Greek love

Not to be confused with Philhellenism.

File:Ac.harmodius.jpg

Statue of Aristogiton and Harmodius 447 BC Roman copy of lost Greek original by Template:Kritios (Archaeological Museum, Naples)

Greek love is a relatively modern coinage (generally placed within quotation marks) intended as a reference to male bonding and intimate relations between males as practised in ancient Greece, as well as to its application and expression in more recent times, particularly in a 19th-century European context. Thus the term has been loosely applied to homosexual behaviour in general but especially pederasty.

History

According to Robert Aldrich, "Greek love" did not hold the central place in the history of lesbians as it did in the history of homosexual men.". However Greek pederasty, which sought to idealise the relationship of an older man (erastes) with an adolescent boy (eromenos), may have been brought to the Greek mainland, possibly from Crete, as early as the 7th century B.C. Both in Sparta and Athens, the bonding of adult men and adolescent boys was a common cultural and social phenomenon. There is also evidence from Greek vases displaying that the intimate association of men with boys was represented in a range of emotive and expressive guises. These relationships, however, often transcended the physical or the erotic, the adult often took on a teaching role model for the boy: abuse or exploitation of the younger partner was not tolerated. John Addington Symonds encapsulates this relationship as:

The lover taught, the hearer learned; and so from man to man was handed down the tradition of heroism, the peculiar tone and temper of the state to which, in particular among the Greeks, the Dorians clung with obstinate pertinacity. Xenophon distinctly states that love was maintained among the Spartans with a view to education; and when we consider the customs of the state, by which boys were separated early from their homes and the influences of the family were almost wholly wanting, it is not difficult to understand the importance of the paiderastic institution. The Lacedæmonian lover might represent his friend in the Assembly. He was answerable for his good conduct, and stood before him as a pattern of manliness, courage, and prudence. Of the nature of his teaching we may form some notion from the precepts addressed by the Megarian Theognis to the youth Kurnus. In battle the lovers fought side by side; and it is worthy of notice that before entering into an engagement the Spartans sacrificed to Eros. It was reckoned a disgrace if a youth found no man to be his lover.

Disapproval Within Christianity and Middle Eastern views

Intergenerational relationships of the kind portrayed by the "Greek love" ideal were increasingly disallowed within the Judaeo-Christian traditions of Western society, leading to a common condemnation of such acts by Western culture..

The Pashtun culture of modern-era Afghanistan is sometimes cited as a society where man-boy relationships - in many respects exhibiting similarities to the pattern of 'Greek love' - were practiced openly in the pre-Taliban days.

Uranian Hellenism

The ‘Uranians’ showed a conscious awareness of pederasty as an essential ingredient of Hellenism, and the impulse to acknowledge and declare this aspect of life in Ancient Greece at a time when Victorian justice upheld the illegality of all male-male sexual relations. The Uranians embraced a number of distinguished men of letters, including William Johnson Cory, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and John Addington Symonds (see above). These people advocated against the unjust and prudish Victorian sexual oppression rampant at the time and tried to get a popular acceptance of "Uranian" love, and to see in "Greek love" an inspiration for civilization at the time. John Addington Symonds defines the term:

I shall use the terms Greek Love, understanding thereby a passionate and enthusiastic attachment subsisting between man and youth, recognised by society and protected by opinion, which, though it was not free from sensuality, did not degenerate into mere licentiousness.

His Uranian colleagues were similar in their views, though it is necessary in evaluating their position as an historical group, to be aware not only of the different emphases and interpretations brought to bear on their ideal of pederastic love, but also of other contemporaneous theories and concepts of sexuality taking place elsewhere. This is crucial to an understanding of Greek love both in its original sense and its wider applications. While this clandestine group of neo-Hellenists was finding support and inspiration from an ancient culture, the voices of Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, Karl-Maria Kertbeny and Richard von Krafft-Ebing were being heard across Europe, articulating their theories of ‘homosexuality’ (coined by Kertbeny), sexual orientation and gender inversion which were to make an increasing impact in legal, medical and sociological circles. The Uranians did not see themselves in this light, and were opposed to Ulrichs’s claims for androphilic, homoerotic liberation at the expense of the paederastic (refer Uranian Poetry). In the introduction to his ‘Love in Earnest’ (1970) Timothy D’Arch Smith underlines the distinction:

Adult homosexuality, indeed, has little to do with the themes of the poets here

treated who loved only adolescent boys and it is for this reason that I have deliberately eschewed the word 'homosexual'. It is unpleasantly hybrid and modern psychiatrists would give another term to the boy-lover

- a position which thirty years on found ready agreement in Michael Kaylor's acknowledgment that the concept of the 'homosexual' was inapplicable to the dynamics of 'boy-love'.

