Greek love

Not to be confused with Philhellenism.

Greek Love

Homosexuality in ancient Greece
Pederasty in ancient greece
Eros, Kalos kagathos, Platonic love
Hellenism (neoclassicism)
Shelly	Byron

Greek love is a modern phrase (generally placed within quotation marks of either or both words, i.e., "Greek" love, Greek "love" or "Greek love"). The ambiguity of an ancient Greek model of "friendship" can imply a male bonding between equals or a spiritual, educational and/or sexual union of males of varying age. The term is believed to have been coined by Robbie Ross, and put into literary use by Oscar Wilde.

Apart from its percieved historical connotation, no such term is found in any surviving text from any ancient source. While there are terms, such as Mos Graecaie (Greek custom) and Mos Graecorum (the Greek Way), they were never deployed in reference to pederasty, but for a variety of greek practices.

History

The history of the concept, predates the term by nearly 3000 years. Institutional Greek homosexuality as well as Greek pederasty (the erotic relationship of an adult male erastes with a young adolescent eromenos), appeared on the Greek mainland, as early as the 7th century B.C..Both Sparta and Athens established similar cultural and social phenomenon.

Homosexual activity in ancient civilizations is common. Many civilizations offer few sexual options in a rigid class system. Greek men stayed within their own class, if not within their own gender. Marriage offered little more than offspring, as the two genders were seperated in public and traditionaly did not even take meals together. The natural step was to turn to who was available and accepting. Ancient sexuality was not approached as a gender specific attraction. Homosexuality, is also a modern term. It has only been in use for just over 100 years. The concept of strict sexual seperation of the genders is also a relatively new idea. Not untill strict church doctine taught this ideology did it become a moral issue. Up untill that time there simply was little to no standard against it.

A true homosexual subculture did not exist in ancient Greece. Not untill the Romans do we see evidence of this. Homosexuality is defined as the complete attraction to the same gender. While there were individuals of both sexes that were only attracted to their own gender they would have no reason not to marry for the same benefits afforded every adult of Greece. The marriage was not to become something else or to hide the males attractions, but because that is what men did at a specific time in their lives. They would have no reason to hide their desires or their affairs as the ancient society saw it as natural and even honorable.

Platonic love is associated with educational practices and instilling civic and philosophical ideals, it apears to have been a great honor to be "mock" abducted in a nearly theatrical way, and spirited off to the residence of the Erastus by his friends where the Eromenos is treated with food, wine and seduction while held "captive". The stylised faux "kidnapping" may last for several days as gifts and song are bestowed on the youth, who is returned safely home. It is clear that the goal is the acceptance from the youth, who may turn away the advances. Generaly the young man or adolescent boy will be sought after by many who, become attracted by the physical perfection of the athlete during competition in the Greek games. There is overwhelming evidence to illustrate the social phenomonon. Literary work such as the Socratic dialogues of Plato, for example, hundreds of Greek vases displaying a range of emotive and expressive guises, and the words of the actual love struck Greek's themselves carved into the many stadium tunnels, where the athelets would wait for their events as well as on the wall's columns and even natural rock of the country. Most of the Ancient greek love poems are attributed to the traditions of Kalos.

Relationships, however, often transcended the physical or the erotic, the adult being invested with responsibility for the moral and spiritual welfare of the boy: abuse or exploitation of the younger partner was not tolerated. The spiritual and educational aspects were the focus of what came to be known as 'Platonic love'. 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".
A Problem in Greek Ethics by John Addington Symonds

Male same-sex relationships of the kind portrayed by the "Greek love" ideal were increasingly disallowed within the Judaeo-Christian traditions of Western society, though there was more tolerance within Asian cultures until recent times. 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 practised openly in the pre-Taliban days. In Western Europe, ‘boy-love’ or boy-worship as an aesthetic ideal flourished within groups of artists and poets who drew inspiration from the Hellenic past, and who consciously identified with the art and mores of the ancients - for example, the Florentine Renaissance artists and the Oxford Hellenists in Victorian England.

