ON THE ROLE OF THE FIGHTING COCK IN GREEK PEDERASTY

The following are excerpts from the article "The Cultural Poetics of the Greek Cockfight" by Eric Csapo, in The Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens Bulletin, Vol. 4 (2006/2007) pp. 20-37.

The Cultural Poetics of the Greek Cockfight

In antiquity, the cock, like the sphinx, was a liminal creature. Its habit of crowing at dawn made it a symbol of transition from night to day and darkness to light. As a marker of time and transitions, it is associated with birth, death and rebirth, and thus gains a close association with liminal deities such as Leto, Hermes, Demeter/Persephone and Asclepius. Adolescence was also closely connected to death and rebirth: Artemidorus, the dream interpreter, claims that dreams about adolescence signify marriage for the bachelor and death for the aged (1.54). [...]

In myth, the cock is closely connected with the war-god, Ares. Originally the cock was a human companion of Ares named Alectryon, which is simply the Greek word for ‘cock’. At first, however, there was nothing martial about Alectryon. Before becoming a cock, Alectryon is said by Lucian to have been ‘an adolescent boy, beloved of Ares, who kept company with the god at drinking parties, caroused with him, and was his companion in lovemaking’.^[1] His only soldierly duty was to keep watch while Ares made adulterous love to Aphrodite, so as to prevent the rising sun from seeing them and from reporting the affair to Aphrodite’s husband Hephaestus. Alectryon failed to keep his post even in this lightest of all soldierly duties. He fell asleep and as a result Hephaestus learned of the affair and set the trap, so memorably described in the Odyssey 8, that led to the public exhibition and humiliation of Ares and Aphrodite caught by invisible bonds in the love embrace. As punishment Ares turned Alectryon into a cock, adding, as penance, an ineluctable impulse to crow at the approach of the sun in eternal compensation for his failure to cry warning on that fateful night. [...]

Cocks served as ready symbols for that supreme agon and most enduring theme of Greek art and poetry: WAR. In Aeschylus the expression ‘hearts of cocks’ stands metaphorically for the spirit of violent confrontation Eum. 861). For this reason, cocks are a favourite motif on shield blazons. Programmatic decoration on Attic vase-painting frequently draws similes between fighting cocks and mythological combatants or hoplites (see, e.g., fig. 8).^[2] [...]

The cock, as we noted, belongs not only to the realm of Ares, but is also close to Aphrodite. The epigrammatist Meleager took the cock on a grave stele to signal the dead man’s devotion to Aphrodite.^[3] Aristotle declares that chickens are ‘most given to Aphrodite’ (HA 488b4). Oppian thinks them sex-crazed beyond all known birds.[4] This is partly justified by observation: Aristotle notes that chickens are the only animals, besides humans, whose mating habits are not seasonal or limited. Indeed they are less limited than humans. [...]

Given the cock’s association with both sex and masculinity, it is not surprising that it was the preferred love gift given by mature men to beautiful youths (fig. 13).[5] In Margaret Visser’s words ‘the cock expressed the sheer maleness of the couple, their virile aggressivity and energy’.^[6] [...]

In most parts of the world cockfighting is a sport practised exclusively by adult males, but in Greece the sport was ideally represented as a pastime for adolescent boys, and particularly young aristocrats. We have seen that in Greek art the human figures associated with fighting cocks are boys, and mostly adolescent boys. Language also encouraged a close identification between the adolescent and the cock. Cocks were, like their owners, ‘aristocrats’; fighting cocks were termed ‘noble’, those unfit for sport ‘ignoble’ or ‘vulgar’.[7] The harsh sounds made by an adolescent whose voice is breaking are referred to as crowing, kokkusmos (gallulare in Latin).[8] And while words for ‘cock’ and ‘penis’ are homonymous in the vernacular of a great many languages, the Greek equivalent, koko, is only ever used as a ‘pet name’ for the puerile member.[9] The close almost exclusive identification of fighting cocks with élite adolescents is hard to square with a tale about martial valour, an express concern of all Greek males. Rather, it reflects the particular configuration of male homosexuality in Classical Greece with its emphasis on pederasty and its predominantly aristocratic milieu.

[1] Lucian Gallus 3. For the myth, see also the scholiast to Aristophanes Av. 835; Eustathius, Ad Odysseam 1.300; Ausonius, 26.2.27; Libanius, Progymnasmata 2.26. [Author’s footnote 10]

[2] Munich Antikensammlung 1470 (J1295): CVA Munich 7, pp. 55–58, pls. 351–352, 353.1–4, 354.1–3; ABV, p. 144, no. 6; Beazley Addenda², p. 39. [Author’s footnote 14]

[3] Anthologia Palatina 7.428.16–17. [Author’s footnote 21]

[4] Oppian in Dionysius, de Avibus 1.26 (A. Garzya, “Pseudo-Oppiani Paraphrasis Dionysii poematis de aucupio. Introd., textus crit., index avium,” Byzantion 25–27 [1955–57], p. 212) ; cf. Scriptores physiognomonici 2.142–43; Martial 13.63. [Author’s footnote 22]

[5] Munich, antikensamlung? 8954 (ex Lausanne), ARV², p. 1629, no. 85 bis; Beazley Addenda², p. 181 MüJb 26 (1975), 211–213, figs 1–3. G. Koch-Harnack, Knabenliebe und Tiergeschenke (Berlin 1983), pp. 63, 97–105. [Author’s footnote 47]

[6] M. Visser, Much Depends on Dinner (New York, 1986), p. 125. [Author’s footnote 48]

[7] Plato Tht. 164c; Aristotle, HA 558b15, Gen. an. 749b31; Heraclides Comicus fr. 1 PCG V; Menander Theophorumenae fr. 1.12–13 (F.H. Sandbach [ed.], Menandri Reliquiae selectae² [New York 1990] 223 K); Athenaeus 655c; Epictetus 2.2.13; Lucian Anach. 37; Aelian frr. 69, 98; Suda, s.v. Ἀλεκτρυόνα ἀθλητὴν Ταναγραῖον and Ταναγραῖοι ἀλεκτορίσκοι. [Author’s footnote 63]

[8] Quintilian 11.3.51; Novius 21 in Nonius Marcellus De compendiosa doctrina 116 M. [Author’s footnote 64]

[9] Anthologia Palatina 12.7 (Straton). Cf. L. Robert, Noms indigènes dans l’Asiemineure gréco-romaine (Paris 1963), pp. 312–20. [Author’s footnote 65]

Comments

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Anon. ,15 October 2021

Is the relationship between Ares and Alectryon homosexual?

Editor,   15 October 2021

I think that is ambiguous. In the second paragraph, Lucian is quoted as saying Alectryon was "beloved" of Ares, but the Greek word thus translated was φίλος, which is not necessarily sexual, though the fact that he was an adolescent close to the god is probably a hint in that direction.