Adonis and Sexual Ambiguity
A fashion in Hellenistic literature was to highlight feminine attributes in young males. This seems to correspond to a trend in statuary and painting, starting in the late fifth century and intensifying in the fourth century and Hellenistic age, to soften such male gods as Dionysus and Hermes by making them more youthful, beardless, and even effeminate (especially Dionysus),[140] and to further soften the perennially youthful Apollo.[141] Although during the democratized fifth century homosexual behavior, closely associated with the archaic ages privileged leisure class and privatized sympotic occasions, declined in visibility,[142] the rise of homoerotic epigrams during the Hellenistic period drew attention again to homoerotic culture. Dover suggests that the growing fashion in visual art and literature to feminize males, especially young males, may reflect a rising taste for effeminate eromenoi (male objects of homoerotic desire: generally boys).[143] But, as shown earlier, the Hellenistic age was also characterized by a trend toward heterosexuality, evident in the rising taste for the female nude in visual art and in the attention paid in literature to female erotic subjectivity. In representing female desire, the Alexandrian male poets seem to have borrowed from current trends in representing male homoerotic desire and thus to stress points of correspondence rather than difference between male and female eros, a continuum of sexual desires rather than a gendered dichotomy. Sculptural representations of hermaphrodites, which began to appear with more frequency during the Hellenistic period,[144] provide a visual example of fluidity of boundaries between male and female.
Several of Theocritus's poems, and particularly his urban mimes, underscore the gender ambiguity of young males by drawing attention to their erotic impact on both men and women. Idyll 2's Delphis provides a key example. Simaetha admires Delphis in terms that highlight his potential appeal to men, for her desire is aroused by how Delphis glistens after exercising in the wrestling school (80), a sight which could also provide erotic stimulus for Greek men who loiter around wrestling schools and gymnasia to gaze at boys.[145] Simaetha highlights Delphis's androgynous qualities by comparing his gleam to that of the goddess Selene (79). Further, Simaetha's informant is unsure whether Delphis's new love is male or female (150, 44).
Delphis's self-praise also highlights the fuzziness of his erotic place-
ment between men and women: he reports that he is considered hand-some and nimble among the young men (124-25). In a seductive speech addressed to Simaetha, Delphis describes his eagerness to comply with Simaetha's summons by using an analogy that evokes the homoerotic ethos of the gymnasium:
(114-16)
Truly, Simaetha, you barely beat me—by no more than I
the other day outran the graceful Philinos—
in summoning me to your house before I came unasked.
By having Delphis use the adjective 
(graceful) of Philinus when other adjectives might seem more suitable to running, the poet suggests that Delphis's interest in Philinus extends beyond the running field. Further, as noted in the previous discussion of Idyll 2's male-female interactions, the analogy Delphis uses to end his seduction speech also highlights his sexual ambiguity, for in describing the passion that might have consumed him (had Simaetha not preempted it), he puts himself in the positions of a maiden and a bride victimized by Eros (136-38).
Before moving to a detailed consideration of Idyll 15's Adonis, another key example in a discussion of the representation of sexually ambiguous males in Theocritus's poetry, I would like to point out two other places in Theocritus's poetry where homosexual and heterosexual desire overlap. In Idyll 13, the narration of Heracles and Hylas's story shows that water nymphs too find Heracles' boyfriend Hylas attractive (48-49). Segal aptly stresses Hylas's sexual ambiguities: "Love in his case veers ambiguously between male and female roles and between eroticism and maternal dependence."[146] In Idyll 7, Simichidas tries to diminish Philinus in his lover Aratus's eyes, by reporting how women are teasing him as he reaches maturity:
(120-21)
And truly riper than a pear is he, and the women cry,
"Alas, Philinus, thy fair bloom is falling from thee."
(trans. Gow, Theocritus 1: 65)
Although Idyll 14 does not explore sexual ambiguity per se , the poem represents a male's confusion concerning gendered self-identity. When
abandoned by Cynisca, his former lover, Aeschinas likens her behavior in leaving him to a bull's, and he likens himself to a mouse and a starving Megarian. These analogies underscore how Cynisca's act of self-assertion at a male-defined symposium has convoluted normative gender identities for Aeschinas: he now views Cynisca as powerful and dominant and himself, a man who formerly felt entitled to beat his girlfriend, as subordinated and powerless. A related example of role reversal occurs in Idyll 6: Damoetas's Polyphemus fantasizes that Galatea will appropriate the male's role of komastically courting him and he will take the subordinated role of barring his door to her (32).
