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The appetite for orgasm was not seen as exclusively male. Greek men were terrified by what they perceived as women's insatiability and sexual energy. Euripides'
The Bacchae
played on this Greek male fear that women would willingly tear men limb from limb in their lust for pleasure. Young virgins, especially around puberty, were seen as particularly wild. The abundant medical writings of the time ascribed women's drive for sexual activity to an inbred psychological urge rather than the desire for pleasure that tempted men. But whatever caused it was immaterial, so long as a civilised Greek city state kept this dangerous hunger for sex in check. This it did by promoting the necessity of marriage, preferably at puberty, after which pregnancy would completely cure any remaining sexual rampancy. As a double indemnity, women were cloistered at home, often surrounded by guard dogs.

Marriage, love and sex were not particularly inter-connected, though. The object of marriage was to produce a son and heir,
but a Greek husband rarely looked to his wife for companionship or for sexual delight. Around 600 BC, an Athenian judge, Solon, established some sexual laws pertaining to marriage: an heiress was given the legal right to demand her husband fulfil his conjugal duties at least three times a month; a cuckolded husband was given leave to kill his adulterous rival. But in practice men and women had little to do with one another after marriage. The refined sexual pleasure appropriate to a gentleman was openly available via a number of extra-marital avenues. Prostitution was entirely accepted – the same Solon instituted fixed-price, state-run brothels outside the walls of cities, with prostitutes in gauzy garments openly advertising their attractions. Most were slaves or women taken as trophies of war. Additionally, the general expectation was for men to be bisexual, or ‘ambidextrous', which opened up an even greater number of erotic opportunities for men.

These erotic opportunities included paedophilia. Parents routinely colluded in the sexual initiation of even young children by older men, and would express outrage if their children were not seduced.
The Birds
by Aristophanes, includes this denunciation by one character of another: ‘Well, this is a fine state of affairs, you villain. You meet my son from the gymnasium, fresh from the bath, and you don't kiss him, you don't say a word to him, you don't hug him, you don't even feel his testicles. And you're supposed to be a friend of ours!'

The Greeks simply had no concept of sex as a sin or a forbidden fruit. They considered sexual relations to be a natural, everyday phenomenon. They had no sense of shame in connection with sex, and attached little stigma to any of its aspects save a little snigger at masturbation, which they did with gusto anyway. Unlike in Egypt, ‘respectable' Greek women showed little by way of bare flesh, but the men were practically full-time nudists. The Greeks even fought their battles nearly naked. Male Greek culture was sexually charged at all levels.
The Greeks referred to various situations in which godliness seized a man, a state they knew as theolepsy. Hearing music, dancing and alcohol could cause this sense of divinity, and they also found it present at orgasm, when the bounds of personality particularly seemed to melt away and one's reality merge with the infinite.

Greek pottery provides us with something close to a pornographic record of the libidinous sex life of these ancient sybarites. A huge amount of it is overtly sexual; naked satyrs and nymphs romp away under olive trees; young lovers, heterosexual, homosexual, whatever, bathe together, dance and make love. We can only assume the whole jolly scene was drawn more or less from life, as artists saw it.

If anything, the Greeks were more suspicious of the one form of sexual desire that would be endorsed by the Christians – that occasioned by love. It was love, after all, that made a man copulate too often and lose strength through the over-draining of his semen; sexual pleasure was necessary to human well-being, and not copulating
enough
could cause a semen build-up and damage health. But sex had to be mastered, which expressly meant limited.

The incessant physical longing of love was regarded as a disturbance of the body's natural balance, a disease which deprived the mind of its control of the body. What we revere as the serotonin rush of post-orgasmic bliss, for the Greeks was a transitory dullness of intellectual power. Those who admired the intellectuality of the Greeks would still be echoing this belief thousands of years later. A nineteenth-century philosopher, Hartmann, wrote: ‘Love causes more pain than pleasure. Pleasure is only illusory. Reason would command us to avoid love. If it were not for the fatal sexual impulse, therefore it would be best to be castrated.'

