonians in turn attacked relatively vulnerable small groups of Greek soldiers. Relations between the Greeks and the Paphlagonians became very hostile:

Then Corylas, who happened at that time to be ruler of Paphlagonia, sent ambassadors to the Greeks. The ambassadors, who rode horses and wore fine clothes, carried word that Corylas was ready to do the Greeks no wrong and to suffer no wrong at their hands. The Greek generals replied that they would take counsel with the Greek army on this matter, but meanwhile they received the Paphlagonian ambassadors as their guests at dinner. The Greek generals also invited to the dinner other men in the Greek army as seemed to them best entitled to an invitation. By sacrificing some of the cattle they had captured and also other animals, the Greeks provided an adequate feast. All dined reclining upon straw mats and drank from cups made of horn found in the country.

{ ὁ δὲ Κορύλας, ὃς ἐτύγχανε τότε Παφλαγονίας ἄρχων, πέμπει παρὰ τοὺς Ἕλληνας πρέσβεις ἔχοντας ἵππους καὶ στολὰς καλάς, λέγοντας ὅτι Κορύλας ἕτοιμος εἴη τοὺς Ἕλληνας μήτε ἀδικεῖν μήτε ἀδικεῖσθαι. οἱ δὲ στρατηγοὶ ἀπεκρίναντο ὅτι περὶ μὲν τούτων σὺν τῇ στρατιᾷ βουλεύσοιντο, ἐπὶ ξένια δὲ ἐδέχοντο αὐτούς· παρεκάλεσαν δὲ καὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἀνδρῶν οὓς ἐδόκουν δικαιοτάτους εἶναι. θύσαντες δὲ τῶν αἰχμαλώτων βοῶν καὶ ἄλλα ἱερεῖα εὐωχίαν μὲν ἀρκοῦσαν παρεῖχον, κατακείμενοι δὲ ἐν στιβάσιν ἐδείπνουν, καὶ ἔπινον ἐκ κερατίνων ποτηρίων, οἷς ἐνετύγχανον ἐν τῇ χώρᾳ. }[4]

This banquet was in effect a diplomatic affair. It provided a hospitable context for settling peacefully the violent conflict between the Paphlagonians and the traveling Greek mercenary soldiers.

At the banquet, Greek soldiers performed war dances ostensibly for entertainment. First two Thracian men danced in full armor to flute music. After some sparring with sabers, one pretended to kill the other and despoil him of his weapons. The victor marched out singing. Other Thracian men carried out the soldier pretending to be dead. The Paphlagonians misunderstood this artful acting. They lamented the Thracian soldier’s death.

ancient Greek women Pyrrhic dancers in a banquet scene

The next dance was particularly relevant to the diplomatic occasion. This dance, which Xenophon called the “carpaea {καρπαία},” realistically represented the conflict between Paphlagonian farmers and the Greek mercenary soldiers:

The manner of the dance was this: a man who has laid aside his weapons is sowing by driving his cattle. He turns about frequently, as would a man in fear. A roving bandit approaches. As soon as the sower sees him coming, he grabs his arms, goes to meet him, and fights with him to save his yoked cattle. The two men do all this in rhythm to flute music. In the end, the roving bandit binds the man and steals the yoked cattle. Sometimes, the cattle’s master binds the roving bandit and yokes him along with the cattle. With the roving bandit’s hands tied behind him, the sower then drives on.

{ ὁ δὲ τρόπος τῆς ὀρχήσεως ἦν, ὁ μὲν παραθέμενος τὰ ὅπλα σπείρει καὶ ζευγηλατεῖ πυκνὰ μεταστρεφόμενος ὡς φοβούμενος, λῃστὴς δὲ προσέρχεται· ὁ δ᾿ ἐπὰν προΐδηται, ἀπαντᾷ ἁρπάσας τὰ ὅπλα καὶ μάχεται πρὸ τοῦ ζεύγους· καὶ οὗτοι ταῦτ᾿ ἐποίουν ἐν ῥυθμῷ πρὸς τὸν αὐλόν· καὶ τέλος ὁ λῃστὴς δήσας τὸν ἄνδρα καὶ τὸ ζεῦγος ἀπάγει· ἐνίοτε δὲ καὶ ὁ ζευγηλάτης τὸν λῃστήν· εἶτα παρὰ τοὺς βοῦς ζεύξας ὀπίσω τὼ χεῖρε δεδεμένον ἐλαύνει. }[5]

Xenophon’s concluding description of alternatives destroys the mimesis. Xenophon seems to be prompting the reader to consider critically the action at a higher level of abstraction. Conflict between nomads and farmers have deep historical and mythic roots.[6] In Xenophon’s time, the dominance of sedentary civilizations wasn’t clear. The conflict between the Paphlagonians and the roving Greek mercenaries points to a more general conflict relevant to civic leaders.

Two further dances were less representational. A Mysian soldier entered and performed a dance simulating combat between two and then one enemy soldiers. He “was whirling and doing aerial somersaults while holding shields {τοτὲ δ’ ἐδινεῖτο καὶ ἐξεκυβίστα ἔχων τὰς πέλτας}.”[7] He thus danced “so as to make a fine spectacle {ὥστε ὄψιν καλὴν φαίνεσθαι}.” He then did a different, Persian war dance. Subsequently, Mantinean and Arcadian soldiers, dressed richly in arms, came forward and marched, sang, and danced as if at a festival for the gods. These dances clearly weren’t mimesis of violent conflict.

Young woman doing Pyrrhic dance as part of women's physical training.

The final dance at the diplomatic dinner was the most significant and the most influential. The presentation of exclusively war dances created a diplomatic incident:

As they watched, the Paphlagonians were horrified that all the dances were under arms. Seeing that they were astounded by this, the Mysian man persuaded one of the Arcadians who had a dancing girl to let him bring her in after first dressing her in the finest way he could and giving her a light shield. She danced the Pyrrhic with grace. That was followed with great applause, and the Paphlagonians asked whether the Greeks’ women also fought alongside their men. The Greeks replied that these very women had routed the king from his camp. So the evening ended.

{ ὁρῶντες δὲ οἱ Παφλαγόνες δεινὰ ἐποιοῦντο πάσας τὰς ὀρχήσεις ἐν ὅπλοις εἶναι. ἐπὶ τούτοις ὁρῶν ὁ Μυσὸς ἐκπεπληγμένους αὐτούς, πείσας τῶν Ἀρκάδων τινὰ πεπαμένον ὀρχηστρίδα εἰσάγει σκευάσας ὡς ἐδύνατο κάλλιστα καὶ ἀσπίδα δοὺς κούφην αὐτῇ. ἡ δὲ ὠρχήσατο πυρρίχην ἐλαφρῶς. ἐνταῦθα κρότος ἦν πολύς, καὶ οἱ Παφλαγόνες ἤροντο εἰ καὶ αἱ γυναῖκες συνεμάχοντο αὐτοῖς. οἱ δ᾿ ἔλεγον ὅτι αὗται καὶ αἱ τρεψάμεναι εἶεν βασιλέα ἐκ τοῦ στρατοπέδου. τῇ μὲν οὖν νυκτὶ ταύτῃ τοῦτο τὸ τέλος ἐγένετο. }[8]

Greek women warriors surely hadn’t routed the Paphlagonian king from his camp. Men, however, love to credit women, even if that credit has no factual basis. A beautiful woman gracefully dancing a war dance provides men with an imaginative victory over harsh reality.

young woman performing Pyrrhic dance at ancient Greek symposium

The Greeks quickly concluded the diplomatic matter. They demanded nothing from the Paphlagonian ambassadors:

On the next day, the Greeks introduced the ambassadors to the army. The Greek soldiers passed a resolution to do the Paphlagonians no wrong and to suffer no wrong at their hands.

{ Τῇ δὲ ὑστεραίᾳ προσῆγον αὐτοὺς εἰς τὸ στράτευμα· καὶ ἔδοξε τοῖς στρατιώταις μήτε ἀδικεῖν Παφλαγόνας μήτε ἀδικεῖσθαι. }

The Greek soldiers thus literally accepted the terms that the Paphlagonian king Corylas had given them. Corylas has proposed “to do the Greeks no wrong and to suffer no wrong at their hands {Ἕλληνας μήτε ἀδικεῖν μήτε αὐτὸς ἀδικεῖσθαι}.” After the diplomatic dinner and all the war dances, including a Greek woman’s Pyrrhic dance, the Greeks soldiers resolved “to do the Paphlagonians no wrong and to suffer no wrong at their hands {μήτε ἀδικεῖν Παφλαγόνας μήτε ἀδικεῖσθαι}.” Emphasizing their commitment to not further pillage the Paphlagonians, the Greek army promptly sailed away from Paphlagonia. The Greeks apparently didn’t believe the asserted martial prowess of Greek women. They apparently didn’t even believe that the Paphlagonians were intimidated by the Greek display of martial dances, including a woman performing Pyrrhic dance. Within Xenophon’s story, the woman’s Pyrrhic dance and the claim about Greek women’s military success is treated as a fantasy.[9] Xenophon apparently had contempt for men’s delight in women’s Pyrrhic dancing.