Modern interpretations

Greek love was sometimes idealized and sentimentalized. Such a reading of the ancient Greeks is implied in the first articulations of sexual liberation, especially for 19th century homosexuals.

Romantic Hellenism

From the time of the Renaissance, Greek literature assumed a central place in classical education. This was particularly characteristic of England and Germany, where the influential figures of Byron, Shelley, Goethe and Winckelmann paid homage to the sexual realities of Greek life and culture.

Byron and his school-mates at Harrow would have read the classics and understood the meaning of the term, "Greek love" as recent biographers (Crompton & MacCarthy) have suggested. His passionate boy-friendships inspired some of his most evocative verse including the ‘Thyrza’ poems (Childe Harold), and ‘Love and Death’ set in his beloved Greece where he was to end his life in the defense of Greek independence.

Ours too the glance none saw beside;
The smile none else might understand;
The whisper'd thought of hearts allied,
The pressure of the thrilling hand.

from:To Thyrza, October 11, 1811.

The poet, Shelley, a pupil at Eton, immersed himself in Greek literature, his Platonic studies leading to an eventual translation of the Symposium (1818) and in the same year a ‘Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love’ which stands as the first published essay (after Bentham’s unpublished writings of 1785) on the subject of homosexuality. The significance of this document lies in its repudiation of the evasions of contemporary scholarship which had cast a veil over the reality of Greek love as a sexual practice. Shelley, however, was restrained by the repressive homophobia of the time, so that much of the essay is couched in elaborately conceived circumlocution, while drawing a line between ‘ridiculous and disgusting conceptions’ and an oblique reference to ‘natural’ orgasmic release:

If we consider the facility with which certain phenomena connected with sleep, at the age of puberty, associate themselves with those images which are the objects of our waking desires…it will not be difficult to conceive the almost involuntary consequences of a state of abandonment in the society of a person of surpassing attractions, when the sexual connection cannot exist, to be such as to preclude the necessity of so operose and diabolical a machination as that usually described.

The ‘Discourse’ was intended as an introduction to his translation of ‘The Symposium’ – which ‘towers over all others because it is alive’ (Lauritsen), but both documents were too daring for the time, and publication of translation (as ‘The Banquet’) and essay had to wait almost a century. In spite of its limitations, the document has nevertheless been considered as ‘a pioneering work in a field not fully and freely explored by an English scholar until Kenneth Dover’s authoritative study of 1980’.

The German scholar and writer, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, did more any other intellectual or artistic figure in the 18th century to promote the Greek ideal of beauty. His passionate dedication to the study and popularisation of Greek art and sculpture is reflected in detailed descriptions conveying in emotive and aesthetic terms an essential blend of eroticism, physicality and idealism. The sensual imagery employed in his portrayal of the Apollo Belvedere is intensely passionate, though never exceeding the bounds of good taste:

Belvedere Apollo. Roman artwork, ca. 130–140 CE, copy of a Greek bronze original probably by Leochares, ca. 330–320 BC.

An eternal springtime, like that which reigns in the happy fields of Elysium, clothes his body with the charms of youth and softly shines on the proud structure of his limbs....From admiration I pass to ecstasy, I feel my breast dilate and rise as if I were filled with the spirit of prophecy; I am transported to Delos and the sacred groves of Lycia - places Apollo honoured with his presence - and the statue seems to come alive like the beautiful creation of Pygmalion.

As Robert Aldrich observes: 'Greek sculpture and painting were the perfect representations of ideal beauty....This idea formed the basis of Winckelmann's art appreciation and criticism and should serve as the foundation for contemporary aesthetics and the programme of modern pedagogy.' The great German poet, Goethe, himself heterosexual, appreciated the depth of feeling and perception which lay behind the passion for Greek art by Winckelmann and others, and understood the force and nature of Greek love. Similarly, Walter Pater, one of the group of Uranian writers and Hellenists in 19th century Oxford (see below),‘considered Winckelmann a true interpreter of the ancients', and so attuned with the spirit of the ancient world that his nature was 'itself like a relic of classical antiquity'.

