To marshal the powers in a boy's naked body, his elders sent him to the gymnasium. The modern word "gymnasium" comes from gumnoi in Greek, Which meant “stark naked.”” The naked, beautiful body seems a gift of Nature, but Thucydides, we recall, wrote about nakedness
as an achievement of civilization. The gymnasium taught young Athenians how to become naked. In Athens there were three gymnasia, the most important being the Academy, which a few generations after Perikles became Plato’s school.
Rather than living in the Academy, students walked out to it from the city during the day. The grounds of the Academy were ancient shrines; during the democratic era, these grounds were transformed into “a kind of suburban park.” Within the grounds was the
palestra, the rectangular building with colonnades which contained a space for wrestling, general exercise rooms, and spaces for drinking and talking. Some gymnasia put the wrestling school in a separate building of its own. Aristophanes drew in The Clouds
an idyllic picture of days spent in the gymnasia: in a modem paraphrase, “all this healthy activity of clean-limbed young men makes a contrast with the clever chatter of the pale, weedy, sophisticated habituĂ© of the agora.“
The gymnasium sought to shape a boy’s body at the point in middle to late adolescence when muscles began to tighten the skin surface but secondary sex characteristics, particularly facial hair, were not yet advanced. This moment in the life cycle seemed critical
to marshalling the body’s heat permanently in muscles. Through lifting other boys when wrestling, the adolescent’s back and shoulder muscles enlarged; the twisting and turning of the body in wrestling cinched in the waist; when throwing the javelin or the
discus, the arm muscles stretched, when running, the leg muscles tightened, the buttocks firmed up. Because boys coated their bodies with olive oil when they exercised. in wrestling one another they tended to slither and slip; the grip of the hands was developed in counteracting the effects of the oil. Games served a physiological purpose also in raising body temperature through friction between bodies.
Just as the gymnasium trained male muscle, it trained the male voice, by teaching boys to compete with one another in words, a skill they would need to participate in the city’s democracy. Training in debate occurred in Perikles’ time through the intervention
of ordinary citizens who wended their way out to the gymnasia. The first step involved showing a boy how to project his voice and articulate his words firmly. He was then taught to use words in the give and take of argument with the same economy of movement
he learned in wrestling. The schools of Petikles’ era had eschewed the rote learning of earlier ages; competition took the place of mechanical learning. Still, the boys were obliged to memorize vast swatches of Homeric poetry to be used as references in these
debates.
Spartan gymnasia trained only the body, since the debating voice did not form part of the civic frame. Moreover, in Sparta the gymnasium aimed at developing a boy's sheer capacity to inflict body injury. For instance, the Spartan gymnasium was ringed by a
moat; here, “the young Spartans fought one another ferociously and hurled one another into the water.” Sparta, it also should be said, was one of the few cities which encouraged girls to wrestle one another, but this was a utilitarian matter; exercise strengthened
their bodies for childbirth. In Athens, the gymnasium trained boys’ bodies for ends which transcended brute force.
It was in the gymnasium that a boy learned that his body was part of the larger collectivity called the polis, that the body belonged to the city. A strong body obviously made a good warrior; a trained voice ensured the body could later participate in public
affairs. The Athenian gymnasium taught a further lesson: the school trained a boy how to be naked sexually. Unlike modern moralists, the Athenians thought sexuality to be a positive element of citizenship. This was more than a matter of observing sexual prohibitions,
like the belief that masturbation was fit only for slaves, with whom no one else would want to make love; more than a matter of imposing laws such as those forbidding slaves to go the gymnasia, “being in love with a boy of free status, or following him.“ In the gymnasium a boy learned how use his body so that he could desire and be desired honorably.
As a Greek male passed through the life cycle, he would be loved by older men. then feel love for boys as he aged; he would also feel erotic love for women. The Greeks made a point of distinguishing “effeminacy,” not “homosexuality” as we use the term, a distinction they based on the physiology of the body. Those with “soft”
male bodies (malthakoi in Greek) acted like women; “they actively desire to be subjected by other men to a ‘feminine' (i.e. receptive) role in sexual intercourse.” The malthakoi belonged to the intermediate heat zones between very male and very female. In
the gymnasium, a boy was meant to learn the way to make love actively rather than passively as did the malthakoi.
