Pisistratus Quotes

It was not long before Pisistratus fell from grace again. The problem was the arrangement with Megacles. He did not want to imperil the succession of his legitimate sons by new rivals, so, to avert the risks of pregnancy, he avoided ordinary sexual intercourse with his new wife and penetrated her up the anus.

Solon and Pisistratus were very fond of one another. We are told they entered into a love affair when Pisistratus was a good-looking lad in his teens. Despite a wide gap of thirty years between them, this is not implausible. Solon was highly sexed, if we may judge from his poetry, where he writes of the delights of falling in love “with a boy in the lovely flower of youth,/Desiring his thighs and sweet mouth.” However, it would be wrong to believe that either man was necessarily, in our modern sense, gay. This is because from the eighth century onwards the Greek upper classes established and maintained a system of pederasty as a form of higher education. A fully grown adult male, usually in his twenties, would look out for a boy in his mid-teens and become his protector and guide. His task was to see him through from adolescence into adulthood and to act as a kind of moral tutor. Sex was not compulsory, but it was under certain strictly defined conditions allowed. The older man was the active lover/partner or erastes and the teenager was the loved one, or eromenos. Buggery was absolutely out of bounds and brought shame on any boy who allowed it to be done to him. It could have the most serious consequences, as the fate of Periander showed. This famous tyrant of Corinth in the seventh century unwisely teased his eromenos in the presence of other people with the question: “Aren’t you pregnant yet?” The boy was so upset by the insult that he killed Periander. A popular and acceptable technique for achieving orgasm was intercrural sex: both participants stood up and the erastes inserted his erect penis between the thighs of the eromenos and rubbed it to and fro. The youth was not meant to enjoy his lover’s attentions or show signs of arousal; rather, he was making a disinterested gift of himself to someone he admired. The great Athenian writer of tragic dramas, Aeschylus, wrote a play about the love between the two Greek heroes, Achilles and Patroclus. It was called The Myrmidons, after the warriors whom Achilles commanded during the Trojan War. Achilles is presented as the erastes, and reproaches his lover, in rather roundabout terms, for declining an intercrural proposition.

Pisistratus understood the value of publicity and of symbolism. He staged a grand entrance into Athens. He found an unusually tall young woman from a country district. Pisistratus dressed her up in a suit of armor, taught her how to present herself convincingly as a goddess, and drove her in procession into the city. Town criers went ahead shouting: “Men of Athens, give Pisistratus a warm welcome, for Athena herself is bringing him home to her own citadel. She honours him more than all men.” What better way of demonstrating that Pisistratus enjoyed divine approval and had a legitimate claim to rule? Herodotus calls the stunt “the silliest idea I have ever heard of,