Women’s Pyrrhic dance in ancient Greek served as an idle distraction from military and gender reality. Only Greek men actually were taught to fight and die in institutionalized violence against men such as the horrific and stupid Trojan War. Moreover, while women predominately danced for pleasure, men who danced for pleasure tended to be disparaged as “effeminate.” In ancient Athens, artistic representations of Pyrrhic dance shifted with the rise of democracy from showing men Pyrrhic dancers to showing women Pyrrhic dancers.[10] More extensive and more competitive public discourse seems to favor gender delusions that both men and women enjoy. Those delusions are Pyrrhic victories that impede true progress toward gender equality.

women Pyrrhic dancer and aulos-player between two young men, with temple in background

* * * * *

Read more:

Notes:

[1] Plato, Laws {Νόμοι} 813D-814B (Book 7), words of the Athenian stranger {Ἀθηναῖος ξένος}, ancient Greek text and English translation (modified slightly) from Bury (1926). The Athenian subsequently queries:

Shall we, then, lay down this law: that up to the point stated, women must not neglect military training, but all citizens, men and women alike, must pay attention to it?

{ Οὐκοῦν τιθῶμεν τὸν νόμον τοῦτον, μέχρι γε τοσούτου μὴ ἀμελεῖσθαι τὰ περὶ τὸν πόλεμον γυναιξὶ δεῖν, ἐπιμελεῖσθαι δὲ πάντας τοὺς πολίτας καὶ τὰς πολίτιδας }

Plato, Laws {Νόμοι} 814C (Book 7), sourced as previously. The Athenian’s interlocutor Cleinias {Κλεινίας} readily agrees to this proposal.

[2] Ancient Greek Pyrrhic dance (pyrrhichē {πυρρίχη}) had a “striking warlike character.” Ceccarelli (2004) p. 91. In the Iliad, Hector’s dance for Ares amid the horrific Trojan War probably was a forerunner of Pyrrhic dance. For Hector’s dance for Ares, Iliad 7.237-43. Fifth-century BGC texts and vase paintings attest to Pyrrhic dance. Plato described this war dance:

The warlike dance division, being distinct from the peaceful, one may rightly call Pyrrhic. It represents modes of eluding all kinds of blows and shots by swerving and ducking and side-leaps upward or crouching. It also represents the opposite kinds of motion, which lead to active postures of offense, when it strives to represent the movements involved in shooting with bows or darts, and blows of every description.

{ τὴν πολεμικὴν δὴ τούτων, ἄλλην οὖσαν τῆς εἰρηνικῆς, πυῤῥίχην ἄν τις ὀρθῶς προσαγορεύοι, τάς τε εὐλαβείας πασῶν πληγῶν καὶ βολῶν ἐκνεύσεσι καὶ ὑπείξει πάσῃ καὶ ἐκπηδήσεσιν ἐν ὕψει καὶ ξὺν ταπεινώσει μιμουμένην, καὶ τὰς ταύταις ἐναντίας, τὰς ἐπὶ τὰ δραστικὰ φερομένας αὖ σχήματα ἔν τε ταῖς τῶν τόξων βολαῖς καὶ ἀκοντίων καὶ πασῶν πληγῶν μιμήματα ἐπιχειροῦσαν1 μιμεῖσθαι. }

Plato, Laws {Νόμοι} 815A (Book 7), sourced as previously. Ancient Greek Pyrrhic dance was performed at contests, festivals, and temple ceremonies. It was “the most eminent martial dance.” Vickers (2016a) p. 41. On Pyrrhic dance, Ceccarelli (2004), Ceccarelli (1998), Goulaki-Voutira (1996), and Poursat (1968).

Pyrrhic dance apparent changed character from fifth-century BGC Greece to the second-century GC Roman Empire. Writing at the end of the second century GC, Athenaeus remarked:

The pyrrichê {Pyrrhic dance} of our times is rather Dionysiac in character and is more respectable than the ancient kind. For the dancers carry Bacchic wands in place of spears, they also hurl at one another fennel stalks, they carry torches, and they dance the story of Dionysus and India, as well as the story of Pentheus.

{ ἡ δὲ καθ᾿ ἡμᾶς πυρρίχη Διονυσιακή τις εἶναι δοκεῖ, ἐπιεικεστέρα οὖσα τῆς ἀρχαίας· ἔχουσι γὰρ οἱ ὀρχούμενοι θύρσους ἀντὶ δοράτων, προΐενται δὲ ἐπ᾿ ἀλλήλους νάρθηκας καὶ λαμπάδας φέρουσιν ὀρχοῦνταί τε τὰ περὶ τὸν Διόνυσον καὶ | τοὺς Ἰνδούς, ἔτι τε τὰ περὶ τὸν Πενθέα. }

Athenaeus of Naucratis, The Learned Banqueters / Deipnosophistae {Δειπνοσοφισταί} 14.631ab (29), ancient Greek text and English translation (modified slightly) from Olson (2006-2012).

[3] On women Pyrrhic dancers being naked in the majority of surviving paintings, Poursat (1968) p. 605 and Goulaki-Voutira (1996) p. 4. On the chronology of representations of women performing Pyrrhic dance, Osborne (2018) p. 164, Poursat (1968) p. 604. On women’s Pyrrhic dancing mainly occurring at symposia, id p. 8, Douka (2008), and Osborne (2018) pp. 186-7. On dancing at symposia more generally, Olsen (2017) and Jesus (2009). Xenophon’s Symposium describes a boy and girl dancing for the entertainment of the symposiasts. Women also did Pyrrhic dances in services for the goddesses Artemis and Athena. Poursat (1968) pp. 599-604 and Valdés Guía (2020). For a tendentious, resolutely gynocentric analysis, Delavaud-Roux (2017). Women also danced at women’s social gatherings, such as when Nausicaa and her servant-women gathered to wash clothes by the seashore. Odyssey 6.112-21.

Watching dancing was associated with the pleasures of symposia:

Let us fasten garlands
of roses on our brows
and get drunk, laughing gently.
Let a gorgeous-ankled girl
dance to the lyre, carrying
the thyrsus with its rich ivy tresses.
With her let a boy, soft-haired
and with sweet-smelling
mouth, play the lyre,
pouring forth a clear song.

{ στεφάνους μὲν κροτάφοισι
ῥοδίνους συναρμόσαντες
μεθύωμεν ἁβρὰ γελῶντες.
ὑπὸ βαρβίτῳ δὲ κούρα
κατακίσσοισι βρύοντας
πλοκάμοις φέρουσα θύρσους
χλιδανόσφυρος χορεύῃ.
ἁβροχαίτας δ᾿ ἅμα κοῦρος
στομάτων ἁδὺ πνεόντων
κατὰ πηκτίδων ἀθύρῃ
προχέων λίγειαν ὀμφάν. }

Anacreontea 43.1-11, ancient Greek text and English translation (modified insubstantially) from Campbell (1988).

[4] Xenophon of Athens, Anabasis {Ἀνάβασις} 6.1.2-4, ancient Greek text and English translation (modified slightly) from Brownson & Dillery (1998). Subsequent quotes above are similarly sourced from Xenophon, Anabasis 6.1.8-14. Vickers (2016b) provides a slightly modified translation of Anabasis 6.1.1-15. The Greek army of mercenaries is conventionally known as the Ten Thousand.

[5] Here “roving bandit” translates the ancient Greek λῃστής, which describes a robber, pirate, or buccaneer and comes from the Epic form ληΐς, meaning booty or spoils. Xenophon used a similar term in describing actions of some of the Greek mercenaries: “and others (of the Greek mercenary army) lived by pillaging in Paphlagonia {οἱ δὲ καὶ λῃζόμενοι ἐκ τῆς Παφλαγονίας}.” Anabasis 6.1.1.

[6] E.g. the conflict between Abel the pastoralist and Cain the farmer in Genesis 4:1-16. The Sumerian myth The debate between Winter and Summer hints of conflict between farmer and the sheep-herder. It describes a conflict between the brothers Winter (the god Enten, perhaps associated with a farmer and stored grain) and Summer (the god Emesh, perhaps associated with sheep-herders). The head god Enlil declares Enten to be a faithful farmer and superior to Emesh. Here’s the Sumerian composite text and an English translation via ETCSL. Kramer called this work Emesh and Enten: Enlil Chooses the Farmer-God and described it as “the closest extant Sumerian parallel to the Biblical Cain-Abel story.” Kramer (1972) p. 49.

Highly developed mobile societies continued to exist in central Eurasia long after the rise of cites in northern Mesopotamia and elsewhere. These mobile societies moved long distances. Mongol invasions of Eastern Europe early in the thirteenth century and the Mongol sacking of Baghdad in 1258 indicate a type of military threat that Xenophon probably recognized about 1600 years earlier.

[7] On interpreting the described bodily movements, Vickers (2016a) pp. 36-7.

[8] The reactions of the Paphlagonians to all the martial dances (Anabasis 6.1.12) is δεινὰ ἐποιοῦντο: “they thought it most strange,” Brownson & Dillery (1998); “they were indignant,” Vickers (2016a) p. 30, Vickers (2016b) handout. The Paphlagonians here are also described as “indignant/upset.” Vickers (2016a) p. 33.The ancient Greek adjective δεινός encompasses horrible, fear-inspiring, and strange. In the next sentence, the Mysian soldier observes that the Paphlagonians “were astonished {ἐκπεπληγμένους αὐτούς}.” The Paphlagonians feeling “resentment” doesn’t seem fitting here. Cf. Vickers (2016a) p. 30. Given the overall context, I’ve translated δεινὰ ἐποιοῦντο as “they were horrified.”