A boy’s tutor in love would be an older youth or adult man who had come out to the gymnasium to watch the wrestling and other games. The older male (erastes) sought out a younger (eromenos) for love; the age-line between the two usually lay in a particular
secondary sex characteristic, facial and body hair, though an eromenos had to have reached an adult height in order to be pursued. In his sixties, Socrates still had young lovers, yet more typically the erastes was a young man not yet, or just, married. The
erastes paid compliments to the eromenos, gave him presents, and sought to fondle him. The public rooms of the gymnasium were not scenes of sex. Contacts were made here; when two males had reached a stage of mutual interest, they retired to the shelter of the gardens surrounding the gymnasium, or met again later at night in the city.
At this point, the sexual code dictated there should be no penetration of any orifice, neither fellatio nor anal intercourse. Instead, the boy and the man took the other’s penis between their own thighs, rubbing and massaging. This rubbing was thought to raise
the body heat of the lovers, and it was the heat men felt in bodily friction, rather than ejaculation, which focused sexual experience between two males. Coital friction as foreplay between a man and a woman was also thought to raise the body temperature of
women, so that they had sufficient force to generate the fluids for birth. In sex between men and women, the woman frequently crouched over, offering her buttocks to a man standing or kneeling behind her. On the evidence of vase paintings, the classicist Kenneth Dover concludes that in this position, “there can be no room for doubt that it IS the woman's anus. not her vagina, which is [often] being penetrated." The Greeks. like many other cultures, found
in anal intercourse both a distinctive pleasure and a simple, safe form of contraception. Yet it was a positton which also expressed social status: the woman who lay down or bent over made herself subordinate. Similarly the effeminate male who sought to be
penetrated lay in a subordinate position. In a trial brought against the Athenian Timarkhos for prostitution-a trial aiming to deprive him of citizenship-his accuser Aiskhines drew up a list of contrasts between sex unworthy of an Athenian and sex according with the future dignity of citizenship:
adoption of a bent or lowered position, reception of another man’s penis in the anus or mouth; [versus] refusal of payment, obdurate postponement of any bodily contact until the potential partner has proved his worth, abstention from any sensual enjoyment of
such contact, insistence on an upright position, avoidance of meeting the partner’s eye during consummation . . .
Sex between men often occurred with both partners standing up. In this posture, eschewing penetration, performing the same act on one another, the male lovers are equal, despite their differing ages. In this posture, Aiskhines says, they make love as fellow citizens. Love occurs on the body’s surface, parallel in value to the surfaces of urban space.
Greek culture made walking and standing expressions of character. Walking with long strides appeared manly; Homer wrote admiringly of Hector, “The Trojans drove forward in close throng, and Hector led them, advancing with long strides."“ Whereas “when the goddesses
Hera and Athena appeared before Troy to help the Greeks, they [according to Homer] resembled ‘in their steps the timorous doves’-exactly the opposite of the striding heroes.” In the city, some of these archaic attributes persisted. Moving steadily, if slowly,
marked a man as manly and well bred; “this is one trait which I regard worthy of no gentleman,” the writer Alexis declared, “to walk in the streets with careless gait when one may do it gracefully.“ Women were still to walk with short, halting steps, and
a man showed himself “womanish” by doing so. Erect, equal, purposeful: in Greek, the word artboi, or “uptight,” carried the implications of male rectitude. Passivity, of the dishonorable sort thought to mark men who submitted to anal intercourse. contrasted to orthos.
This choreography of bodies in love shaped the behavior appropriate to citizens of Athens. Indeed. in the Funeral Oration, Perikles urged that citizens “should fall in love with" the city, using the erotic term for lovers, erastai, to express love for the
city.“ Thucydides gave Perikles a phrase to speak here which was common parlance, other Athenians employing the sexual term erastai to indicate those who love the city-the plays of Aristophanes also employ this usage. An erotic bond between citizen and city,
as between citizen and citizen, is what a boy first learned in the gymnasium, an active, upright love.
The Athenians made a direct analogy between body and buildings not that they made buildings shaped like heads or fingers. Rather, they used their physiological understanding of the body to create urban form. For instance, on our imaginary walk through the agora,
we passed a structure, the stoa, which bore the impress of this understanding. Basically a long shed, the stoa contained b0th cold and hot, sheltered and exposed dimensions; the back side of the stoa was walled in, the front side consisted of a colonnade which
gave Onto the open space of the agora. Though free-standing, the stoas were not in Perikles’ day conceived as independent structures, but rather as edging for this open space. On the walled side of the shed, men gathered with a few others to talk, do business,
or dine; dining rooms in public buildings were organized somewhat as in a house. Men wanted to dine and drink enclosed within solid walls, and thus people would not recline “with their backs turned to an open colonnade.” However, other people did not intrude,
though they could perfectly well see within. When a man moved toward the unwalled side facing the agora, he could be noticed and approached; he was on the “male side, the side of exposure".