The Seduction of the Mediterranean

Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy

Robert Aldrich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134871391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Through an explanation of forty figures in European culture, ^The Seduction of the Mediterranean> argues that the Mediterranean, classical and contemporary, was the central theme in homoerotic writing and art from the 1750s to the 1950s. Episodes of exile, murder, drug-taking, wild homosexual orgies and court cases are woven into an original study of a significant theme in European culture. The myth of a homoerotic Mediterranean made a major contribution to general attitudes towards Antiquity, the Renaissance and modern Italy and Greece.

1
SEX AND SOCIETY IN THE EUROPEAN MEDITERRANEAN
Greek, Roman and Renaissance

THE STUDY OF ‘HOMOSEXUALITY’

Gay studies, or the study of homosexuality, is a relatively new field, but it has attracted increasing interest and produced research with implications outside its specialised province.¹ Scholars from various disciplines have been drawn to gay studies, and cross-fertilisation of methodologies and the use of different sources have led to new theories about homosexuality, homosociality and homoeroticism, as well as insights into the general subject of sex and society.² The ancient world provides a particularly significant domain for such studies, since Antiquity is considered the fount of Western civilisation and because of the permutations of sexual and affectational relationships which were the norm in classical Athens and Rome. Among the varieties in sexual behaviour characteristic of classical culture was a widely practised and socially acceptable type of ‘homosexuality’.³

The study of homosexuality was until very recent times taboo. According to an eminent contemporary scholar of the ancient world, the author of a pioneering study of Greek Homosexuality, Kenneth Dover: ‘I know of no topic in classical studies on which a scholar’s normal ability to perceive differences and draw inferences is so easily impaired.’ Many writers displayed embarrassed ambivalence on the subject, caught between ‘a combination of love of Athens [mixed] with hatred of homosexuality’; some were outright homophobes.⁴ A number ignored sex, especially ‘homosexuality’, altogether, while others explained it away as purely ‘Platonic love’ without physical expression. Particularly in the prudish nineteenth century, teachers skipped over indelicate passages in classical texts, and publishers printed versions suitably expurgated of sexual references.⁵ Yet the sexual practices of the Greeks and Romans were well known both to specialists and, to a certain extent, to students, as the classics provided the basis for a gentleman’s education at Oxford and Cambridge, at the Sorbonne and at German universities. Classical ‘homosexuality’ was especially evident to educated men who were themselves attracted to their own sex, and to writers, artists and composers who used Greek antecedents as a justification for what others regarded as perversion.

Sources for the study of Greek same-sex relationships are numerous. Of the 20,000 Greek vases now known, about 200 are decorated with erotic scenes, many of which are homoerotic. Greek statuary provides insight into Greek concepts of masculinity and male beauty. Works such as the Iliad recount famous ‘love stories’ between males, such as Zeus and Ganymede and Achilles and Patroclus. A large body of Greek poetry speaks of the love of men for boys. Philosophical dialogues, notably Plato’s Symposium, treat sex and love. Legal texts survive, including the prosecution speech in the trial of Timarchos for homosexual prostitution. So do graffiti scratched on the walls of temples and gymnasia.

Despite a wealth of information, most Greek ‘homosexuality’ was neglected by scholars who thought it not to be an appropriate subject for investigation; among the few who were interested during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as John Addington Symonds, were homosexuals as well as Philhellenes.⁶ Not until 1907 did an academic scholar of the classical world, a German named Bethe, publish an in-depth study of Greek same-sex relationships; it appeared in an obscure journal.⁷ At about the same time, periodicals connected with the emerging homosexual emancipation movement, especially Magnus Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, included contributions on ‘Greek love’. But the subject remained controversial. Paul Brandt, who wrote on various aspects of classical love and sex for Hirschfeld’s review, generally used a pseudonym, and his Beiträge zur Antiken Erotik, published in 1924, contained a page opposite the frontispiece bearing the warning: ‘PRIVATE IMPRESSION, this work may be distributed only to librarians, academics, and collectors.’ Brandt’s work nevertheless represented a significant advance in understanding the sex life of the ancients, and the translation of his Sexual Life in Ancient Greece in 1932 was one of the few serious treatments of the subject in English.⁸ Over fifty years later, critics hailed Dover’s 1978 work on Greek homosexuality, but some of their phrases—about ‘provocative conclusions’ on a subject ‘which needed to be exposed to the light of day’ by a scholar ‘who treats the subject without prejudice either way’ and who ‘presents facts that can no longer be ignored’⁹—betray squeamishness with the theme. In the last fifteen years, as studies of family life, sexuality, private life and homosexuality have become more widely accepted, works on Greek sexuality and Greek pederasty have multiplied; more is now known about sex life in Antiquity than ever before.¹⁰