In “they (the Greeks) said that these very women had routed the king from his camp {οἱ δ᾿ ἔλεγον ὅτι αὗται καὶ αἱ τρεψάμεναι εἶεν βασιλέα ἐκ τοῦ στρατοπέδου}” (Anabasis 6.1.13), the referent of “king {βᾰσῐλεύς}” isn’t clear. It’s typically taken to be the Persian king Artaxerxes II. E.g. Olsen (2021) p. 189; Olsen (2017) p. 28, n. 33; Vickers (2016a) p. 30; Flower (2012) p. 185; Ma (2010) p. 512. Flower takes this claim to be an allusion to the action of the concubine from Miletus in Anabasis 1.10.2-3. Flower (2012) p. 185. However, the Paphlagonians weren’t plausibly aware of that action, nor of the Persian king of kings being in some “camp {στρᾰτόπεδον}.” Making an incomprehensible quip to the Paphlagonians isn’t conversationally reasonable. In context, “king {βᾰσῐλεύς}” makes better sense as an obviously ridiculous reference to the Paphlagonian leader Corylas, whom Xenophon previously called “ruler {ᾰ̓́ρχων}.” The Paphlagonians would recognize a reference to Corylas as “king {βᾰσῐλεύς}” to be bombastic and the alleged military action of the Greek women to be ridiculously fictitious. They would laugh along with the Greeks at it. This interpretation is consistent with Xenophon’s ending of the story, as analyzed above.

[9] At least one ancient Greek reader seems to have read in a simple, partisan way Xenophon’s story about the conflict with the Paphlagonians. Modern scholars have scarcely been more critical. A leading study of the Anabasis declared:

Whether Xenophon intended this “grim pleasantry” {the claim that Greek women routed the king} simply to be read in context as a means for the Ten Thousand to inspire fear in the Paphlagonians (you had better not mess with us when even our women can fight in pitched battles) or to serve as a timeless example of how simple it is for Greeks to defeat Persians, one can readily imagine why later Greek readers would have picked up on the latter implication.

Flower (2012) pp. 185-6, with “grim pleasantry” quoting the Hellenistic writer Demetrius, On Style 131. Id. p. 185. Neither of these two alternative interpretations provide a perceptive, sophisticated reading of Xenophon’s story.

Modern scholarly readers have projected their own fantasies onto Xenophon’s story. One scholar declared:

The dances, whatever their original context (symposiastic or festive), are used for a purpose, to entertain but also to intimidate the Paphlagonians, by giving an image of the prowess, the diversity but also the unity of the Ten Thousand: fencing, light infantry raiding and footwork, hoplitic square-bashing. (The Paphlagonians duly ask for alliance after these terrifying displays.)

Ma (2010) pp. 511-2. The Paphlagonians didn’t “ask for alliance after these terrifying displays.” After these displays, the Greeks accepted the terms that the Paphlagonian ambassadors had brought to Greeks prior to the banquet.

Modern scholars have interpreted the dance show more literally and more obtusely than the Paphlagonians probably did. One scholar declared:

The series of dances, taken together, indicates the performers’ martial, physical, and even cultural superiority.

Vickers (2016a) p. 33. The Greek mercenaries thus enacted a “cultural triumph of martial mousike.” Id. p. 35. The woman’s Pyrrhic dance was “the climax {sic} of the evening” and helped the Greek mercenary army to “convey an impression of martial strength.” Baragwanath (2019) p. 124. In a presentation entitled, “The Cultural Triumph of Martial Dance in Xenophon’s Anabasis 6.1.1-14,” Vickers declared:

I argue that the sequence of performances is purposefully crafted to create a choreographic narrative, which substitutes for actual battle; the Greek army ‘defeats’ the Paphlagonians with dance, not war.

Vickers (2016b). The fictive quality of this literary analysis becomes inescapably clear with a textual citation:

The message of the evening’s entertainment is inescapable, and the Paphlagonians duly accept peace (6.1.14). The episode and its dancing warriors indeed showcase the cultural superiority of the Ten Thousand, and their martial prowess.

Id. In Anabasis 6.1.14, the Paphlagonian ambassadors don’t speak or act. In that passage, the Greek mercenary army (the Ten Thousand) unconditionally accept the Paphlagonian king’s prior terms for peace.

Scholars seem to have idealized the Greek mercenary army in a way that Xenophon didn’t. A scholar thus perceived that the Greeks’ performance for the Paphlagonians sent the message that “the Greeks are powerful and ever-ready warriors, who use weapons skillfully even in their leisure-time pursuit of dance.” Olsen (2016) p. 176, Olsen (2021) p. 191. That interpretation is then bluntly forced upon Xenophon’s story:

When the Greeks subsequently make peace with the Paphlagonians and depart from the region (ἔδοξε τοῖς στρατιώταις μήτε ἀδικεῖν Παφλαγόνας μήτε ἀδικεῖσθαι, 6.1.14), the agreement is tinged by the prior evening’s display of Greek force and skill. Xenophon implies that the Greek army possesses the ability to defeat the Paphlagonians by force, but instead magnanimously agrees to leave them in peace.

Olsen (2016) p. 176, Olsen (2021) p. 191. Xenophon was a sophisticated rhetorician. He wrote nothing indicating that the Greek mercenaries “magnanimously” agreed to leave the Paphlagonians in peace. In contrast, the ending of his story is meaningfully jarring.

[10] Athenian pottery made before 460 BGC depicts men doing Pyrrhic dances. After that date, only women Pyrrhic dancers appear on Athenian pottery. Osborne (2018) p. 164, Poursat (1968) p. 604. Depictions of women performing Pyrrhic dance apparently were most popular from 440 BGC to 420 BGC. Depictions of Pyrrhic dance subsequently became rare. Poursat (1968) p. 604. The change from representing men Pyrrhic dancers to representing women Pyrrhic dancers is a component of a broad pattern of change in the content of paintings of everyday life on Athenian pottery. The change in the content and style of Athenian paintings seems to be linked to the rise of democratic values and greater appreciation for contemplation and collaboration. Osborne (2018). The gender structure of dance in ancient Greece illustrates the instrumentalization and devaluation of men’s lives. The importance of public deliberation in driving such a change is consistent with Georges Duby’s rise to eminence as a scholar of medieval women.

Men doing Pyrrhic dance in ancient Athens

[images] (1) Pyrrhic dancer and aulos-player. Painting by the Cassel painter on a red-figure krater (vessel for mixing wine and water). Painted in Athens about 440-430 BGC. Preserved as inventory # Cp 761; G 480 in the Louvre Museum (Paris, France), which supplied the source image.

(2) Women Pyrrhic dancers, depicted along with the winged god Eros and the young man Kallias, charged with mutilating herms. In a lower register, a young man amorously pursues a young woman. Painting by the Polygnotos group on an Attic red-figure hydria (water jug). Painted about 430 BGC in Athens. Preserved as inventory # 4014 in Museo Archaeologico Nazionale, Firenze (Florence, Italy). Source image thanks to ArchaiOptix and Wikimedia Commons. This hydria is Beazly Archive 213776. For some artistic analysis, Matheson (1995) p. 287, which catalogs it as PGU 168.

(3) Woman dancer / acrobat. Above her are beads and two tympana (drums), instruments associated with dancing. Painting by the Foundling Painter and made on a red-figure hydria. Painted about 340-330 BGC in Campania, Italy. Preserved as museum # 1814,0704.566 in the British Museum, which supplied the source image.

(4) Women Pyrrhic dancers in a banquet scene. The winged god Eros is next to the leftmost woman Pyrrhic dancer and next to the woman aulos-player. Painted about 430 BGC on a red-figure hydria made in Athens. Preserved as item # 7359 in the National Museum of Denmark (Copenhagen), which supplied the source image under a CC-BY-SA license via Osborne (2018) Plate 27. For discussion of this painting, id. pp. 164-6.

(5) Young woman doing Pyrrhic dance as part of women’s physical training. Painted by Polygnotos on a red-figure hydria in Athens c. 440 BGC. Preserved as item H3232 (Naples, inv. 81398) in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, Italy. For additional photos of this painting and some analysis, Matheson (1995) pp. 23-5, including Plate 17. Matheson cataloged this hydria as P 67.

(6) Young woman performing Pyrrhic dance at an ancient Greek symposium. Perhaps a symposium of the gods (Dionysian feasting), with the goddess Athena doing Pyrrhic dance. Painted about 400 BGC on an Athenian red-figure krater by a painter associated with the Talos Painter. Preserved as item H 5708 in the Martin von Wagner Museum (Würzburg, Germany), also cataloged as ARV 1339 5 / Beazley Archive 217527. Source image thanks to ArchaiOptix and Wikimedia Commons. Here’s an alternate image.

(7) Women Pyrrhic dancer and aulos-player between two young men, with temple in background. Painting by the Pothos painter on red-figure krater made in Athens in the second half of the fifth century BGC. Preserved as item 732 in Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria, which supplied the source image. Also cataloged as Beazley Archive 215764.