Idyll 15's Adonis is central to a consideration of the theme of feminized males in Theocritus's poetry. Adonis is unusual among Greek heroes and gods in that he was already a figure of gender ambiguity in Greek poetry of the archaic age. In his first extant appearance in Greek literature, he is described as 
("delicate"; Sappho fr. 244.1 Page).[147] In Hellenistic poetry, the adjective 
continues to spotlight feminized male beauty, for example, in a homoerotic epigram by Philostratus:
(Ep. 1.5-6 Gow and Page [ = A.P . 12.91])
Why did you gaze upon sweet, delicate
Stasicrates, a sapling of violet-crowned Aphrodite?
In Idyll 15, Theocritus's shaping of Praxinoa's gaze upon the Adonis figure represented in the woven tapestry underscores characteristics in Adonis that can make him sexually attractive to both men and women (
"with the first youthful down spreading from his temples," 85). Youth was traditionally a valued quality in eromenoi (beloved boys) and "youthful down" imagery appears regularly in homoerotic poems.[148] The homoerotic appeal of "down" imagery in the Hellenistic age can also be seen in a wry Hellenistic epigram attributed to Asclepiades:[149]
(Ep . 46.1-2 Gow and Page [ = A.P . 12.36.1-2])
Now you offer yourself, when the delicate down is spreading
under your temples and there is a prickly bloom on your thighs.
(trans. based on Paton, Greek Anthology 4: 299).
Callimachus, whose Work includes many homoerotic epigrams, also uses down imagery to describe a youths appearance:
(Hecale , fr. 274)
A delicate down, like the helichryse's blossom,
was just starting to spread on him too.
The sex of the speaker is unspecified and could be female, but from the imagery, the speaker's sex could just as well be male.[150] Further, the element of down is also traditional in descriptions of males who die young, for example, Homer's description of young giants killed before reaching manhood:
(Od . 11.319-20 O.C.T .)
before the down blossomed beneath their temples
and covered their chins with freshly blooming beard.
(trans. A. T. Murray, Odyssey 1: 409, rev.)
Thus when Idyll 15's Praxinoa gazes on a tapestry representing the dead or dying Adonis and comments on the youthful down on his face, she focuses on qualities (his youthfulness, the incipience of a beard) that make his sexuality available to both men and women (and that also emphasize the poignancy of his premature death).[151]
In Theocritus's Idyll 15, the poet intensifies Adonis's ambiguity as a sexual figure by having the hymnist highlight Adonis's association with Ganymede, an object of Zeus's homoerotic desire,[152] as well as with the Erotes, young male figures often represented hermaphroditically.[153] On Aphrodite and Adonis's couch, the centerpiece of Idyll 15's Adonis celebration, carved ivory eagles transport Ganymede to Zeus (123-24), and Erotes fly overhead in the arbors. Both Ganymede and Erotes, like Adonis, traditionally represented youthful homoerotic beauty, and Theocritus uses Ganymede elsewhere in explicitly homoerotic contexts. Thus in Idyll 12, the erastes -narrator uses Ganymede in the closure of a homoerotic courtship speech addressed to his eromenos :
(34-37)
Happy he who judges those kisses for the boys,
and surely long he prays to radiant Ganymede
that his lips may be as the Lydian touchstone whereby
the money-changers try true gold to see k be not false.
(trans. Gow, Theocritus 1: 95)
Callimachus's Epigram 52 also underscores Ganymede's value in homoerotic contexts, for the erastes -narrator, in courting an eromenos named Theocritus,[154] uses Ganymede to invoke Zeus:[155]
(3-4)
Yea, by Ganymede of the fair locks, O Zeus in heaven,
thou too hast loved.
(trans. Mair, "Callimachus," 175 [his Ep . 53])
Thus in Theocritus's Idyll 15, the association with the Erotes and Ganymede (like Adonis, a beautiful boy who never grows up and a subordinated lover) emphasizes Adonis's sexual ambiguity as a passive, sexual object on display for both men's and women's gazes.[156] The elements of youth and passivity in Praxinoa's description of Adonis's appearance take him beyond sexual dichotomy to suggest more androgynous appeal.[157]
Ovid too emphasizes the element of gender doubt in Adonis's erotic appeal (Met . 10.519-739). Venus, in telling the story of Atalanta to Adonis, highlights Adonis's androgyny by comparing Atalanta's face and naked body[158] to Adonis's (as well as her own):
Ut faciem et posito corpus velamine vidit,
Quale meum, vel quale tuum, si femina fias,
Obstipuit.
(Met . 10.578-80; Anderson, Ovid's Metamorphoses)
But when Hippomenes saw Atalanta's face and unclothed body—
a body like my own, or like yours, Adonis, if you were a woman—
he was struck with wonder.