Consensus holds that emotional and physical relationships between persons of the same sex flourished in ancient Greece, although they were constrained by various regulations and social mores. In particular, sexual relationships between men and adolescent boys—pederasty—were considered a vital aspect of Greek life, permitted by law and lauded in poetry and philosophy. Such relationships, and sexuality in general, were very much embedded in Greek conceptions of education and social initiation, the status of women, dichotomies between fully fledged citizens and those deprived of political rights, exchanges between the gods and men, and the canon of ‘classical’ beauty. Without an understanding of the sociohistorical context of pederasty, it is easy to imagine, as did generations of homophilic and homophobic observers, that pederasty was only spiritual and idealised love, a disgraceful stigma on Greek life or a rationalisation of and antecedent for modern homosexual life.

EROTIC LIFE IN ANCIENT GREECE

So different were classical Greek conceptions of erotic life from contemporary views that it may be unjust to think of Greek eroticism in the modern category of ‘sexuality’ and certainly in terms of the modern polarities of homosexuality and heterosexuality.¹¹ Ancient erotic life responded to individual and collective demands in a society free of the commandments and the very categories imposed by Judeo-Christian ethics. Concerns that later became obsessions, such as the premium placed on sexual abstinence or continence, the importance of pre-marital virginity, enforced heterosexuality, monogamous and indissoluble unions and the intention that sexual activity be pursued only for procreative purposes, did not constrain Greek appreciation of erotic pleasure.

Greek society in fifth-century Athens allowed, indeed encouraged, various modes of sexual expression, which were not considered contradictory. Tradition expected men and women at some stage in their lives to contract heterosexual unions and beget children; a married couple’s primary responsibility belonged to each other and to their offspring. But Greek society also permitted ‘homosexual’ unions and tolerated prostitution and ‘deviant’ sexualities, that is, sexual behaviour which did not conform to standard practice.

Of particular pertinence is Greek pederasty. In classical Greek society throughout the Hellenic world, a man who had reached early adulthood had a temporary but sometimes years-long liaison with an adolescent boy. The older partner, the erastes, initiated the courtship, bestowed presents on his younger friend and was his recognised mentor. The younger partner, the eromenos, played a complementary role, receiving gifts and attention from the erastes for the duration of the relationship. Later, the eromenos became an erastes, taking younger partners of his own but ultimately marrying and fathering children. The length of any partnership varied, and partners often remained close after the end of their sexual relationship, with friendship (philia) replacing sexual attraction (eros). The ages of the partners varied. The erastes, generally a man in his twenties, was occasionally much older. The eromenos was usually in his early teens,¹² and the rule of thumb was that the first appearance of his beard ended his status as eromenos—the razor severed the bond, it was said.