For additional, freely available images of women performing Pyrrhic dance, Poursat (1968) and Goulaki-Voutira (1995). A painting of a woman Pyrrhic dancer running in front of men symposiasts, Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale: STG 281 (Beazley Archive 213564), attributed to the Lykaon Painter, is shown in Osborne (2018) p. 184 (Figure 7.19) and Matheson (1995) p. 94 (Plate 70).

(8) Two young men doing Pyrrhic dance. Painted on an Attic red-figure hydria by a painter similar to the Dikaios painter. Part of the Pioneer Group. Painted about 500 BGC. Preserved as accession # 21.88.2 (credit: Rogers Fund, 1921) in The Met Museum, New York, USA, which supplied the source image.

References:

Baragwanath, Emily. 2019. “Heroes and Homemakers in Xenophon.” Chapter 6 (pp. 108-129) in Thomas Biggs and Jessica Blum, eds. The Epic Journey in Greek and Roman Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Ceccarelli, Paola. 1998. La Pirrica nell’Antichità Greco Romana: Studi Sulla Danza Armata. Pisa: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali. Reviews by Alexandra Goulaki-Voutira, by Jean-Jacques Maffre, by Silvia Milanezi, and by Eva Stehle.

Ceccarelli, Paola. 2004. “Dancing the Pyrrhichē in Athens.” Chapter 4 (pp. 91-118) in Penelope Murray and Peter Wilson, eds. Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousikē in the Classical Athenian City. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Delavaud-Roux, Marie-Hélène. 2017. “Danses féminines, espace de liberté ou de contraintes? L’exemple des danses initiatiques pour Artémis en Grèce antique / Danças Femininas, Espaço de Liberdade ou Restrição? O Exemplo das danças iniciáticas para Ártemis na Grécia Antiga.” Dramaturgias. Revista do Laboratório de Dramaturgia – LADI – UnB. 5: 197-210.

Douka, Stella, Vasilios Kaïmakamis, Panagiotis Papadopoulos, and Antonia Kaltsatou. 2008. “Female Pyrrhic Dancers in Ancient Greece.” Studies in Physical Culture and Tourism. 15 (2): 95-99.

Flower, Michael A. 2012. Xenophon’s Anabasis, or, the Expedition of Cyrus. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Review by John Dillery.

Goulaki-Voutira, Alexandra. 1996. “Pyrrhic Dance and Female Pyrrhic Dancers.” RIdIM/RCMI Newsletter (published by the Research Center for Music Iconography, The Graduate Center, City University of New York). 21 (1): 3–12.

Jesus, Carlos A. Martins de. 2009. “Dancing with Plutarch: dance and dance theory in Plutarch’s Table Talk.” Pp. 403-414 in José Ribeiro Ferreira, Delim Leão, Manuel Tröster, and Paula Barata Dias, eds. Symposium and Philanthropia in Plutarch. University of Coimbra: Classica Digitalia – CECH 2009 (Humanitas Supplementum).

Kramer, Samuel Noah. 1972. Sumerian Mythology: a Study of Spiritual and Literary Achievement in the Third Millennium B.C. Rev. ed. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Lane Fox, Robin, ed. 2004. The Long March: Xenophon and the Ten Thousand. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Ma, John. 2010. “You Can’t Go Home Again: Displacement and Identity in Xenophon’s Anabasis.” Chapter 18 (pp. 502-519) in Vivienne J. Gray, ed. Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Xenophon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reprinted in Lane Fox (2004) pp. 330-345.

Matheson, Susan B. 1995. Polygnotos and Vase Painting in Classical Athens. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Olsen, Sarah. 2016. Beyond Choreia: Dance in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture. Ph.D. Thesis, Classics. University of California, Berkeley. Revised into Olsen (2021).

Olsen, Sarah. 2017. “The dancing girls of Ancient Greece: Performance, agency, and entertainment.” Clio. Women, Gender, History. 2 (46): 19-42. Alternate source for version in French.

Olsen, Sarah. 2021. Solo Dance in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature: Representing the Unruly Body. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Olson, S. Douglas, ed. and trans. 2006-2012. Athenaeus of Naucratis. The Learned Banqueters {Deipnosophistae}. Loeb Classical Library vols. 204, 208, 224, 235, 274, 327, 345, 519. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Osborne, Robin. 2018. The Transformation of Athens: Painted Pottery and the Creation of Classical Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Reviews by John Boardman, by Barbara Graziosi, by Guy Hedreen, and by Unai Iriarte.

Poursat, Jean-Claude. 1968. “Les Représentations de Danse Armée dans la Céramique Attique.” Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique. 92 (2): 550–615.

Valdés Guía, Miriam. 2020. “Pallas and a Female Pyrrhic Dance for Athena in Attica.” Mnemosyne. 74 (6): 913–34.

Vickers, Jonathan R. 2016a. The Acrobatic Body in Ancient Greek Society. Ph.D. Thesis, Classics. The University of Western Ontario.

Vickers, Jonathan. 2016b. “The Cultural Triumph of Martial Dance in Xenophon’s Anabasis 6.1.1-14.” Presentation. CAMWS: The Classical Association of the Middle West and South, USA. 112th Annual Meeting. March 16-19, 2016. Williamsburg, VA. Handout: text and translation of Anabasis 6.1.1-14.

transcending violence in Acts: the genteel Ethiopian eunuch official

Castration is a starkly gendered form of violence against men. Some men historically have suffered castration to serve their own interests in becoming high-ranking officials. These eunuch officials have been widely despised for being vicious and jealous. A few years after Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, Philip the Evangelist met on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza an Ethiopian eunuch. The biblical book Acts clearly characterizes this Ethiopian eunuch, a high-ranking official, as gracious and genteel.

The Ethiopian eunuch was both a royal African official and a pious, humble man. Acts records:

A man of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great power under Candace queen of the Ethiopians, the man who was in charge of all her treasure, had come to Jerusalem to worship.

{ ἀνὴρ Αἰθίοψ εὐνοῦχος δυνάστης Κανδάκης τῆς βασιλίσσης Αἰθιόπων ὃς ἦν ἐπὶ πάσης τῆς γάζης αὐτῆς ὃς ἐληλύθει προσκυνήσων εἰς Ἰερουσαλήμ }[1]

Returning from Jerusalem, the Ethiopian eunuch was sitting in his chariot, as befits a high official. He wasn’t checking for messages and sending texts to many different persons. A pious man, he was reading aloud and pondering the biblical book of Isaiah. That prophetic book concerns the destiny of Israel after the terrible suffering of its exile.

The Ethiopian eunuch with Philip in chariot stopping for baptism. From the Menologian of Basil

Philip the Evangelist ran up to the Ethiopian eunuch’s chariot. Royal bodyguards might have killed Philip as a possible assailant. Perhaps the Ethiopian eunuch restrained his bodyguards. In any case, Philip then impudently asked:

Do you even understand what you are reading?

{ ἆρά γε γινώσκεις ἃ ἀναγινώσκεις }[2]

The ancient Greek form of the question presumes that the Ethiopian eunuch, a royal official, didn’t understand what he was reading. A typical royal official might have responded angrily, e.g. she might have said, “What the hell are you doing, asking me such a question, you walking lunatic nobody?”

Despite Philip’s impudence, the Ethiopian eunuch responded graciously and humbly. He accepted Philip’s suggestion that he didn’t understand what he was reading. He sought Philip’s help with sophisticated, oblique rhetoric:

And how could I, unless someone guides me?

{ πῶς γὰρ ἂν δυναίμην ἐὰν μή τις ὁδηγήσει με }

This royal official then invited Philip to sit with him in his chariot. He asked Philip about Isaiah’s meaning in describing a man suffering under unjust treatment:

I ask you, please tell me, about whom does the prophet say this? About himself, or about someone else?

{ δέομαί σου περὶ τίνος ὁ προφήτης λέγει τοῦτο περὶ ἑαυτοῦ ἢ περὶ ἑτέρου τινός }

The Ethiopian eunuch thus imploringly petitioned Philip for an answer, as if Philip were a royal official. Philip then explained that Isaiah foretold Jesus’s coming.

While the Ethiopian eunuch acted humbly toward Philip, he retained the courtliness and authority of a royal official. When the chariot came to some water, the eunuch said:

Look, water. What prevents me from being baptized?

{ ἰδοὺ ὕδωρ τί κωλύει με βαπτισθῆναι }

The directness of “look, water {ἰδοὺ ὕδωρ}” contrasts sharply with the circumlocutory question, “what prevents me from being baptized {τί κωλύει με βαπτισθῆναι}?” That circumlocutory question is more elegant than the direct request, “baptize me,” or the direct question, “will you baptize me?” No obstacle existed to the eunuch being baptized. The eunuch thus “commanded {ἐκέλευσεν}” the chariot to stop, emphasizing his authority. Both the eunuch and Philip went down into the water. That explicit mutuality emphasizes their equal status as human beings. Philip then baptized the eunuch, and the eunuch went on his way “rejoicing {χαίρων}.”

Philip the Evangelist baptizing the Ethiopian eunuch. Painting by Rembrandt.