Victorian Hellenism

It is to the ‘Uranians’, as they were called, that we may look to identify 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 the above-mentioned John Addington Symonds who 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, almost all classically-educated Oxonians, stood aside from such scientific controversies, secure in the knowledge of their spiritual, philosophical and emotional antecedents. Their Hellenic appellation derives from both Plato’s ‘heavenly’ love and the birth of Aphrodite as described in Hesiod (Theogony), but it should not be confused with ‘Urning’, a term coined by Ulrichs to denote ‘a female psyche in a male body’ ('Urning' also derives from Classical sources, particularly the Symposium). The Uranians did not see themselves in this light, and were opposed to Ulrichs’s claims for androphilic liberation at the expense of the pederastic (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

Socrates and Alcibiades
Victorian view of the balance of affection and restraint between the most famous eromenos and erastes
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends (1868)

- 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'.

The immediate Hellenist precursors of the Uranians were the influential literary and reformist figures of Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, and Benjamin Jowett who had already set out the Grecian values of philosophy and education which provided fertile ground for their passionate adherents:

The immense spiritual significance of the Greeks is due to their having been

inspired with this central and happy idea of the essential character of human perfection […] [It is] this wonderful significance of the Greeks [that has] affected the very machinery of our education, and is in itself a kind of homage to

it. (Arnold)

Of the Greek authors who at the Renaissance brought a new life into the world

Plato has had the greatest influence. The Republic of Plato is also the first treatise upon education, of which the writings of Milton and Locke, Rousseau, Jean Paul, and Goethe are the legitimate descendents. [….] He is the father of

idealism in philosophy, in politics, in literature.(Jowett)

Through such statements, the Victorian ‘Greek chorus’ (as Kaylor described it) “unwittingly facilitated a ‘suspect’ aspect of the ‘Hellenic element’ that assisted in the emergence of the Uranians as a group, a ‘suspect’ aspect that linked the ‘essential character’ and ‘wonderful significance’ of the ancient Greeks to their celebration of paederastic love and its attendant pedagogical practices.” Passion for youth and passion for the education and moral welfare of youth – such was the call to arms of the Oxford Hellenists who brought wisdom, learning, and instinctive perceptions bred by a highly cultivated aesthetic milieu. But the balance between pedagogic responsibility and pederastic inclination was (perhaps unsurprisingly) achieved with varying success: after all, the sober environment of Victorian England was a far cry from the blue skies of Hellas.

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.”

To what extent does the sexual world of the Uranians mirror the pederasty of the Ancients? Certainly the intergenerational aspect is clear, even if the ‘boy’ was occasionally in his late teens or early twenties i.e. older than the traditional ‘eromenos’; the pedagogical element so essential to the Greek experience (as William Percy notes Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece, 1996 ) was present except, for instance, in the case of Wilde, the dissident, though his writings can be construed as didactic and inspiringly so. Greek relationships were essentially asymmetrical, an aspect alluded to by the Uranians in their desire to emulate Grecian values within their own ‘culture’. Donald Mader viewed the use of these allusions as a “conscious and deliberate strategy for a sexual cultural politics through art” and as a “tool for valorization in a strategy for social acceptance.” He continues:

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:

But if we give boys Greek books to read and hold up the Greek spirit and the

Greek life as a model, it is very difficult to slice out one portion [the paederastic], which was a perfectly normal part of Greek life, and to say that it is

abominable etc. etc.

Fiction and non-fiction usage

[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 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.

Contradicting opinions

Sex and Domination

In his paper, Reconsiderations about Greek Homosexualities (2005), Percy takes Dover to task in connection with what he terms ‘the sexual-role dichotomization’. He refers here to the depiction of the erastes/eronemos relationship as defined by sexual roles, active and passive respectively. This dichotomy was connected by Dover to other sexual and social mores which conferred a certain propriety on the role of the male adult Athenian as an active penetrator while denigrating the passive/penetrated role. As a result, ‘penetration’ has become a focal point in the scholarship to the extent that the concept of domination takes precedence over any other aspects of Greek sexuality. The ‘constructionists’, Foucault and Halperin, and their many followers, have extended this analysis, but the ‘Dover dogma’ remains at the heart of the discussion.

