Ancient Effeminates

Abstract

This chapter connects earlier portrayals of effeminate men mentioned in archaic lyric poetry and Attic Old Comedy to the first extant use of the word kinaidos in Plato’s Gorgias at the beginning of the fourth century BCE. By comparing Anacreon’s presentation of a certain Artemon (PMG 388), a lowlife hawker who feigns aristocratic luxury, with Aristophanes’ Agathon, who in the Thesmophoriazusae blurs distinctions between both sexual genders and textual genres, it argues that the principal significance of these effeminates is their ability to cross and confuse conceptual binaries. Artemon’s effeminacy becomes laughable for its counterfeit nature, revealing his former lowly background and now badly performed affluence; Agathon’s elite effeminacy, however, stands in opposition to the man of the demos in Athens and thus becomes non-normative. Lastly, it re-evaluates the significance of Plato’s brief mention of the “life of the kinaidoi” in the Gorgias (494e) to propose that, if viewed as an appetitive creature, the kinaidos can be read as an example not only of excessive living but also of foul speaking.