Venus's flattery of Adonis here emphasizes the sexual ambiguity of his appearance. In Ovid's version,[159] Venus, in Diana's dress, participates in Adonis's liminal world of hunting (535-39) by feminizing it, transforming it into an erotic playground. In restricting the hunt to small animals, especially deer and rabbits (traditional love-gifts),[160] Venus reorients the hunt around the goal of embracing on the grass afterwards (554-59). But for a Greek youth, the hunt represented a passage to manhood:[161] Adonis ignores Venus's cautionary tale, rejects her hunting proscriptions, and chases a boar. But he fails to pass to manhood, for the boar
kills him (708-16). Venus commemorates his youthful death by instituting an annual reenactment of her grief, and she transforms his blood into the anemone (717-39), a reminder of ephemerality and sexual ambiguity.[162]
The link between eros and death is a central theme in Adonis's representations in Greek literature. Thus Sappho emphasizes through the adjective 
(delicate) the poignancy of Adonis's tender death: 
("Delicate Adonis is dying, Kythereia [Aphrodite]"; fr. 244.1 Page).[163]Idyll 15's representation of the Adonis festival exploits the linkage between eros and death. Praxinoa admires a representation of Adonis by describing him as one who evokes love even in death (86). The hymnist's description of the grieving female celebrants' appearance also highlights this linkage:
(132-35)
At dawn we will gather with the dew and carry him outside
to the waves crashing on the shore,
and with hair unbound, robes in folds at our ankles,
breasts bare, we shall begin the funereal song.
The Adonia traditionally offered a poetic forum for heteroerotic voyeurism. For example, in Menander's Samia , a youths spying activities at a private Adonia result in his impregnating his neighbor's daughter (38-50). A Hellenistic epigram by Dioscorides also highlights the heteroeroticism of the ritualized Adonis lament:
(Ep . 4 Gow and Page [ = A.P . 5.193])
Tender Cleo took me captive, Adonis, as she beat her breasts
white as milk at thy night funeral feast.
Will she but do me the same honour, if I die,
I hesitate not; take me with thee on thy voyage.
(trans. Paton, Greek Anthology 1:223-25)
By personalizing the eros inherent to the Adonia, Dioscorides' speaker transforms the Adonis lament into a site of personal, heteroerotic seduc-
tion.[164] Later Ovid too recommends the Adonia as an opportunity to find women: "nec te praetereat Veneri ploratus Adonis" ("Do not let Adonis, bewailed by Venus, escape your notice"; Ars Am . 1.75).
Theocritus's poetry romanticizes deaths of other young males besides Adonis, in both heterosexual and homosexual contexts. Idyll 13 combines the two: amorous water nymphs steal Hylas from Heracles by pulling him into a pond:
(48-49)
For love of the Argive lad had fluttered
all their tender hearts.
(trans. Gow, Theocritus 1: 99)
Idyll 1's Daphnis, a rebel, seeks to escape the tyranny of love through death: Daphnis vows to continue to give love (Eros) grief even in Hades (103), and Thyrsis's description of Daphnis's death stresses the muses' and the nymphs' tenderness for him (140-41). Throughout Theocritus's poetry, fictive characters connect love and death. In heterosexual contexts, Idyll 2's Simaetha threatens to kill her beloved (159-62, 58) and Idyll 3's goatherd threatens to commit suicide for love (25-27, 53). In homoerotic contexts, lovers also highlight their love through death references, but less violently. Idyll 12's erastes desires that even two hundred generations later, in Acheron (Hades), he might learn of his love affair's lasting fame (18-21). Idyll 29's erastes claims he would fetch Cerberus, keeper of the dead, for his beloved (38). Idyll 12 offers an amusing variation of the use of the eroticism of death motif in a seduction strategy: an erastes ends his courtship speech to his eromenos by describing an annual boys' kissing contest held at Diodes' tomb in Megara to commemorate his homoerotic passion (27-37).[165]
Callimachus's poems that feature young males also typically represent their attractiveness in ways that heighten their homoerotic appeal, even when the context for their appearance is heterosexual (as in the case of a male-female marriage). For example, in Callimachus's Aetia , 3, frs. 67-75 (the marriage of Acontius and Cydippe), the poet-narrator underscores Acontius's attractiveness by describing the attention he is given in settings that typically attract the homoerotic gaze: Acontius receives notice on his way to school or to the bath (fr. 68), and at symposia male admirers play the game kottabos in his honor (fr. 69). Further, Callimachus describes only Acontius's response on the wedding night, not Cydippe's,
and he uses imagery that reflects a homoerotic world oriented around the gymnasium:[166]
(Aet . 3, fr. 75.44-48)
Then, I deem, Acontius, that for that night,
wherein you touched her maiden girdle,
you would [not] have acccpted . . . the ankle of Iphicles
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
who ran upon the corn-ears.