For the Uranians and those who shared their desires, Michael Kaylor identifies “two forms of erotic positioning in relation to this ‘boy-worship’— as well as the fulfilment and outcome of such an erotic attachment — one ‘conciliatory to social orthodoxies’, the other ‘pervasively dissident’. The three major figures highlighted in his study Hopkins, Pater and Wilde, “represent different responses to this ‘boy-worship’: Gerard Manley Hopkins sublimated most, if not all of his paederastic desires; Walter Pater seems to have actualised his paederastic desires only once, threatening his academic position so thoroughly that he sublimated thereafter, a choice that later matured into an appreciation for such sublimation; Oscar Wilde actualised most of his paederastic desires, a ‘madness for pleasure’ that ruined many lives, and not just his own.”

Donald Mader said:

Surveying the allusions, one sees that they are largely to asymmetrical

relationships, either clearly age-structured, or between a god and a mortal, or a warrior/hero and his protégé […], or various combinations of these. […] Such relationships today are regarded as inherently morally culpable, paternalistic and patronizing at best, exploitative or even ‘abuse’ at the worst; to hold up such relationships as an ideal is accordingly viewed either as self-justification on the part of the ‘superordinate’ party, or hypocrisy. Yet this inequality is part of the objective outline that Uranians saw in their Greek mirror; the Greek relationships were asymmetrical, and the Uranians saw themselves in this outline

and filled in their own features.

The dilemma for the Uranians, put succinctly by A.C. Benson, one of Pater’s first biographers, resided in the educational value attached to the ‘essential character’ of the Greeks and their sanctioned practice of paederastic pedagogy.

Recent developments

Since the publication in 1964 of Greek Love by J. Z. Eglinton (the pseudonym of Walter Breen), the term 'Greek love' has become more seriously noticed by the mainstream, as is displayed by the fact that it is employed in the titles of books, as, for example, David Halperin's 1990 book One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: and Other Essays on Greek Love (1990), and James Davidson's 2007 book The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece (November 2007). The first full exploration of Greek love occurred with Kenneth Dover’s authoritative study of 1980’. In the 1980s and especially after Foucault, the view of "Greek love" was turned upside down and a new consensus was established.

Recognition of the term 'Greek love' by scholars and writers

[As regards E. M. Forster's novel Maurice:] The first [half] is dominated by Plato and, indirectly, by John Addington Symonds and the apologists for "Greek love"; the second is dominated by Edward Carpenter and his translation of the ideas of Walt Whitman.

"Greek love" did not hold the central place in the history of lesbians as it did in the history of homosexual men.

Byron and his contemporaries (at Harrow) would have been familiar with heroic concepts of "Greek love" through their reading of Horace, Catullus, Virgil, Petronius: indeed in Byron's Cambridge circle the term 'Horatian' was used as a code word for homosexual.

In this context such late-Victorian writers as Pater, Symonds, and Wilde, urged by Victorian liberalism to save the English polity by taking Greek history and philosophy seriously, will begin to glimpse in Plato's defense of transcendental, "Uranian" love a vocabulary adequate to their own inmost hopes, and to see in "Greek love" itself the promise of a Hellenic individuality and diversity with the most positive implications for Victorian civilization.

Gide was right. Those who did speak of "Greek love" tended to downplay its social and cultural significance.

Winckelmann's, Goethe's, and Moritz's languages of self-fashioning do not, of course, operate in isolation. [...] They were languages evolving within the contours of an emerging and formative discourse of German Classical aesthetics – an aesthetics deeply indebted to notions of "Greek love".

Percy Bysshe Shelley considered the dynamics surrounding "Greek love" (or paederasty) in his Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love (written in 1818). William Beckford and George Gordon, Lord Byron, were both practitioners of "Greek love" – and had to flee to the Continent as a result.

Greek Love... helped to build a sense of a unified political society out of divided groups, a pan-Athenian Eros of the Academy, a pan-Theban Sacred Band

‘of the Polis', and finally, in images of Thessalian Achilles fighting foreign Memnon over the beloved body of Antilochus of Pylos, a pan-Hellenic Eros,

a sense of Team Greece itself in opposition to the Barbarians.

See also

• Eros
• Homosexuality in Ancient Greece