User:Avazina/Quotes on Greek love by User Textorus

Quotes on Greek Love

USER'S NOTE: I created this page so I could remove the following information from my talk page. This information was compiled by Textorus and posted to my talk page at my request; it makes for some very interesting reading.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Material in single brackets, or not surrounded by quotation marks, or not in block quotes, is my commentary, not Crompton's. If the subject interests you, I strongly urge you to go get the book: Louis Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization, Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2003. I think you can find it on Amazon now for about $15. Good solid info, a great read.--Textorus 00:47, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

• Crompton, p. 80: "Greek usage incorporated some form of the root eros (love) into such words as paiderastia, erastes, eromoenos. Roman men did not embrace lovers (amantes) but rather pathici, cinaedi, exoleti - terms suggestive of passivity, degradation, and abuse."

• "Harmodius and Aristogeiton were hailed as the sponsors of this new freedom [i.e., democracy in Athens, 514 B.C.]. These bronze figures [of the heroes, erected in the agora ] became the main secular emblem of Athens, as closely associated with the city as the Statue of Liberty is with New York.” (Crompton, p. 26)

• In fact, "seven hundred years after the deed it honored took place," their death was honored in verses at a dinner party in a Greek city in Egypt:

Ever shall your fame live in the earth

Dearest Harmodius and Aristogeiton,

For that you slew the tyrant

And made Athens a city of equal rights. (Crompton, p. 27)

• "As usual in Greek society, bisexuality was taken for granted." (Crompton, p. 54)

• In fact, after the death of Plato, the headship of his famous Academy "devolved for a century (from 339 to 240 [B.C.]) from lover to lover." (Crompton, p. 59)

• One of these couples at the Academy, Polemo and Crates were buried together; their epitaph read, "Passing stranger, say that in this tomb rest godlike Crates and Polemo, men magnanimous in concord, from whose inspired lips flowed sacred speech, and whose pure life of wisdom, in accordance with unswerving tenets, decked them for a bright immortality." (recorded by Diogenes Laertius) (Crompton, p. 59)

• "No side of human life is idealized in Arisophanes," writes Crompton (p. 54): "Gods, statesmen, poets, military commanders, wives--everyone in these comedies is venal, coarse, lecherous, gluttonous. Even [the god] Dionysus, the patron of the festival at which the plays were presented, is portrayed as a coward and a buffoon. It is not surprising, therefore, that male love is treated without glamour or sentiment."

• According to Crompton (p. 2-3):

Mythology provides more than 50 examples of youths beloved by deities [including] Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Hercules, Dionysus, Hermes and Pan," everybody but Ares, the god of war who is "surprisingly" missing.

• • • Among the poets, Sappho, Alcaeus, Ibycus, Anacreon, Theognis, Pindar, and a host of contributors to the Greek Anthology sang of same-sex love.
    • Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides produced important plays, now lost, on the subject.
    • The lives of Greek political leaders in a host of cities record episodes, crucial or trivial, of homoerotic passion. These include Solon, Peisistratus, Hippias, Hipparchas, Themistocles, Aristides, Critias, Demosthenes, and Aeschines in sophisticated Athens;
      • Pausanias, Lysander, and Agesilaus in militaristic Sparta;
      • Polycrates in his cultivated court on Samos;
      • Hieron and Agathocles in Sicilian Syracuse;
      • Epaminondas and Pelopidas in bucolic Thebes;
      • and Archelaus, Philip II, and Alexander in semi-barbarous Macedon.
    • Socrates spoke, and Plato and Xenophon wrote, of the inspirational powers of love between men, though they decried its physical expression.
    • Among the Stoics, Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus extolled the love of boys.
    • Among the artists, Phidias's love for Pantarcres was immortalized in marble.
    • In the later Hellenistic Age, Plutarch, Athenaeus, and Aelian recorded the history of Greek love from its earliest times,
    • while poets from Theocritus to Nonnus celebrated pederastic affairs in idylls, epigrams, and epics.

Throughout these accounts, male attachments are presented in an honorific light, though there were always some skeptics. But for many biographers, for a man not to have had a male lover seems to have bespoken a lack of character or a deficiency in sensibility. . . . Nor was this view restricted to intellectual circles. It's peculiar note of exaltation echoes repeatedly through all levels of Greek society. Like the rest of humanity, the ancient Greek was susceptible to various erotic moods - heroic, tender, frivolous, ribald, even, on occasion, brutal. But the notion of the potential ennobling effect of such love remained common currency from almost the earliest days of recorded Greek history down to the triumph of Christianity. (Crompton, p. 3)