(trans. Trypanis, "Callimachus," 59)
Callimachus also underscores the effeminancy of the god Apollo:[167]
(Hymn 2.36-37)
And ever beautiful is he and ever young: never on the girl
cheeks of Apollo hath come so much as the down of manhood.
(trans. Mair, "Callimachus," 51-53)
This feminized Apollo may correspond to (or anticipate) a trend in Hellenistic statuary representing Apollo: as Smith suggests, "Apollo had always been represented as young and beautiful, but Hellenistic Apollo often takes on a soft, languorous, effeminate style."[168] Callimachus also highlights the homoerotic aspect of Apollo's relationship with Admetus: 
("He tended the yokemares, / fired with love of young Admetus"; trans. Mair, "Callimachus," 53; Hymn 2.48-49).[169]
In Callimachus's Iambus 3, the erastes -narrator's wish to overturn his sexual identity highlights Callimachus's preoccupation with gender roles: he claims that he would rather be a celebrant of Cybebe (Cybele) or participate in the ritual lament for Adonis (that is, he would rather be a eunuch or a woman) than be a poet in a materialistic age when poets are not honored (or a lover of boys when boys have turned mercenary).[170] This poem stresses the degraded aspect of the erastes -narrator's wish by describing Adonis, the proposed object of worship, as Aphrodite's 
("slave [or mortal]," Iambus 3, fr. 193.37).
In addition to feminized males, boyish females appear in many of Theocritus's and Callimachus's poems.[171] In Theocritus's Idyll 18, for example, a maiden chorus underscore their own athleticism:
(22-23)
And we, the full tale of her coevals, together anoint ourselves in manly fashion
by the bathing places in Eurotas and run there together.
(trans. Gow, Theocritus 1:143)
Similarly, Callimachus's Hymn 5 praises Athena by highlighting her boyish charms (13-32). The festival director instructs the celebrants not to bring Athena perfume, alabasters, or mirror, for her red blush comes from running and from simple unguents:[172]
(29-30 Bullock, Callimachus )
So now too bring something manly, just olive oil,
the anointing oil of Castor, of Heracles.
(trans. Bulloch, Callimachus , 95)
Theocritus's urban mimes also include examples of women engaging in conventionally male behavior. Idyll 2's Simaetha takes an active (male) role in courtship behavior: she falls in love when she sees Delphis on the street, and she summons him to her. Idyll 15's Syracusan women take the active roles of subjects as they gaze upon male objects of desire (the Adonis figures), and Praxinoa defies a male stranger and asserts her right to public speech. Idyll 14's Cynisca claims the traditional male fight of a self-willed love, and when Aeschinas beats her for her disloyalty, she asserts her power by leaving him.
A key simile can illustrate the theme of gender ambiguity in Apollonius Rhodius's Argonautica , for Jason's joy when he has attained the golden fleece, the object of his heroic quest, is compared to a girl's delight in catching the moonlight on her robe:
(Argon . 4.167-73 O.C.T .)
And as a maiden catches on her finely wrought robe
the gleam of the moon at the full, as it rises above
her high-roofed chamber; and her heart rejoices
as she beholds the fair ray; so at that time did Jason
uplift the great fleece in his hands;
and from the shimmering of the flocks of wool
there settled on his fair cheeks and brow a red flush like a flame.
(trans. Seaton, Argonautica , 305, rev.)
Medea has performed the crucial feat of putting the serpent to sleep, while Jason has simply taken the fleece afterward. This simile not only feminizes Jason's response to the fleece, but also seems to eroticize it by evoking imagery appropriate to marriage readiness and by emphasizing Jason's sexual attractiveness (the flush on his cheeks and brow).[173]
The gender ambiguity characteristic of much of Hellenistic poetry may reflect uncertainty about gender roles in a world in which Greek men's pubic roles were being curtailed and women's were opening up. Just as boundaries between males and females were fluctuating in Hellenistic society, so too in poetry and art. The trend toward feminizing males in Hellenistic visual art and literature may reflect the political subordination of males in a new Greek world defined by autocratic hegemonies. Hellenistic pore were living in a period of change: gendered roles in society—such as the equation of public and political with male, and private and immobile with femme—were in flux due to the rise of mobility and the domination of autocratic hegemonies. Through representations of sexual desire and interrelations, poets were able to explore the changing gendered conditions of their world.