Beloved Charioteers
The Greek World
If you were to peer closely into an ancient Greek vase painting, vibrant with life and detail, you might just find yourself pulled beyond its surface, drawn into another world. At first you might feel quite at home. It is a land of paved streets lined with hot-food stands, public gyms, swimming pools, steam baths, democratic government, doctors, tailors, lawyers, cooks, teachers. You might book passage to Egypt to see the pyramids, and there you’d find guides to usher you around, and peddlers hawking trinkets. Every four years you could attend the Olympic games, and any educated person could tell you the world was round, and even its size.
Were you to look closer still, some less familiar features might take shape. This Greece is still pristine: virgin forests cover hills and mountain slopes where rocky scrubland spreads today, and lions, boar and deer roam at will in an unpolluted world. The human realm is rife with divisions: Freemen on one side, passing orders; slaves on the other, doing the work, a thin divide between the two, easily crossed if Fortune smiled or frowned. The women keep to one wing of the house, the men to another; they call the shots here. Before the doors of the well-to-do, herms stand at attention: carved stone totems, eyes gazing out at the passers-by, penises erect, to snag fertility and fortune. Here, a youth might well be ashamed not to have a lover, and people might wonder why men did not vie for his affection. Of course, male love, like all Greek life, was bounded by customs and regulations.
There was a right way to engage in such a relationship, and a right time as well. Strato of Sardis, the second century CE Lydian epigrammatist, perhaps said it best: 1