• Not everybody approved of same-sex love, and some were vehemently against it, but without the weight of church doctrine to justify their opposition. Just like today, "unmanly" behavior (including taking the passive role in sex as well as "effeminate" mannerisms) was considered loathsome by some. And then as now, some people wanted to argue that same-sex love was "contrary to nature," as one of the debaters in Plutarch's Eroticus (aka The Dialogue on Love), written a generation or two after the death of Christ. (Crompton, p. 122) But just as many, if not in fact more writers, argued the opposite: that the love of females was an inferior thing to the love of males, which led to greater virtue. "Indeed, it might be said that Plutarch's point is simply that conjugal love can rise to the level of male love." (Crompton, p. 124) One of the debaters the Amores of Lucian, another philosphical writer of the second century A.D., "presents male love not as an 'exotic indulgence of our times' but as the essence of things Greek, citing Solon, Socrates, and Callimachus as its revered exponents." The same speaker argues that "the love of males is another sign of the advance of civilization, the creation of divine philosophy." (Crompton, p. 126) As Crompton observes, "We can only be astonished at this cultural conservatism and marvel that so little had changed in six or seven hundred years - a span that in our time would stretch back to Chaucer." (p. 127)

• Speaking of Pausanias's remarks in Plato's Symposium, Crompton observes (p. 57):

Pausanias appeals to two other Greek values: pleasure in intellectual converse (which only older youths are capable of) and enduring fidelity. The love of boys is fleeting, but devotees of the Uranian Aphrodite [i.e., Heavenly Love, "which did not exclude the physical" says Crompton] who choose young men, he claims, "are ready to be faithful to their companions, and pass their whole life with them, not to take them in their inexperience and . . . then run away to others." We know that many Greeks had relations with both women and boys. But Pausanias clearly identifies another class of man - a class who are exclusively devoted to their own sex, approximating the modern conception of the "homosexual." This idea of a homosexual "orientation," though by no means central to Greek thinking as it is to ours, was certainly understood by Plato and his contemporaries.

Sentiment in ancient Greece overwhelmingly approved male love, but on the question as to whether such love should be physical, opinion was divided. Pausanias takes a middle ground: boys [adolescents] may grant their favors to men but only under certain conditions. In Elis and Boeotia male relations are fully accepted by the law, and sexual contact is taken for granted. The suppression of male love in Ionia he explains as a policy of tyrannical rulers. Pausanias rejects both traditions, the first as libertine, the second as repressive, arguing instead that an honorable young man should yield his favors only to an older man who will be his mentor in the pursuit of wisdom and virture. (Crompton, p. 57)

• Plato felt "passionate affections" for males, and Diogenes Laertius quotes five poems by Plato that demonstrate these feelings. Plato's most famous attachment was to Dion of Syracuse, after whose assassination Plato composed this epitaph:

[Now] in your widewayed city, honored at last, you rest,

O Dion, whose love once maddened the heart within this breast. (Crompton, p. 56)

However, Plato was from an aristocratic family, and was not fond of the democratic values of classical Athens, and as he aged, his philosophy overrode his feelings. "Plato's ideal is wholly asexual; a Spartan at heart, he worships discipline, not liberty and spontaneity. For Plato, pleasure, and especially sexual pleasure, is the great evil to be resisted. To experience an orgasm is for him the ultimate humilitation, for at such a moment reason is out of control and passion supreme. To make his point, Plato . . . introduces the famous myth of the soul as a charioteer guiding a white and a black horse," symbolizing reason and sexuality." (Crompton, p. 60) The Symposium celebrates male love from several points of view. But in the Laws, which Plato was writing when he died at the age of 80 (384 B.C.), Plato outlines

a blueprint for a narrowly repressive commonwealth on the Spartan plan, marked by a harsh puritanism. There will be no freedom of thought or opinion, and strict censorship is to control literature, art, and science. Since humans are by nature anarchic, Plato wants to adopt some religion to provide a supernatural sanction for morals and inculcate strict obedience to the state. Forgetting, or disregarding, the fate of [his mentor] Socrates, he proposes that any who question this faith shall be imprisoned and, if recalcitrant, killed. . . . In the Laws, Plato attacks all non-procreative sexual behavior. . . .

Plato freely acknowledges the difficulty in getting the Greeks to adopt a law forbidding male relations. . . . [His] solution is a radical one, uncannily prophetic of the course Christian Europe was later to follow. To suppress homosexuality, lawmakers must invent a new religious taboo, a taboo that will inspire in the average man a horror akin to the horror he feels toward incest. The act must be labeled (like incest) "unholy" and "hated of God." Only such an extreme measure will terrify him into chastity and make him willing to support the new legislation.

• From "Ancient Greece" at glbtq.com:

Equally compelling evidence over a much longer period makes it plain that anal intercourse was the sexual act men liked best. It was practiced regularly with women as well as with boys. The problem with anal intercourse was that the receptive partner in a male relationship was perceived to be acting sexually like a woman.