Not all eunuch officials are vicious, jealous, self-loathing persons. The Ethiopian eunuch as described in the biblical book Acts is one of the most admirable persons in the New Testament.[3] Despite his high royal position and Philip the Evangelist’s effrontery, the Ethiopian eunuch treated Philip graciously. Moreover, the Ethiopian eunuch spoke with cultured sophistication. He also was open to new understandings and new ways of being. Despite having suffering the sexual violence of castration, he was neither angry nor bitter. Christianity understands God to have become incarnate as a person with masculine genitals, and Christianity fully recognizes men’s seminal blessing.[4] In turning the world upside down, Acts presents the Ethiopian eunuch as an exemplary Christian.

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Read more:

Notes:

[1] Acts 8:27, ancient Greek text (morphological GNT) via Blue Letter Bible, my English translation, drawing upon widely available biblical translations. Subsequent quotes above are similarly from Acts 8:26-39 (the story of the Ethiopian eunuch and Philip).

Since no later than the seventeenth century, the story of the Ethiopian eunuch was included in the Octave of Easter in the Roman Missal. The Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (1979 edition) celebrates on August 27 the “Feast of Simeon Bachos, the Ethiopian Eunuch.” Neither the Bible nor Patristic sources on the Ethiopian eunuch specify his name. “Simeon Bachos” apparently arose relatively late as a name for this important Christian person.

Candace was the Greco-Roman name for the queen of the Nile valley empire called Kush. Greco-Romans referred to Kush as Ethiopia. The capital of Kush was Meroë, which is in present-day Sudan.

Acts refers to this eminent Ethiopian Christian convert as a eunuch five times. Wilson preposterously claimed that the story “marks him solely in terms of his lack of physical manhood.” Wilson (2014) p. 405. To the contrary, Acts characterizes him as pious, gracious, open-minded, wealthy, politically powerful, and happy. Cf. “the Ethiopian eunuch defies categorization…. His lack of definition is extreme.” Carson (1999) p. 145, as quoted in Burke (2013) p. 1.

The word “man {ἀνὴρ}” in Acts 8:27 is distinctively gendered male in ancient Greek. Though a eunuch, the Ethiopian was nonetheless a man. Scholars recently have tended to deny his identity as a man and deny men’s suffering from castration. E.g. Kartzow & Moxnes (2010), Burke (2013), Wilson (2014). One present-day cleric insightfully commented:

What might be his back story? He may have been taken as a young boy to become a eunuch. He had no choice in the matter, and he probably didn’t know what was happening to him. To become a eunuch his testicles were crushed to stop him producing testosterone. Because he had no testosterone, this altered his growth and changed his appearance. His voice never broke, so as an adult he still had the voice of a boy. His body had little hair, and his body grew in disproportionate ways – reduced muscles, but increased body fat in his abdomen, and he developed breasts. His bones would be weaker and more likely to break. He would also be lethargic and depressed.

Smith (2021). The Ethiopian eunuch doesn’t appear in Acts to be lethargic and depressed. He rejoices in being baptized as a Christian.

Whether the Ethiopian eunuch suffered the crushing and removal of his testicles, the amputation of his penis, or both isn’t clear. Such sexual violence has little relation to the modern ideological construction “phallus.” The “phallus” ideologically continues the brutalization of penises by displacing a physical organ with a disparaging ideological construction. Consider the tortuous effect:

Eunuchs in the Greco-Roman world were considered the ultimate “nonmen” since they lacked one of the main features — if not the main feature — of masculinity, namely, a functioning phallus. Given the increased emphasis placed on not just the phallus but the large phallus during the Roman Empire, the eunuch’s so-called deficient phallus made him an object of even more scorn during this period. … Both Jesus and the eunuch do not generate descendants by means of sexual relations and thus relativize the procreative power of the phallus. We know that Jesus has a phallus since he is circumcised in Luke 2:21, yet the generative potential of his phallus does not figure into the growth of his newly formed family of God.

Wilson (2015) pp. Men don’t experience genital mutilation to the ideological, abstract phallus. Men with any sense of interpersonal relations also do not have sex with it.

[2] Philip {Φίλιππος} the Evangelist, who isn’t the same person as Philip the Apostle, was perhaps a relatively wealthy man. He was one of seven Christians chosen to provide for poor widows in Jerusalem. Acts 6:1-6.

[3] For theological interpretations of the story of the Ethiopian eunuch of Acts, see, e.g. Aymer (2021) and Martens (2015). For an interpretation of this story “From a queer perspective, … as a drag show with implications for inclusion in early Christian communities,” Burke (c. 2024). Ebed-Melech {עֶבֶד-מֶלֶךְ}, another Ethiopian eunuch, was also an admirable, godly person. Jeremiah 38:7-13, 39:15-18,

[4] Amid diffuse problematizing and ambiguating, academics have failed to appreciate the incarnate reality of Jesus’s masculinity and the seminal blessing that men offer women. Consider, for example, the paradoxical ambiguity of the scholarly conclusion, ‘Indeed, for {the gospel of} Luke, “real” men look manifestly unmanly.’ Wilson (2015), concluding sentence of the book abstract. In elaborating on boundary-crossing and ambiguity, Wilson (2014) and Wilson (2015) remain strictly confined within the rigid boundaries of contemporary academic orthodoxy. Further demonstrating the possibility of having the word made meaningless, Wilson (2016) claims to ‘problematize how we view Jesus as a “man.”’ But who is “we”?

[images] (1) The Ethiopian eunuch with Philip in a chariot stopping for baptism. From folio 107 of the Menologian of Basil II, made about 1000 GC and preserved as Ms. Vat. gr. 1613. Source image via Wikimedia Commons. For a narrow-minded, tendentious analysis of this image, Betancourt (2020) Chapter 5. Betancourt’s bullying manipulation of reality grotesquely characterizes a central feature of contemporary intellectual life. Consider his declaration:

Whether Empress Teodora actually carried out the sexual deeds and abortions that Procopius slut-shames her for does not matter, because there were other women in the past subjected to the same — and far worse — rhetorical and physical violence as that imputed against Procopius’s literary Teodora. … To deny these realities is to be complicit with violence — both physical and rhetorical — not just in the past but also in the present.

Betancourt (2020) p. 17. Similarly, id. p. 207. Betancourt provides little historical documentation about the realities of those “other women.” He shows no concern for the vastly gender-disproportionate violence against men obvious from the Iliad to present-day mortality statistics. He trivializes gender inequality in parental knowledge and sexual oppression of men. In general, his arch concern for marginalization and oppression extends only to what’s intellectually fashionable. That makes his bullying particularly disgusting. (2) Philip the Evangelist baptizing the Ethiopian eunuch. Painting by Rembrandt c. 1626. Preserved as accession # ABM s380 in the Museum Catharijneconvent (Utrecht, Netherlands). Image via Wikimedia Commons. For analysis of this painting, Kauffman (2015). Rembrandt’s painting much less faithful translates Acts 8:26-39 than does the painting in the Menologian of Basil. Uncannily echoing Rembrandt’s ideological painting of the story, Betancourt asserts that Philip was the one “commanding the {Ethiopian eunuch’s} chariot to stop.” Betancourt (2020) p. 161.

References:

Aymer, Margaret. 2021. “Commentary on Acts 8:26-39.” Working Preacher. Posted online Apr. 25, 2021.

Betancourt, Roland. 2020. Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Introduction. Reviews by Meaghan Allen and by C. Libby.

Burke, Sean D. 2013. Queering the Ethiopian Eunuch: Strategies of Ambiguity in Acts. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Introduction. Brief review.

Burke, Sean D. c. 2024. “Ethiopian Eunuch from a Queer Perspective.” Bible Odyssey. A public outreach of the Society of Biblical Literature. Online.

Carson, Cottrel R. 1999. ‘Do You Understand What You Are Reading?’ A Reading of the Ethiopian
Eunuch Story (Acts 8.26-40) from a Site of Cultural Marronage. Ph.D. Thesis, Union Theological
Seminary.

Kartzow, Marianne B., and Halvor Moxnes. 2010. “Complex Identities: Ethnicity, Gender and Religion in the Story of the Ethiopian Eunuch (Acts 8:26–40).” Religion & Theology. 17 (3-4): 184–204.

Kauffman, Ivan J. 2015. “Seeing the Light: The Ethiopian’s Baptism.” Published June 2,2105, on Academia.edu.

Martens, John W. 2015. “Is the Ethiopian eunuch the first Gentile convert in Acts?” America: The Jesuit Review. Posted online Sept. 23, 2015.

Smith, Andrew. 2021. “The backstory of the Ethiopian Eunuch.” Letters, Thoughts, News. Canberra Region Presbytery (Australia). Post online May 2, 2021.

Wilson, Brittany E. 2014. “‘Neither Male nor Female’: The Ethiopian Eunuch in Acts 8.26–40.” New Testament Studies. 60 (3): 403–22.

Wilson, Brittany E. 2015. Unmanly Men: Refigurations of Masculinity in Luke-Acts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Review by Alexander Nachaj.

Wilson, Brittany E. 2016. “Gender Disrupted: Jesus as a ‘Man’ in the Fourfold Gospel.” Word and World. 36: 24-35.

