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.
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.
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]
* * * * *
Read more:
- men’s concern for birth control from Peisistratus to the present
- Marcolf challenged Solomon on malice toward men
- Sappho’s gender-defying love for her brothers Charaxos & Larichos
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.
References:
Davids, T. W. Rhys, and V. Fausbøll, trans. 1880. Buddhist Birth Stories; Or, Jātaka Tales. The Oldest Collection of Folk-Lore Extant. London: Trübner & Co.
Evelyn-White, Hugh G., ed. and trans. 1914. Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica. Loeb Classical Library Volume 57. London: William Heinemann.
Ford, Laura. 2016. ‘Plutarch’s “On the Malice of Herodotus.”‘ The Kosmos Society. Online, March 15, 2016.
Frazer, James G. ed, and trans. 1921. Apollodorus. The Library, Volume II: Book 3.10-end. Epitome. Loeb Classical Library 122. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Godley, A. D., ed. and trans. 1920. Herodotus. The Persian Wars. Loeb Classical Library 117-120. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Henderson, Jeffrey, ed. and trans. 1998. Aristophanes. Clouds. Wasps. Peace. Loeb Classical Library 488. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Holland, Tom, trans. and Paul Cartledge, introduction and notes. 2014. Herodotus. The Histories. New York: Viking.
Kazanskaya, Maria. 2015. “A Ghost Proverb in Herodotus (6. 129. 4)?” Hyperboreus. 21: 33–52.
Kilburn, K., ed. and trans. 1959. Lucian. How to Write History. The Dipsads. Saturnalia. Herodotus or Aetion. Zeuxis or Antiochus. A Slip of the Tongue in Greeting. Apology for the “Salaried Posts in Great Houses.” Harmonides. A Conversation with Hesiod. The Scythian or The Consul. Hermotimus or Concerning the Sects. To One Who Said “You’re a Prometheus in Words.” The Ship or The Wishes. Loeb Classical Library 430. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kurke, Leslie. 2011. Aesopic Conversations: popular tradition, cultural dialogue, and the invention of Greek prose. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Kurke’s introduction. Reviews by Andrew Ford, by Vivienne Gray, and by Tom Hawkins.
Lavelle, Brian M. 2014. “Hippokleides, the ‘Dance’, and the Panathenaia.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies. 54 (3): 313–41. Alternate source for article. Related presentation.
Levaniouk, Olga. 2022. “Seeking Agariste.” Pp. 147-165 in Menelaos Christopoulos, Athina Papachrysostomou, and Andrea P. Antonopoulos, eds. Myth and History: Close Encounters. MythosEikonPoiesis 14. Berlin: De Gruyter.
MacLeod, M. D., ed. and trans. 1967. Lucian. Soloecista. Lucius or The Ass. Amores. Halcyon. Demosthenes. Podagra. Ocypus. Cyniscus. Philopatris. Charidemus. Nero. Loeb Classical Library 432. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Most, Glenn W., ed,. and trans. 2018. Hesiod. The Shield. Catalogue of Women. Other Fragments. Loeb Classical Library 503. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.
Nagy, Gregory. 2022. “The Dancing Peacock in the Buddhist Jātaka-s: a link with Herodotus?” Classical Continuum. Posted online December 5, 2022.
Ogden, Daniel. 1997. The Crooked Kings of Ancient Greece. London: Duckworth.
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. 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.
Olson, S. Douglas. 2018. ‘χειρονομία and the aulos: How Hippocleides “danced away” his Marriage.’ Glotta. 94 (1): 259-263.
Pearson, Lionel and F. H. Sandbach, ed. and trans. 1965. Plutarch. Moralia, Volume XI: On the Malice of Herodotus. Causes of Natural Phenomena. Loeb Classical Library 426. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Storey, Ian C., ed. and trans. 2011. Fragments of Old Comedy, Volume II: Diopeithes to Pherecrates. Loeb Classical Library 514. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Wright, Wilmer C., ed. and trans. 1913. Julian. Orations 6-8. Letters to Themistius, To the Senate and People of Athens, To a Priest. The Caesars. Misopogon. Loeb Classical Library 29. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.