Aeschines in Against Timarchus presents a set of laws as part of a coherent system with a set purpose: to protect Athens’ democracy from perversion by those whose characters have been corrupted by inappropriate sexual behaviour. From 1.7 onwards, Aeschines presents a large number of different laws which govern the education of boys, and imputes to all of them the underlying purpose of protecting boys from sexual predation, and so protecting those boys’ characters from perversion. None of these laws is directly relevant to Aeschines’ prosecution of Timarchus. Aeschines is not alleging that Timarchus committed any of the offences related to the protection of young boys; far from it, he claims that Timarchus was the victim of such offences. Rather than forming part of his prosecution of Timarchus for sexual offences, the citation of these laws is intended to support an argument which is likely to have been controversial:34 the argument that it is harmful for adult men to have sex with young boys. To support this argument, Aeschines takes this fairly disjointed selection of laws and claims that they all have as their purpose the prevention of sex between men and boys, and argues that the reason they have this as their purpose is because Athenians had always considered that young boys who had sex with older men would see their characters perverted as a result.35 Here, we see Aeschines attempting to use the existence of laws which he claims are intended to prevent young boys having sex as evidence to substantiate an argument that Athens considered and had always considered sex between young boys and grown men to be harmful to the characters of young boys. Timarchus was not, according to Aeschines, the perpetrator of this
34
See Cohen (1987) pp. 171-202 on the contradictions inherent in Athenian approaches to sex between males. Fisher (2001) pp. 25-36 concludes that there was probably a ‘relatively high level of actual homosexual sex’.
35
Fisher (2001) p. 37 suggests that these laws, if genuinely Solonian, were more likely to have as their purpose the maintenance of correct status boundaries.
kind of wrongful sex, but its victim, which suggests that Aeschines was trying to present not a moral argument (having sex with boys is wrong), but a pragmatic one (having sex with boys damages the characters of Athens’ future citizens). This is borne out by the rest of the speech, as we shall see.
From 1.18 onwards, Aeschines moves from the laws that concern young boys, and onto the laws which determine what a man can do with his own body. The shift from offences with a victim to victimless offences is marked by Aeschines, but in a sense which continues to place emphasis on the body which is subject to penetration: ‘But as soon as the young man has been registered in the list of citizens, and knows the laws of the state, and is now able to distinguish between right and wrong, the lawgiver no longer addresses another, Timarchus, but now the man himself.’ (1.18-19) Again, we see Aeschines present a selection of different laws with the purpose of demonstrating to the jurors an underlying intention. The first law presented is one which appears to have governed the graphē hetairēseōs
and which forbade anyone who had been a prostitute36 from serving as one of the nine archons, as a state advocate, as herald or ambassador, or in any office whether appointed by lot or elected, or from addressing the Council or the Assembly.37
From there, Aeschines moves on to the law governing the arrangements for meetings of the Assembly. Aeschines successfully spins a law instructing the herald to invite men over fifty38 to speak first into a paean to the orderliness and politeness of Athenians’ forbears, and then into a complaint about Timarchus᾽ rude behaviour in giving a speech in which he threw off his cloak (1.26). The laws which Aeschines actually presents about the organisation of the Assembly, however, specify only
36
It is unclear exactly what forms the core of the act of hetairesis. Fisher (2001) pp. 40-2 is unsure that penetration is the core element, and suggests that living financially off someone else was at least as important. E. Cohen (2016) p. 366-69 argues that a fairly large number of Athenian citizens might have worked in prostitution, and claims that the purpose of the laws restricting the political rights of male prostitutes was to guard against those who would pervert traditional homosexual relationships and gift-giving into business relationships, in line with other Athenian prejudice against money-making activity.
37 1.19-20. 38
A law the validity of which is doubted by Lane Fox (1994) p. 147-8, who observes the conflict between citing an obsolete law while claiming to exist in a state in which laws are sovereign. On obsolete laws, see 5.4.3.
that the sacrifice is to be carried around, that the Assembly is to discuss ‘matters to do with ancestral religious matters, dealing with heralds and embassies, and with secular matters’,39 and that older men should be invited to speak first. Though many jurors might have agreed that behaving appropriately in the Assembly was important, Aeschines has not been able to present a law to that effect. Nonetheless, Aeschines gathered a set of laws which he can convincingly argue have as their principle the maintenance of order in the Assembly, and successfully argues that the reason this was considered important was to prevent unsuitable people from addressing the Assembly.
Finally, Aeschines comes to the law concerning the dokimasia rhētorōn, which excluded men who have abused their parents, failed to perform military service, prostituted themselves, or squandered their patrimony from speaking before the
demos.40 Underlying all these laws, Aeschines claims to find a consistent belief that
men who are disorderly and poorly disciplined should not be allowed to address the people because they will give unsuitable advice. This claim, that only men with morally upstanding lives should be allowed to address the demos, is, at heart, an argument about expediency. It is not that Timarchus must be punished for his immoral behaviour, but rather that Timarchus’ behaviour shows him to be the kind of man whom lawgivers considered likely to be damaging to good order in the city. Despite the moralising arguments used by Aeschines in his speech, his presentation of the laws relevant to his case depends not on moral arguments but on practical ones.41
39 1.23 Trans. Fisher (2001). 40
1.28-32. Lane Fox (1994) pp. 147-9 identifies this law too as having probably been semi-obsolete at the time Aeschines used it in this case.
41
Lanni (2016) pp. 98-117 claims to find the laws on the graphē hetairēseōs and dokimasia rhētorōn
having wider effects among Athens’ elite. She seems to identify the laws as initially embodying a popular dissatisfaction with the elite practice of pederasty, and argues that this elite practice fell out of fashion precisely because of these laws. Her argument depends on two unprovable assumptions: first that the laws were genuinely popular attempts to control elite behaviour, and second that the laws predate the change in elite attitudes towards homosexual pederasty. Even if Lanni’s arguments can be substantiated, they do not clearly indicate a moral role for laws in Athens. Participation in pederastic relationships does not, in her analysis, become morally wrong, but it may become dangerous for one’s later career. Lanni seeks to identify these laws as signalling that
‘a majority of the Athenian population viewed hetairesis as incompatible with honorable