Hippocleides doesn’t care: great moment of men’s sexed protest

Men competing to win a woman’s love as if she were a prize much more valuable than themselves is a conventional story-line of modern romance. That’s also the plot of medieval romances such as Marie de France’s twelfth-century lay, Two Lovers {Deus Amanz}. An asymmetrically gendered love-quest occurs more than a millennium earlier in the ancient Greek myth of Princess Pallene, King Sithon, and Pallene’s suitors. The great mother of all such asymmetrically gendered love-seeking is the many suitors seeking the hand of the horrible Helen, who came to be known as Helen of Troy.[1] In contrast to the long romance history of gender inequality, the transgressive story of Hippocleides among competing suitors of Agariste, daughter of Cleisthenes, provides a great moment of men’s sexed protest.

According to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, Cleisthenes, the tyrant-ruler of Sicyon, wanted his daughter Agariste to marry the best man among all Greek men. Like most fathers, Cleisthenes apparently adored his daughter and assumed that all men would want to marry her and have him as father-in-law:

Cleisthenes made a proclamation, bidding any Greek men who consider themselves worthy to be his son-in-law to come on the sixtieth day hence or earlier to Sicyon. There, said Cleisthenes, he would promise marriage in a year from that sixtieth day. All the Greek men who were swollen with pride in themselves and their native land then came to seek Agariste’s hand. Cleisthenes made a running track and wrestling arena for the suitors to compete to achieve this end.

{ ὁ Κλεισθένης κήρυγμα ἐποιήσατο, ὅστις Ἑλλήνων ἑωυτὸν ἀξιοῖ Κλεισθένεος γαμβρὸν γενέσθαι, ἥκειν ἐς ἑξηκοστὴν ἡμέρην ἢ καὶ πρότερον ἐς Σικυῶνα, ὡς κυρώσοντος Κλεισθένεος τὸν γάμον ἐν ἐνιαυτῷ, ἀπὸ τῆς ἑξηκοστῆς ἀρξαμένου ἡμέρης. ἐνθαῦτα Ἑλλήνων ὅσοι σφίσι τε αὐτοῖσι ἦσαν καὶ πάτρῃ ἐξωγκωμένοι, ἐφοίτεον μνηστῆρες: τοῖσι Κλεισθένης καὶ δρόμον καὶ παλαίστρην ποιησάμενος ἐπ᾽ αὐτῷ τούτῳ εἶχε. }[2]

Herodotus cataloged these eminent Greek suitors of Agariste like the Hesiodic catalog of suitors of Helen and the Iliadic catalog of warriors coming to Troy to engage in violence against men for Helen.[3] Cleisthenes inquired about each man’s family and lineage. He tested them for a long time in various ways:

He then kept them with him for a year, testing their manliness and temper and upbringing and manner of life. He did this by consorting with them alone and in company, and putting the younger of them to contests in the gymnasium, but especially by watching their demeanor at the common meal.

{ μετὰ δὲ κατέχων ἐνιαυτὸν διεπειρᾶτο αὐτῶν τῆς τε ἀνδραγαθίης καὶ τῆς ὀργῆς καὶ παιδεύσιός τε καὶ τρόπου, καὶ ἑνὶ ἑκάστῳ ἰὼν ἐς συνουσίην καὶ συνάπασι, καὶ ἐς γυμνάσιά τε ἐξαγινέων ὅσοι ἦσαν αὐτῶν νεώτεροι, καὶ τό γε μέγιστον, ἐν τῇ συνεστίῃ διεπειρᾶτο }

Cleisthenes gradually came to favor the Athenian Hippocleides, son of Tisander, for his outstanding “manliness {ἀνδραγαθία}.”[4] That manliness included learning and cultural sophistication as well as physical strength. Hippocleides thus became the leading contestant for marriage to Agariste.

ancient Greek satyr dancing upside-down and being approached on the backside by another satyr with an erect penis

Cleisthenes planned to announce on the very day of the marriage ceremony the winning suitor, whom he undoubtedly chose in private consultation with his daughter Agariste. Cleisthenes thus hosted a great feast and invited all of Sicyon to attend. The competition between the men for the woman continued even during the marriage feast:

After the meal, the suitors vied with each other in music and dance and in public speaking for all to hear. Having sat for a long time drinking with the other suitors, Hippocleides, now far outdoing the rest, ordered a flute-player to play slow, stately dance music. The flute-player obeyed, and Hippocleides began to dance. I suppose he pleased himself with his dancing, but Cleisthenes saw the whole business with much disfavor.

{ ὡς δὲ ἀπὸ δείπνου ἐγίνοντο, οἱ μνηστῆρες ἔριν εἶχον ἀμφί τε μουσικῇ καὶ τῷ λεγομένῳ ἐς τὸ μέσον. προϊούσης δὲ τῆς πόσιος κατέχων πολλὸν τοὺς ἄλλους ὁ Ἱπποκλείδης ἐκέλευσέ οἱ τὸν αὐλητὴν αὐλῆσαι ἐμμελείην, πειθομένου δὲ τοῦ αὐλητέω ὀρχήσατο. καί κως ἑωυτῷ μὲν ἀρεστῶς ὀρχέετο, ὁ Κλεισθένης δὲ ὁρέων ὅλον τὸ πρῆγμα ὑπώπτευε. }[5]

Men should dance no matter who disfavors them doing so. Hippocleides showed himself to be a well-trained, sensational dancer:

Hippocleides then stopped for a while and ordered a table to be brought. When the table arrived, he first danced Laconian dance movements on it, and then Attic. Last of all, he rested upside-down with his head on the table and performed with his legs a dance-like form of shadow-boxing.

{ μετὰ δὲ ἐπισχὼν ὁ Ἱπποκλείδης χρόνον ἐκέλευσε τινὰ τράπεζαν ἐσενεῖκαι, ἐσελθούσης δὲ τῆς τραπέζης πρῶτα μὲν ἐπ᾽ αὐτῆς ὀρχήσατο Λακωνικὰ σχημάτια, μετὰ δὲ ἄλλα Ἀττικά, τὸ τρίτον δὲ τὴν κεφαλὴν ἐρείσας ἐπὶ τὴν τράπεζαν τοῖσι σκέλεσι ἐχειρονόμησε. }[6]

Greek men wore tunics and no underwear. Hippocleides thus culminated his performance of various dances by displaying his genitals and buttocks while dancing upside-down. In performing an upside-down shadow-boxing dance, he seems to have been taunting Cleisthenes for having men compete to marry Agariste.

Ancient Greek woman dancer dancing upside-down, or a woman tumbler doing a somersault

The conflict between Cleisthenes and Hippocleides burst into words. Both persons gave their interpretations of Hippocleides’s concluding dance:

During the first and the second dance displays, Cleisthenes could no longer accept considering Hippocleides as his son-in-law because of his dancing and his shamelessness. Nonetheless, he held his tongue, for he didn’t want to censure Hippocleides publicly. However, when he saw him performing with his legs the dance-like form of shadow-boxing, he could no longer keep silent. He said, “Son of Tisander, you indeed have so danced away your marriage.” Hippocleides said in reply, “Hippocleides doesn’t care!” So it is from this that this gets a name.

{ Κλεισθένης δὲ τὰ μὲν πρῶτα καὶ τὰ δεύτερα ὀρχεομένου, ἀποστυγέων γαμβρὸν ἄν οἱ ἔτι γενέσθαι Ἱπποκλείδεα διὰ τήν τε ὄρχησιν καὶ τὴν ἀναιδείην, κατεῖχε ἑωυτόν, οὐ βουλόμενος ἐκραγῆναι ἐς αὐτόν: ὡς δὲ εἶδε τοῖσι σκέλεσι χειρονομήσαντα, οὐκέτι κατέχειν δυνάμενος εἶπε ‘ὦ παῖ Τισάνδρου, ἀπορχήσαό γε μὲν τὸν γάμον.’ ὁ δὲ Ἱπποκλείδης ὑπολαβὼν εἶπε ‘οὐ φροντὶς Ἱπποκλείδῃ.’ ἀπὸ τούτου μὲν τοῦτο ὀνομάζεται. }[7]

Like Hippocleides, men need not accept that they must compete for the love of a woman. Defying the gender injustices that men endure, men should dance with delight in their full selves despite the authority of tyrant-rulers like Cleisthenes.

Men’s best response to gynocentric demands that they “be a man” and renounce their “toxic masculinity” is “I don’t care.” To those who attempt to teach men that they are inferior to women and that the future is female, men should say “I don’t care.” For those who show no concern other than for “what women want,” men should say “I don’t care.”

The story of Hippocleides among suitors competing to marry Agariste belongs within the transgressive tradition of men’s sexed protest. In ancient Rome, men for good reasons were reluctant to marry. Juvenal regarded his friend Postumus as insane for marrying. Valerius dared to speak the truth to Rufinus about his desire to marry. Matheolus learned too late about his fate under his wife Petra. Hippocleides’s words and bodily orientation to the tyrant-ruler Cleisthenes have most significance within a broad social context similar to that of the peasant Marcolf mooning the woman-appeasing King Solomon. Authorities who don’t recognize this resemblance have been staring for too long into elite mirrors for princes.[8]

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Read more:

Notes:

[1] Classical scholars have ignored gender asymmetry in love-seeking throughout history. The ancient Greek myth of Princess Hippodamia, King Oenamous, and Hippodamia’s suitors parallels that of Princess Pallene, King Sithon, and Pallene’s suitors.