Aristophanes (died ca 385 B.C.E.), for example, makes fun of pederasty and cruelly mocks the receptive party in adult relationships. All his examples of male-male sexual intercourse, whether pederastic or androphile, are anal. He defames the passive party as "cistern-assed" or "wide-assed" or a man with a "white rump" (because he shaves his buttocks); and he abuses real persons by calling them katapugon, a male who offers his buttocks to another (the word has a pejorative connotation akin to "faggot"). There are many attestations in graffiti of the word katapugon and its variants, as in Olympiodoros katapugon (on a potsherd found during excavations in the market place of Athens).

Hellenistic, and later, texts confirm the same preference and the same prejudice. Strato, for example, says that during casual calculations he has discovered that the numerical values of the letters in proktos (anus) and chrusos (gold) are the same: this proves the anus is golden. In his epigrams, lovers want to kiss their eromenos, embrace him, sleep with him, and penetrate him anally (pugizein, from puge, another word for anus).

• Refutation of Foucault's theory:

Michel Foucault and his followers have argued that the "homosexual" is a modern invention, a mental construct of the last hundred years. This is, of course, true, of homosexuality as a "scientific" or psychiatric category. But it is a mistake to presume that earlier ages thought merely of sexual acts and not of persons. Medieval literature speaks not only of sodomy but also of "sodomites," individuals who were a substantial, clear, and ominous presence. The fact that such beings were perceived from a theological rather than a psychological point of view did not make them any less real, or less threatening. The classical Greek ideal of the pederastes as the heroic lover, protector, and mentor was long forgotten in the West. . . . (Crompton, pp. 174-175)

• Hadrian & Antinous: Of the "good emperors" of the 2nd century A.D., Crompton says (pp. 105-110):

Trajan and Hadrian [both] seem to have been predominantly homosexual. . . Dio Cassius commented on [Trajan's] love of wine and boys but thought he remained within the bounds of Roman decency: "I know, of couse, that he was devoted to boys and to wine, but if he had ever committed or endured any base or wicked deed as a result of this, he would have incurred censure; as it was, however, he drank all the wine he wanted yet remained sober, and in his relation with boys he harmed no one." . . .

Trajan was succeeded by his protege Hadrian, a fellow Spaniard and second cousin. . . . [Hadrian] shared Trajan's attachment to boys, wrote poetry on this theme, and was rumored to have had affairs with some of his predecessor's favorites. In the end, death was to blazon one such passion before the world.

A tireless traveler, Hadrian made it a policy to visit every part of the empire, from Gaul to Britain (where he built his famous wall) to Egypt and the East. . . . Somewhere during these peregrinations he met and fell in love with Antinous, a handsome youth from Bithynia, who became part of his entourage. . . . All we know for certain is that Antinous accompanied Hadrian on a tour of Egypt and that he drowned in the Nile at the age of eighteen or nineteen. . . .

Hadrian's grief was overwhelming; we are told "he wept like a woman." . . . Fifteen centuries later a grieving Mogul emperor memorialized his beloved wife in the majestic Taj Mahal. Hadrian worked on a grander scale, raising a whole new city, Antinoopolis, on the banks of the Nile where his lover had died. . . . [Furthermore,] Hadrian, in the extravagance of his devotion, had Antinous proclaimed an immortal. . . . The new worship of Antinous had a surprisingly wide popular appeal. . . . Images of Antinous have been found scattered throughout the length and breadth of the Roman Empire. More than thirty cities in Asia Minor, Greece, and Egypt depicted Antinous on their coinage as a god or hero . . . . Antinous' cult was not only widespread, it was also lasting, [surviving] the emperor's death by several centuries. Annual commorative games were still being held at Athens in 266 and at Argos a century later.

Inevitably, parallels were drawn with Christianity. The pagan apologist Celsus, hostile to both new faiths, protested that the honors paid to Jesus were "no different from those paid to Hadrian's boy-favorite," a comparison that must have galled the church fathers. None of the cult images of Antinous hints at any relation with Hadrian. It was left for hostile Chrisitans to emphasize Antinous' sexuality. The Spanish poet Prudentius imagined the new god lying in Hadrian's bosom, "robbed of his manhood." Athanasius, the embattled defender of orthodoxy, writing in Alexandria (c. 350), accused the cultists of "worshipping a sordid and loathsome instrument of his master's lust."

• The article "Hadrian" at glbtq.com says:

After Antinous drowned on a journey down the Nile in October 130, the emperor declared his paidika, or beloved, to be a god and founded a city in his honor, Antinoopolis in Middle Egypt.