The tradition arose, then, that only the conscious intellectual or physical diversion of the mind would do the trick, a spot of hard work, whether it was fishing, poetry or just thinking. And like twentieth-century anti-pornography campaigners who
became obsessed with pornography, anti-sex Greek philosophers thought a great deal – about sex.

In the fourth-century BC, Plato related in
The Republic
that someone once asked Sophocles in his old age, ‘How do you feel now about sex? Are you still able to have a woman?' He replied, ‘Hush, man; most gladly indeed am I rid of it all, as though I had escaped from a mad and savage master.' Socrates opined that satisfaction of the sexual instinct worked against moral perfection. Epicurus saw love as ‘an impetuous appetite for sexual pleasure, accompanied by frenzy and torment'. He denounced carnal intercourse as the worst enemy of the serenity of the wise man: ‘Sexual intercourse never did anybody any good and one can think oneself lucky if it doesn't do one harm. A wise man will neither marry nor have children. Nor will he yield to the passion of love.'

But a certain proportion of these thinkers' pronouncements was underwritten by hypocrisy, or by the sour grapes attitude of old men who could no longer take advantage of the gloriously licentious society in which they found themselves. As the Greek scholar Robert Flacelière wrote in his 1960
Love in Ancient Greece:
‘In practise the Epicurean outlook closely resembled that of an egotistical old bachelor, valuing peace of mind above all things, and dignifying it with the high-sounding name of “philosophic wisdom”.'

In Ancient Greece much as in other male-dominated societies through the ages, from the quadrangles of the great Western universities to the Muslim world, the exclusion of women from the mainstream of life in the interests of a supposedly greater intellectual or spiritual calling led to an extraordinary amount of homosexuality, especially between the sixth and the fourth century BC. According to Aristotle, it was initially employed in Crete as a method of birth control, and that island provides the earliest representation of homosexuality, in the form of a bronze plaque of around 650 BC. It was soon considered shameful in Crete for a well-born boy not to have an older man as lover.

Gay love on the Greek mainland was originally about male companionship and devotion to warrior buddies, shared bravery rather than sex, and certainly nothing to do with population control. Too many young Greeks died in their warrior years, having experienced no love life other than the closeness of military bonds. The military requirement for fitness segued into a homoerotic culture. The fitter a boy, the more orgasmic pleasure he seemed equipped to deliver to his comrades; the more beautiful he was, the better mind he was assumed to possess. The best-looking boys, therefore, attracted older male sexual lovers as tutors.

Anal sex was perfectly legal and the common sexual mode for men, being considered an enjoyable, healthy, and uplifting activity. One Greek physician explained that men enjoy anal intercourse because sexual enjoyment depends on friction of the part of the body where seminal fluid is secreted, and due to a birth defect, theirs happens to be in the rectum.

Vase paintings of anal intercourse usually show the participants as being members of the same age group. But paintings and illustrations on the male drinking cups used at evening
symposia
(drinking and intellectual discussion parties) tended to show the older men bringing themselves to orgasm between a naked teenage boy's thighs. The boy would be the guest of honour, attending with his father's permission, having been invited by another older man who fancied him – and who would commission special crockery celebrating his beauty.

Homosexuality was seen straightforwardly as morality in action, the unquestioned proper way to bring up a boy to be an upstanding citizen. A man was not really considered to be upholding community standards unless he practised sodomy. Lycurgus, the Spartan legislator, refused to consider any citizen to be a worthy man if he did not have a male lover. And any parental squeamishness about anal intercourse would damage a boy's education. The best teaching was conducted through the love between teacher and student,
called
paiderastia
, and there was a common feeling that virtue could literally be implanted in a boy by receiving the anal ministrations of his teacher.

At the same time, however, heterosexual prostitution was an enormous and respected industry. While wives were breeding machines secluded at home, prostitutes, of the market place or the boudoir, were the liberated women with whom men could explore their sexual fantasies. The beauty and sexual skills of the upmarket and fabulously wealthy
hetairai
are illustrated on precious vases. One
hetairai
practice said to have survived in Greece to modern times is that of using the feet to masturbate a lover. Lower-ranking streetwalkers had their charms, too; some would wear a sandal whose sole imprinted on a dirt surface the words, ‘Follow me'.