Book 5 of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women is the earliest and most important textual account of Helen’s suitors. It describes a wide array of Greek heroes, “desiring to be beautiful-haired Helen’s husband {ἱμείρων Ἑλένης πόσις ἔμμεναι ἠυκόμοιο}.” Catalogue of Women, Book 5, ancient Greek text and English translation for fragment 154d 1 (31) from Most (2018) pp. 248-9. For an earlier, far inferior edition, see fragment 68 in Evelyn-White (1914). These foolish men offered lavish material gifts to “win” marriage to the truly horrific Helen.

Writing 800 or 900 years after Hesiod, the author known as Apollodorus (pseudo-Apollodorus) also lists suitors of Helen. Apollodorus, The Library {Bibliotheca} 3.10.18, ancient Greek text and English translation available in Frazer (1921).

Lavelle observed of Herodotus’s story of Hippocleides among the competing suitors of Agariste:

The story has been cited since Grote {in a book published in 1888} as a doublet of the mythical ‘wooing of Helen’ of Sparta.

Lavelle (2014) p. 321, footnote omitted. The outcomes of the two stories — the Trojan War’s horrific violence against men and Hippocleides’s transgressive dance and quip — differ starkly.

[2] Herodotus, Histories (Ἱστορίαι} 6.126, ancient Greek text and English translation (modified) from Godley (1920). In translating ἐξωγκωμένοι, I’ve drawn upon the insights in Kurke (2011) pp. 417-8. Subsequent quotes above are similarly sourced from Herodotus’s Histories 6.126-9. Tom Holland has provided a freely available English translation of Histories 6.126-9, apparently from Holland (2014).

The historical significance of Herodotus’s story of Hippocleides among the competing suitors of Agariste has been widely debated, except with respect to gender. Lavelle regarded the story, apart from the fact of the marriage of Agariste, to be obviously fictional:

The stunning reversal {in the story} is in fact improbable — it is as if ‘Hippokleides’ is two different persons — and raises doubts about the story, to which may be added those created by its obvious folktale elements and impossible chronologies. Notwithstanding its dubious nature, the tale has been taken as essentially factual by many scholars. … In fact, it is not history at all.

Lavelle (2014) pp. 313-4, 321.

Some scholars argue that the story derives from the ancient Indic Pāli fable “The Dancing Peacock.” See fable 32 in Davids & Fausbøll (1880) pp. 291-3. For a recent argument for “The Dancing Peacock” as Herodotus’s source, Kurke (2011) pp. 414-20. Others see Herodotus’s story as arising independently of the “The Dancing Peacock.” Nagy (2022). Overall, where the story falls between myth and history isn’t clear:

The relationship between history and myth in the case of Agariste’s betrothal could well be of a mise en abyme variety: it may belong to a type of event — and story — that flows in a somewhat systemic way out of the features of our species and cultural structures of particular societies, crossing freely between history and myth and belonging fully to neither. The permeable interface between mythical history and historical myth in Agariste’s betrothal remains invisible

Levaniouk (2022) p. 163.

[3] Homer, Iliad 2.494–759. Underscoring the dehumanization of these men-warriors, this Iliadic passage is commonly called the “Catalogue of Ships.”

[4] Cleisthenes {Κλεισθένης} of Sicyon (Kleisthenes of Sikyon) is thought to have been tyrant-ruler of Sicyon from about 600 to 560 BGC. Other than from Herodotus’s story, nothing more is known of Hippocleides / Hippokleides {Ἱπποκλείδης} than that he was highly regarded and was the Athenian Eponymous Archon in 566 BGC when the Greater Panathenaia was established. Lavelle (2013) p. 313.

[5] Flute-player here refers to a player of the ancient Greek aulos {αὐλός}, which has two pipes and a strong, driving sound like that of bagpipes. On the sound of the aulos, Lavelle (2013) pp. 326-7. Hippocleides told the aulos player to play a specific type of dance music — an emmeleia {ἐμμελεία}. That’s a slow, stately dance associated with tragic choruses.

The ancient Greek word “μουσική {arts of the Muses}” can include dance. In the context of this story, Hippocleides’s solo dancing clearly distinguishes that dance from what he and the other suitors were doing. Nonetheless, he and the other suitors may have been performing group singing and dancing like ancient Greek choruses did.

[6] For the translation of τοῖσι σκέλεσι ἐχειρονόμησε, I’ve drawn on the learned philological analysis of Olson (2018). Underscoring the importance of dance in the ancient Greek world, “the inventory of dances precisely recorded in the story is astonishing.” Lavelle (2013) pp. 327-9. On these dances, Kurke (2011) pp. 421-2.

Cleisthenes’s angry words to Hippocleides apparently include a pun on “testicles”:

Cleisthenes’ response ostensibly means “you have danced away (aporchêsao) your marriage,” but the hapax aporchêsao also puns significantly on orcheis, ‘testicles’: “You have lost your marriage by displaying your testicles,” possibly even “You have ballsed up your marriage.”

Ogden (1997) p. 117, quoted in Lavelle (2014) p. 329. Lavelle suggested that Hippocleides didn’t actually display his testicles:

While this interpretation is inventive, lively, and even witty, it is oblivious both to representations of Greek hand-stand dancing and what is humanly possible. The only way that Hippokleides could “make hand gestures with his feet” is if he was head-standing faced away from the audience regarding his dancing. … There is certainly a sense of abandon and great impropriety in Hippokleides’ dance, which, as with Douris’ satyr, highlights his buttocks and suggests that the dance has become both satyric and homoerotically suggestive: Hippokleides was apparently advertising for male penetration in the midst of what would have been his own wedding feast!

Id. pp. 330-1. Occurring on a table at a marriage feast, Hippocleides’s dance is best understood as being performed in the round. Irrespective of the primary facing of his upside-down dance-like form of shadow-boxing, his testicles and penis surely were visible to the wedding guests standing around and watching. Moreover, the form of the dance suggests his penis participating in the movement of his lower members.

When eminent and beloved classics professor Mortimer Chambers re-enacted this dance for his class, he was evidently with his (clothed) front facing the audience as he continued to tell the story. See the UCLA Classics Departments online post, “In Memoriam Mortimer Chambers.”

The precise bodily orientation of Hippocleides as he did his dance isn’t important. Lavelle commented:

The impression is of frantic movements and the gesticulations of a man with his legs, buttocks, and genitals exposed above the heads of the wedding guests, flailing away with his bride presumptive present.

Lavelle (2014) p. 329. Whatever the bodily orientation of Hippocleides, that impression is essentially accurate.

[7] For ἀπὸ τούτου μὲν τοῦτο ὀνομάζεται, I’ve used the English translation from Nagy (2015). For detailed philological analysis of the meaning of this phrase, Kazanskaya (2015).

Herodotus probably circulated his Histories about 430 BGC. That’s very close to the date of old Greek comedies that apparently referenced the phrase “Hippocleides doesn’t care! {οὐ φροντὶς Ἱπποκλείδῃ}.”

In his play Wasps {Σφῆκες / Vespae} that was performed at the Lenaea festival in Athens in 422 BGC, Aristophanes included a phrase similar in meaning and context to “Hippocleides doesn’t care! {οὐ φροντὶς Ἱπποκλείδῃ}.” In particular, in response to Myrtia {Αρτοπωλισ} threatening to bring a case against him, Lovecleon {Φιλοκλεων} sarcastically declares:

No! Just listen and see if you think I’m making sense. Once Lasus and Simonides were training rival choruses, and Lasus said, “I couldn’t care less.”

{ μὰ Δί᾿, ἀλλ᾿ ἄκουσον, ἤν τί σοι δόξω λέγειν. Λᾶσός ποτ᾿ ἀντεδίδασκε καὶ Σιμωνίδης· ἔπειθ᾿ ὁ Λᾶσος εἶπεν· “ὀλίγον μοι μέλει.” }

Wasps, vv. 1409-11, ancient Greek text and English translation from Henderson (1998). Henderson noted:

Lasus of Hermione was invited to Athens by the tyrant Hipparchus between 527 and 514, where he may have helped to establish the contests in dithyramb, his poetic specialty. Collections of his witty sayings were still read in Roman times (cf. Athenaeus 8.338).

Id. The precedential relationship between these two “don’t care” references isn’t clear. The extensive analysis of Kazanskaya (2015) doesn’t consider this reference in Aristophanes’s Wasps.

The Athenian Hermippus, “a comic poet of the generation previous to Aristophanes,” referred to “Hippocleides doesn’t care {οὐ φροντὶς Ἱπποκλείδῃ}” in his comedy Demes-men {Δημοται}. Fragment 16 in Storey (2011) pp. 288-9. The specific nature of the reference to οὐ φροντὶς Ἱπποκλείδῃ in Hermippus’s isn’t clear. Kazanskaya (2015). Hermippus’s Δημοται may have been performed before Herodotus’s Histories had been widely circulated.

