Love, sex and marriageἔρως καὶ γάμος

A Greek marriage was a deal between two households, made so that a man would have legitimate children to inherit his house. The bride could be a young teenager and the groom twice her age. Yet the same people wrote one of the most famous poems of desire ever written, told a myth in which lovers are two halves of one creature looking for each other, and argued about the proper way for a man to court a boy. Athenian law let a husband kill a man caught in bed with his wife, and a comedy had the women of Greece stop a war by refusing sex. Here is what the texts say, and where they need reading with care.

A contract between two houses

The frankest statement of what an Athenian marriage was for comes from a lawsuit. In the mid-4th century BC Apollodorus prosecuted Neaera, whom he accused of having been a courtesan and of living as the wife of an Athenian citizen although she was a foreigner, which the law forbade. The speech survives among the works of Demosthenes. Explaining what marriage means, the prosecutor tells the jury:

Debated among scholars This line is often quoted as if it summed up Athenian men's lives. It is a prosecutor's point, made to win a case about legitimate children, and it says more about what the law cared about than about how husbands and wives felt.

When, and whom

The poet Hesiod gave the traditional advice: a man should marry at about thirty, and take a young wife who has been grown up for four years.

Much later Aristotle, planning an ideal city, set the best ages at about eighteen for women and thirty-seven for men. Real brides could be younger. In Xenophon's Oeconomicus the wealthy Ischomachus describes the girl he married:

The wedding

The wedding itself was a night-time procession. On the shield that Hephaestus makes for Achilles in the Iliad, one of the scenes is a city at peace with weddings in it:

Well established The oil flask above, painted by the Amasis Painter between about 550 and 530 BC, is the earliest and most complete picture of an Athenian wedding, according to the Metropolitan Museum, which owns it. The bride and groom ride in a cart drawn by two donkeys, a woman walks ahead with two torches to light the way, and the procession heads for the groom's house, where a woman, probably his mother, waits at the door. Painted vases like this one are the main evidence for the stages of the ceremony.

Desire

Sappho, writing on Lesbos around 600 BC, describes watching a woman she loves laugh with a man, "equal to the gods", who sits opposite her. What follows is a list of symptoms. We owe the poem to the critic known as Longinus, who quoted it in *On the Sublime* as a model of how to choose and combine details.

In Plato's Symposium the comic poet Aristophanes explains love with a myth. Humans were once round creatures with four arms and four legs, until Zeus cut them in half; ever since, each half has searched for the other. Some of the original creatures were male and female, some male and male, some female and female, so the myth accounts, in its comic way, for men who love women, men who love men and women who love women.

Men and boys

In Athens and many other cities, an accepted form of love was the courtship of an adolescent boy by an adult man, the erastes ("lover") and the eromenos ("beloved"). It appears on painted vases, in poetry and in the law courts; K. J. Dover's study of this evidence, published in 1978, is the classic account.

The customs varied from city to city, and even Greeks found them confusing. In the Symposium, Pausanias says that in Elis and Boeotia it was simply thought honourable for a boy to "gratify" his lover, that in Ionia, under Persian rule, it was thought disgraceful, and that the Athenian custom was complicated. Athenians honoured as the founders of their freedom two lovers, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who killed the tyrant's brother in 514 BC. Thucydides insists that a love affair was the cause.

Debated among scholars How the courtship worked in practice, how much of it was sexual, and what the boys themselves thought, are argued over. Nearly all the evidence was written or painted by and for adult men.

Unfaithful husbands, unfaithful wives

A wife could leave her husband, but the divorce had to be registered, in person, with a magistrate. Plutarch tells how Hipparete, wife of the brilliant and dissolute Alcibiades, tried to divorce him:

The law on adultery was harsh on the man. In a speech Lysias wrote for Euphiletus, an Athenian on trial for killing his wife's lover Eratosthenes, the defendant says he caught Eratosthenes in the act, and that the law allowed a husband to kill him there. He describes his small house, where he had given the ground floor to his wife so that she could see to the baby at night:

Debated among scholars Euphiletus goes on to argue that the law punished a seducer with death but a rapist only with double damages, because seduction corrupted a wife's mind and made the children's father uncertain. Historians used to take this as the Athenian view. Edward Harris has argued that it is special pleading by a man on trial for his life, not a statement of what Athenians generally believed.

The sex strike

In 411 BC, twenty years into the war with Sparta, Aristophanes staged Lysistrata. Its heroine persuades the women of Greece to refuse their husbands until the men make peace, and administers an oath over a bowl of wine. Her friend Calonice has to repeat it line by line.

1. c. 700 BCHesiod's Works and Days advises a man to marry at about thirty. Debated among scholars
2. c. 600 BCSappho writes her poems on Lesbos.
3. c. 550–530 BCThe Amasis Painter paints the earliest full picture of an Athenian wedding.
4. 514 BCThe lovers Harmodius and Aristogeiton kill Hipparchus, the tyrant's brother.
5. 411 BCAristophanes' Lysistrata.
6. 4th c. BCPlato's Symposium and Xenophon's Oeconomicus.
7. mid-4th c. BCThe prosecution of Neaera.