One of the most famous women of ancient Athens was a positively regal prostitute, Phryne, who held court with the leading men of her day in the late-fourth century BC. Her affair with Praxiteles, the greatest of the Attic sculptors and the most original artist of his day, was famous. She was his model for the first ever naked statue of a woman, Aphrodite. The statue became the masturbatory fantasy of every red-blooded Athenian man unable due to youth or lack of cash to aspire to a prostitute of Phryne's shimmering wonder.
Erotes
, by the satirist Lucian of Samosata, tells of a rather earnest young soldier who falls in love with the Phryne Aphrodite statue and achieves his ambition to spend a night in its company. ‘The statue is a flawless work of Parian marble. The goddess's lips are slightly parted in a disdainful, ironic smile. No garment veils her charms, but one hand screens her modesty with a casual gesture,' Lucian writes.

‘I need not,' he continues, ‘be so indiscreet as to recount the details of the crime that he committed on that disgraceful occasion. When daylight returned, the goddess had a stain as a tribute to the traumas she had been through. After perpetrating this outrage, the young man threw himself into the sea.'

Despite this slightly disdainful tone, the Greeks regarded
male masturbation – which they called
cheiromania
or ‘passion with the hand' – as wholly normal and a safety-valve substitute for men to whom sex was not available. The Ancient Greeks also knew that a man could ‘see stars' and feel as if he was fainting when his prostrate gland was probed, and they were known to experiment with prostates in the manner of modern people and soft drugs. (The prostate gland is still used today by some as a kind of male G-spot.) Masturbation proper was talked about avidly, and frequently featured in comedy. In an Aristophanes play, a slave talks about his much-manipulated foreskin, saying that it is soon going to look like the back of a flayed slave.

Cynical philosophers encouraged masturbation as a defining act of self-sufficiency. Masturbating men were depicted on vases and terracottas; the Royal Museum in Brussels has a cup showing a garlanded youth performing the act. Plutarch records that Dio Chrysostum, a Stoic philosopher of the first century AD, praised the fifth-century BC philosopher Diogenes for his stance on masturbation. Diogenes was generally anxious to contravene social convention, especially in the matter of performing natural functions in public. He argued that sexual competitiveness was a destructive force in society, unnecessary since it was possible to find, ‘Aphrodite everywhere, without expense'. When someone asked what he meant, Diogenes started to masturbate in front of his audience in the marketplace, saying to his surprised fans and critics: ‘Would to Heaven that by rubbing my stomach in the same fashion, I could satisfy my hunger.' He attributed the origins of masturbation to Pan, who was distraught when Echo had left him bereft of sexual fulfilment; he was duly taught masturbation by Hermes/Mercury, his father, whose special subject it happened to be.

In a reversal of the custom at
symposia
for older men to perform frottage between a boy's thighs, vase paintings show young men masturbating by placing their penis between the thighs of an older, stooping man. This was delicately called,
‘interfemoral connection'. Fears that masturbation wasted semen were not taken seriously, even though it was commonly believed that it took forty parts of blood to create one of semen.

As for female sexual pleasure, especially masturbation (of which more later), there is, as in so many matters Ancient Greek, a dichotomy. Greek mythology, with its chaste and demure goddesses – even Aphrodite was portrayed with a hand casually shielding her genitalia – displays women in an idealised form, minus the rampant sexuality believed to exist in mortal woman. But the evidence is that in reality, as in so many cultures where a formal decorousness surrounds female sexuality, Greek women, while not the nymphomaniacs of their men's fears, were not as obedient and modest as the men thought, either, even after their wilder sexual feelings had been strictly curbed by their closeted existence.

The freedoms of a woman such as Phryne were unbelievable to wives who were supposedly only allowed out of their house once a year for fertility ceremonies. Yet it is now known that there were secret women-only sanctuaries at which they could take breaks, get-away-from-it-all oases which had their own erotic life and ceremonial. Here, they told rude sexual jokes, reclined to eat from naughty pottery designed to amuse women, and conspired to win back a modicum of control over their own bodies, offering the gods plants like pomegranate that were thought to be contraceptives and abortifacients – the polar opposite of the fertility they were imagined by their husbands to be on holiday to improve.