The phrase “Hippocleides doesn’t care” is quoted in much later literature. About 100 GC in his essay On the Malice of Herodotus {Περι Τησ Ηροδοτου Κακοηθειασ / De Herodoti malignitate}, Plutarch wrote:

It looks to me as though, like Hippocleides standing on his head on the table and waving his legs in the air, Herodotus would “dance away the truth” and say: “Herodotus doesn’t care.”

{ δοκεῖ μοι, καθάπερ Ἱπποκλείδης ὁ τοῖς σκέλεσι χειρονομῶν ἐπὶ τῆς τραπέζης, εἰπεῖν ἂν ἐξορχούμενος τὴν ἀλήθειαν· “οὐ φροντὶς Ἡροδότῳ.” }

Plutarch, Περι Τησ Ηροδοτου Κακοηθειασ 867B, ancient Greek text and English translation from Pearson & Sandbach (1965) pp. 86-7. On Plutarch’s view of Herodotus, Ford (2016).

Other writers quoted the saying consistent with its context in Herodotus’s story. Lucian of Samosata writing in the second century GC concluded his “Apology {Απολογια}” for his “The Dependent Scholar / On Salaried Posts in Great Houses {Περὶ τῶν ἐν Μισθῷ συνόντων}” with this saying. Kilburn (1959) pp. 212-3. Pausanias Grammaticus / Atticista in his second-second lexicon referred to this phrase and called it a “proverb {παροιμία}.” Kazanskaya (2015) pp. 34-5. The Roman Emperor Julian / Flavius Claudius Julianus, in an oration he made probably about 362 GC, quoted this saying. Julian, Oration 6, “Emperor Julian to the Uneducated Cynics (Dogs) {Ιουλιανου Αυτοκρατοροσ Εισ Τουσ Απαιδευτουσ Κυνασ}” 182B in Wright (1913) pp. 8-9. The pseudo-Lucian dialogue “The Patriot {Philopatris},” probably written in Byzantium about 969, also ends with this saying, and also explicitly refers to it as a “proverb {παροιμία}.” MacLeaod (1967) pp. 464-5. Nonetheless, it may not have been a proverb when Herodotus wrote his Histories. Kazanskaya (2015).

A phrase similar to “Hippocleides doesn’t care” certainly became famous in the U.S. in the twentieth century. In the 1939 film, Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) said to Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh): “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” That film adapted this line from the final chapter (Chapter 63) of Margaret Mitchell’s 1935 novel, Gone with the Wind. Rhett Butler’s words there are more concise: “My dear, I don’t give a damn.”

[8] Nagy (2022) refers to Hippocleides as a “preening aristocrat” and characterizes him as “Sybaritic.” Cf. Agariste’s suitor Smindyrides of Sybaris, analyzed in Kurke (2011) p. 418. Nagy thinks about Herodotus’s story of Hippocleides among the competing suitors of Agariste as a simplistic fable serving as a mirror for princes:

When Hippokleides missed his chance of marrying the daughter of Kleisthenes, tyrant of Sikyon, the marriage that was lost by the Athenian aristocrat Hippokleides was now won by another Athenian aristocrat, Megakles, descended from the lineage of the Alkmaionidai, and we read all about it in the continued narration of Herodotus (6.130.2). And here we come to a most telling detail: as we read further in Herodotus (6.131.1), the son who was born to Agariste—and thus the grandson who was born to Kleisthenes the tyrant—turned out to be Kleisthenes, whom Herodotus himself describes as the originator of Athenian democracy. Also descended from the family of Megakles, as we read still further in Herodotus (6.131.2), was another paragon of democracy, Pericles.

I think, then, that the story of the failed suitor Hippokleides, as retold by Herodotus the historian, is well worth thinking about — even if Hippokleides, who had made a name for himself as a main character in his part of the story, had no inclination to think about it.

Nagy (2022). Nagy thus thinks about the story much as would the tyrant-ruler Cleisthenes. Athenaeus seems to have had a more subtle view:

Damon of Athens was accordingly quite right to say that songs and dances can only be produced when the soul is somehow set in motion. Free, beautiful souls produce songs and dances that resemble them in that respect, and vice versa. The witty remark of Cleosthenes, the tyrant of Sicyon, thus shows that he had an educated intellect. It is said that when he saw one of his daughters’ suitors — specifically Hippocleides of Athens — doing a vulgar dance, Cleosthenes commented that this man had danced away his marriage, since he thought that his soul most likely matched his actions. For grace and dignity in how a person dances and carries himself are in fact attractive, whereas clumsiness and low-class behavior are embarrassing.

{ οὐ κακῶς δ᾿ ἔλεγον οἱ περὶ Δάμωνα τὸν Ἀθηναῖον ὅτι καὶ τὰς ᾠδὰς καὶ τὰς ὀρχήσεις ἀνάγκη γίνεσθαι κινουμένης πως τῆς ψυχῆς· καὶ αἱ μὲν ἐλευθέριοι καὶ καλαὶ ποιοῦσι τοιαύτας, αἱ δ᾿ ἐναντίαι τὰς ἐναντίας. ὅθεν καὶ τὸ Κλεοσθένους τοῦ Σικυωνίων τυράννου χαρίεν καὶ σημεῖον διανοίας πεπαιδευμένης· ἰδὼν γάρ, ὥς φασι, dφορτικῶς ὀρχησάμενον ἕνα τῶν τῆς θυγατρὸς | μνηστήρων (Ἱπποκλείδης δ᾿ ἦν ὁ Ἀθηναῖος) ἀπωρχῆσθαι τὸν γάμον αὐτὸν ἔφησεν, νομίζων ὡς ἔοικεν καὶ τὴν ψυχὴν τἀνδρὸς εἶναι τοιαύτην. καὶ γὰρ ἐν ὀρχήσει καὶ πορείᾳ καλὸν μὲν εὐσχημοσύνη καὶ κόσμος, αἰσχρὸν δὲ ἀταξία καὶ τὸ φορτικόν. }

Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters {Deipnosophistae} 14.628cd, ancient Greek text and English translation (modified insubstantially) from Olson (2010). Yonge’s translation (1854) is also available online. Many thoughtful readers would recognize the unwritten but well-known punchline to Athenaeus’s near-parody of wooden thinking: “Hippocleides doesn’t care {οὐ φροντὶς Ἱπποκλείδῃ}.”

Other scholars have interpreted Herodotus’s story of Hippocleides among the competing suitors of Agariste with an appropriate sense of social justice. Kurke declared:

We might imagine Cleisthenes and/or Megacles and their descendants attempting to aggrandize themselves by casting the narrative of this dynastic marriage alliance in terms that imitate epic wooing scenes and other forms of high poetic narrative. But against this attempt (if it was made), popular tradition — or Herodotus himself — responds by recasting the tale as fable, thereby valorizing and commemorating instead the irreverent Hippoclides. … here, low fable relentlessly demystifies and explodes a tyrant’s epic pretensions. … in Herodotus’s farcical version, Hippoclides is the hero, the character we admire and identify with, in his independence and aplomb in the face of self-important tyrannic authority (while we might say that both Cleisthenes and the hapless Megacles are the butts of this joke).

Kurke (2011) pp. 425, 420, 421. Men defiantly dancing for pleasure promotes social justice:

Cleisthenes rejects and represses the somatic creativity of Hippocleides. But the latter’s famous rejoinder, “Hippocleides doesn’t care” (Οὐ φροντὶς Ἱπποκλείδῃ, 6.129), exuberantly affirms his personal and political autonomy. Hippocleides does not care about the potential consequences of male solo dance – by choreographing and performing his own idiosyncratic dance, he has already succeeded in undermining Cleisthenes’ apparent authority over the bodies of suitors and subjects alike.

Olsen (2016) pp. 166-7. The elite moralist Plutarch in maligning Herodotus not surprisingly figured Herodotus as Hippocleides.

Understanding gender reality in the ancient Greek world is vitally important for appreciating Herodotus’s story of Hippocleides among the competing suitors of Agariste. The exploitation of men as social instruments for war and work and the devaluation of men in love with women give Hippocleides’s insouciance deep social relevance. Consider, in contrast, the old woman Maryllis’s upside-down dance in Niketas Eugenianos’s twelfth-century Byzantine romance Drosilla and Charikles. With her feet over her head, she farted three times. Her dance, though transgressive, isn’t social protest. Her dance highlights lack of understanding of men’s love for women. Men will do anything in love for women. That social fact is crucial gender context for Hippocleides’s astonishing act of men’s sexed protest.

[images] (1) Ancient Greek satyr dancing upside-down and being approached on the backside by another satyr with an erect penis and hand extended in a gesture of admiration. Painting about 490 BGC by Douris on red-figured psykter (wine-cooler). Made in Attica (Greece). Preserved as museum # 1868,0606.7 in the British Museum. (2) Ancient Greek woman dancer / tumbler upside-down in front of a table and behind a stool. Above her are beads and two tympana (drums), instruments associated with dancing. Painted about 340-330 BGC by the Foundling Painter on a red-figured hydria (water jar). Made in Campania, Italy. Preserved as museum # 1814,0704.566 in the British Museum. For other ancient Greek paintings suggesting upside-down dancing, Lavelle (2014) p. 330. (3) Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) telling Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) that he doesn’t give a damn in the 1939 film, Gone with the Wind. Via YouTube.

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