The Problem with Pornoi: Male Prostitution and the Law in Classical Athens
According to Athenian law, citizens who could be proven to have been prostitutes were
barred from public activity, such as speaking in the Assembly or proposing litigation
(Andocides, Mysteries 100-101; Demosthenes, Androtion 21-32; Aeschines, Timarchus 21).
This punishment, called atimia, was a dishonorable banishment from politics which effectively
disenfranchised these men. This paper analyzes accusations of prostitution within the genre of
forensic oratory in order to determine the precise nature of the shame attached to male
prostitution that rendered it incompatible with active public life. I argue that this shame arises
chiefly from the desire for profit shown by the prostitute, and not, as most historians argue, from
passive sexual positions.
While submission to lust is a crucial factor, it is not submission to the sexual lust of another
man, but instead submission to one’s own lust for material wealth. The mercenary greed
exhibited by prostitutes was believed to translate into the political realm, making a man
susceptible to bribery and corruption. Importantly, other crimes which were also punished with
atimia are highly economic in nature: accepting bribes, owing money to the state, or squandering
one’s patrimony (Andoc., Myst. 73-75; Aes., Tim. 30; Rainer 1986). Furthermore, each speaker
emphasizes the amount of money earned by the accused, be it “not much silver” (Andoc., Myst.
100) or three hundred drachmae (Lysias, Simon 22-24). While the deeds performed are
sometimes described as “shameful” (Andoc., Myst., 100), the speakers do not describe these
deeds in detail but instead focus on their opponent’s greed and the extravagant uses to which the
profits were applied (Dem., Andr. 60-65, 75; Aes., Tim. 42, 75). In all three of the speeches in
which the speaker directly accuses his opponent of prostitution, he also insinuates a charge of
bribery; this suggests that the main reason for the legislation against male prostitution was the
close connection which Athenians made between taking money for a sexual act and accepting a
bribe for a political act.
Previous historians have usually looked at the evidence for male prostitution in studies of
Greek homosexuality, resulting in a focus on sexual acts. Since the publication of Kenneth
Dover’s landmark book, Greek Homosexuality (1978), research on male prostitution has worked
largely within the paradigm of Dover’s active-passive binary. Michel Foucault refined this
concept into a penetrator-penetrated phallocentric binary (1984), which continues to dominate
scholarship (Winkler 1990; Keuls 1992; Halperin 2003). Consequently, the current scholarly
debates focus on sexual position as the critical factor rendering prostitution dishonorable: anal
(Hindley 1991; D. Cohen 2003) or oral (Halperin 1990) intercourse. Edward Cohen works
outside the paradigm, focusing on the economic aspects of prostitution (2006), yet he
underestimates the highly political nature of the surviving evidence. Recognizing that
accusations of male prostitution in Athenian law were more concerned with material lust than
sexual positions can help separate the legal aspects of male prostitution from the history of Greek
homosexuality and move scholarship beyond the active-passive binary that dominates research
on gender and sexuality in ancient Greece.
Works Cited
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