This interchangeability of boys and women was widely taken for granted. Thus Xenophon remarks that when prisoners of war were ordered released, "the soldiers yielded obedience, except where some smuggler, prompted by desire of a good-looking boy or woman, managed to make off with his prize." 107 Similarly, when Plato argues in the Laws that it was possible for people to exercise sexual restraint, he recalls that the renowned athlete Ikkos of Taras "never had any connexion with a woman or a youth during the whole time of his training.
To be sure, it was recognized that some men preferred women, and others, male partners. Atheneus, for example, remarked that Alexander the Great was indifferent to women but passionate for males. In Euripides' play The Cyclops, Cyclops proclaims, "I prefer boys to girls." Plato never married. The philosopher Bion (third century B.C.) advised against marriage and restricted his attention to his (male) pupils. The Stoic philosopher Zeno (late fourth and early third centuries B.C.) was also known for his exclusive interest in boys.
Aristophanes' speech in Plato's Symposium explains these preferences by fantasizing that the ancestors of the human race had two pairs of arms and legs, two heads, and two sets of sexual organs. lU Some were double males, some double females, and some half male and half female. After the gods split the twins, their descendants sought, and continue to seek, reunion with the "missing half," whether of the same or opposite sex. Since humans who preferred same-sex partners would still have had to reproduce heterosexually for the myth to explain same-sex preferences in the next generation, it is not so clear that Aristophanes' explanation implies exclusive sexual choices. Still, it does presume specialized preferences.
Hellenistic writers even imagined debates about the relative merits of male and female partners. Some argued that it made little difference. One of the characters in Plutarch's Erotikos, or Dialogue on Love, argues that "the noble lover of beauty engages in love wherever he sees excellence and splendid natural endowment without regard for any difference in physiological detaiL" He will be "fairly and equably disposed toward both sexes, instead of supposing that males and females are as different in the matter of love as they are in their clothes. His interlocutors, however, have more definite tastes. So do the protagonists in Love, a sophistical treatise attributed to Lucian. Even here, though, the arguments in favor of boys or women largely concern the practical advantages of each. Moral considerations are never raised, and boy lovers win the debates as often as those who prefer women.
In this sense, homosexuality and heterosexuality are treated as having equal status. Thus Athanaeus remarked that "Sophocles liked his young lads in the same way that Euripide liked his women. As long as they were exercised in moderation, sexua preferences for boys or women did not become the basis for imputations of moral character or competence in other spheres of life.
