homosexuality in ancient Greece Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Ganymedes: The Adolescent Boy Zeus Abducted and Raped

The ancient Greeks told many stories about their god Zeus raping mortal adolescent girls, often shape-shifting into various animal and human forms in order to do so. Just to name a few examples, he is said to have abducted the Phoenician princess Europe in the form of a bull and raped her, raped the Aitolian princess Leda in the form of a swan, raped the Boiotian princess Antiope in the form of a satyr, raped the Argive princess Danaë in the form of a shower of gold coins, and tricked his own great-granddaughter Alkmene into having sex with him by impersonating her husband Amphitryon (which is, of course, another form of rape).

There’s a popular modern joke that 90% of the problems in Greek mythology are caused by Zeus not being able to “keep it in his pants,” but, even in ancient times, Zeus’s rapacious habits were already the subject of mockery. The Athenian playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) wrote a comedy titled The Clouds, which was first performed at the City Dionysia in Athens in 423 BCE and later revised at some point between 420 and 417 BCE. In the play, an amoral character gives advice on what a man should do if he is caught in the act of adultery, saying, in lines 1080–1081, that he should “. . . ἐς τὸν Δί᾽ ἐπανενεγκεῖν, κἀκεῖνος ὡς ἥττων ἔρωτός ἐστι καὶ γυναικῶν:” (“. . .point at Zeus, and how he is also overcome with lust for women!”)

Many people, however, are not aware that Zeus’s habit of raping adolescents was not exclusively heterosexually oriented. In fact, in ancient times, one of the most famous stories about Zeus abducting and raping someone was about how he abducted a handsome adolescent boy named Ganymedes in the form of an eagle and forced him to become his catamite.

Was Sappho Really a Lesbian?

One of the questions that I have frequently encountered online in discussions about ancient Greece is the question of whether the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE) was really a lesbian. On the surface level, the answer to this question seems like an obvious “yes.” After all, Sappho wrote poems in which she very expressly describes her erotic desire for other women, the word lesbian itself literally comes from the name of the island where she lived, and its synonym, the word sapphic, comes from her own name. There is even an entire subreddit about queer erasure called r/SapphoAndHerFriend, making fun of people who try to deny that Sappho was a lesbian.

I fully agree that there is no sense in which Sappho can be accurately described as “straight.” On the other hand, though, it would be an oversimplification to say that she was a lesbian in the contemporary sense. For one thing, the ancient Greeks generally did not think about sexuality in terms of which gender (or genders) a person was erotically attracted to, but rather in terms of whether they took the active or passive role during sex. There were no words in Ancient Greek in Sappho’s time that meant “gay,” “bi,” or “straight.” As such, it is highly unlikely that anyone in her time would have seen erotic attraction to women as a sign of any kind of innate identity.

Furthermore, the character “Sappho” who is the main speaker in Sappho’s poems is most likely a fictionalized literary persona, meaning that it is difficult to untangle the relationship between the speaker in the poems and the historical poet who composed them. Finally, given the fact that the vast majority of Sappho’s poems have not survived to the present day and ancient people told many stories about her having supposedly had affairs with men, it is possible that her character may have expressed erotic desire for men in poems or parts of poems that have not survived, which would make her what twenty-first-century westerners would consider bisexual.

Just How Gay Were the Ancient Greeks Really?

The ancient Greeks have a longstanding reputation in modern culture for their alleged tolerance of homosexuality—a reputation that has been so thoroughly ingrained that a common euphemism for the word homosexuality itself is “Greek love.” Additionally, the modern English word lesbian, referring to a female homosexual, comes directly from the name of a Greek island (i.e. Lesbos) and the word sapphic with the same meaning comes from the name of an ancient Greek poetess (i.e. Sappho).

While the ancient Greeks’ modern reputation does have some basis in truth, the modern popular stereotype of the “boy-loving Greeks” is far from a complete and accurate portrait of ancient Greek sexuality. In reality, the subject of sexuality in the ancient Greek world is a deeply complicated—sometimes downright convoluted—matter. Homosexual activities were considered acceptable in some ancient Greek cultures under some specific circumstances, but, under other circumstances, the same activities were not tolerated at all.