Percy underlines the complexity of the Greek male experience which is not served by reducing same-sex behaviors to the purely physical or sexual. He places at the forefront of his discussion the established pederastic system of education which ‘became a way to lead a boy into manhood and full participation in the polis’ which in turn was able ‘to benefit the city in a wide range of potential ways.’ The training and indeed inspiration provided in the pederastic relationship ‘released creative forces that led to what has been called the Greek "miracle".’ He argues that the coexistence of ‘lustful pederasty’ and pedagogical pederasty represented ‘two ways that the Greeks understood the desire and relationship involved in boy-love’, and its vital educational force.

He refers to Thomas Hubbard who described ‘the simplistic bifurcation that has tended to dominate studies of Greek pederasty’:

Oscar Wilde’s and J A Symond’s idealistic version of Greek love was just as much an oversimplification of the complex historical phenomenon as Halperin’s ghastly nightmare vision of a society where the penetrating phallus was the universal wrench of subordination.

Percy strongly criticizes Dover’s ‘myopic view of the institution of pederasty' and ‘lack of understanding of homosexuality verging on homophobia, a crucial point being Dover’s way of dealing with the sexual terminology: retaining the word ‘sexual’ for hetero relations while being inclined to treat homosexuality ‘as a subdivision of the quasi-sexual or pseudo-sexual (not para-sexual)’.[Dover, 1978, Preface] He does not, however, neglect to mention the availability of flute girls, slaves, prostitutes, and hetairai to dispel any notion that the elite Greeks had no opportunity for heterosexual contact before marriage (typically delayed until the age of 30), concluding (in a footnote) that the incidence of homosexual choice would still most likely have been higher than in today's world (as measured by Kinsey). No exclusive homosexuals are recorded in the epics or myths, though the stories - as with Achilles and Patroclus - continued to be homosexualized even as late as the Roman period.

Professor Thomas K Hubbard stands back from the dominant/submissive position which as he says ‘has led some scholars to see the active/passive polarity as fundamental to the significance of pederasty as a social institution’. The depiction on Greek vases of the older partner as typically the insertive agent in sexual acts lies behind claims ‘that phallic penetration was an index of sociopolitical empowerment, and that boys, as passive “victims” of penetration (considered isomorphic to exploitation) were parallel to women, slaves, and foreigners as instrumental foils to the adult citizen males who wielded the political franchise and thereby the right to phallic supremacy.’

He contests this interpretation via the following observations:

• the textual evidence, and even the iconographic tradition points towards a different conclusion in that most man-boy couples are engaged in frontal and intercrural penetration, not anal acts
• it is the adult partner who has to adopt an awkward and distorted posture in order to accommodate himself to the younger and usually shorter partner
• the erotic interest is focused on the boy’s developing penis rather than the anus: the interest is not in the boy ‘as a passive receptacle’, but as one ‘who is himself budding and maturing into an active agent with sexual capabilities’
• boys seemed quite free to make their own choices either to accept or refuse men’s advances – there are many categories of response between outright rejection and full acceptance
• oral or anal penetration – the symbolic instruments of the active partner’s power and control – occurs in Attic vase-painting only in the case of heterosexual partners or age-equal males
• the fact that age-equal activity was not uncommon ‘profoundly undercuts any interpretation of Greek homosexuality in terms of “victim categories”’

Hubbard goes on to compare the ‘advantages’ of the older and younger protagonists in the love game: the experience and worldliness of the older lover as against the ‘countervailing power of Beauty’ of the youth – ‘a rarer commodity’ taking into account the demographic reckoning that eligible boys within the transient period of adolescent bloom (about fourteen to eighteen years old) were far fewer than the adults who might pursue them. Even among those eligible, many boys would not be interested, or would be closely guarded by their fathers or pedagogues (slave attendants), not forgetting the evidence of Socrates’ proverb, ‘Youth delights youth’, that they would prefer age-mates.

Bibliography

Archaeological references

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Historical references

• Aldrich, Robert (1993). The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy. Routledge. ISBN. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

Literary references

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See also

• Eros
• Homosexuality in Ancient Greece