The relationship between erastai and eromenoi served various functions in Greek society and its significance probably changed over the course of Greek history. Three phases in the history of pederasty emerge in Attica. Among aristocrats during the archaic age, pederasty formed part of an initiatory ritual common in European cultures and across Indo-European and other civilisations. The function of pederasty was to provide rituals of induction into adulthood and to contribute to the education and upbringing of the youth. The older man provided the model for the younger and presented him gifts which marked his passage into adult life: a suit of armour which fitted him out as a warrior, a bull for sacrifice to the gods and a goblet which symbolised admission to banquets and other ceremonies. In the second period and particularly in some regions of Greece, the relationship lost much of its symbolic initiatory connotations and became more closely connected to the teaching of manly skills, above all the hunt. Finally, by Athens’ golden age, pederasty had become generalised among the free population and it was primarily an erotic relationship aimed at sexual satisfaction.¹³ These different functions, however, melded together and were not exclusive.¹⁴

Pederasty was definitely a sexual relationship, although some later observers tried to downplay or deny this aspect of Greek love. Literature and painting describe physical relations between a man and an adolescent. The erastes was always, in theory, the dominant partner and the eromenos the receptive one. The erastes achieved orgasm through anal or intercrural intercourse—inserting his penis between the boy’s thighs. The passive eromenos, at least in principle, showed little sexual interest and did not necessarily achieve orgasm.¹⁵ The roles were not reversible and a mature man lost status if he took the passive role. This strict usage, according to David Halperin, was based on the general Greek view of sex as something performed by one person on another (whether male or female) rather than as a mutually participatory act.¹⁶

The basic division in Greek sexual practice indeed was between active and passive roles. Greek sex was extraordinarily phallocentric: ‘It revolved around who had the phallus, was defined by what was done with the phallus, and was polarized by the distribution of phallic pleasure.’¹⁷ The adult man, who possessed the all-powerful phallus, reaped the benefits, and his sexual partner, whether a young man or a woman, was supposed to satisfy that pleasure. Polarity of sexual action, and the attributes which it represented, was crucial for the Greeks, and Halperin suggests that even assimilating the roles of erastes and eromenos into a relationship labelled ‘homosexuality’ would have struck ancient Greeks as ‘no less bizarre than to classify a burglar as an “active criminal”, his victim as a “passive criminal”, and the two of them alike as partners in crime: burglary—like sex, as the Greeks understood it— is, after all, a “non-relational” act.’¹⁸

Sexual relations between men and boys were not limited to intercrural or anal intercourse. Vase paintings show men and boys touching and carressing, kissing and fondling each others’ genitals and engaging in masturbation and fellatio. Fellatio, however, seems not to have been particularly popular or socially acceptable between men; vase paintings mostly show women or satyrs performing fellatio on men. (Satyrs, sexually omnivorous, performed all sorts of sexual activites not considered proper for humans.¹⁹) But the very representations of oral and anal intercourse and even bestiality indicate that they formed part of the Greek sexual repertoire, whether condoned or not.

Prostitution was a feature of Greek life and both male and female prostitutes plied their trade. Some worked in brothels, others contracted longer-term liaisons with clients; young men who worked as entertainers and dancers (kinaidoi) were also commonly gigolos. Even though no evidence remains of legal penalties against prostitution per se, great social and political disapprobation greeted a free adult male who sold his body as a prostitute, and such action was grounds for the revocation of a Greek’s rights to sit in an assembly, serve as a magistrate or complete a normal citizen’s duties in the polis. Timarchos was prosecuted on the grounds that he had repeatedly sold himself to other men for sex. Witnesses, such as Demosthenes, defended Timarchos, but he lost the case. Classical scholars now place the trial of Timarchos in a political as well as a sexual context. The prosecutors wanted to eliminate Timarchos, a popular and influential ambassador, from his position and used charges of prostitution to destroy his career.²⁰ The incident points to the isomorphism between sex and politics in ancient Greece: sexual misbehaviour was cause for political disenfranchisement. But the links were greater; only the person playing the sexually active role (whether his partners were women or boys), able to capture his intended and abstaining from selling his own body, was a true manly citizen. Those who took the passive sexual role—pre-pubescent boys or adolescents, women, slaves, prostitutes—were not granted full political rights.

Pederasty, therefore, related closely to social status in Greece and women held decidedly inferior rank. Their geographical territory was the inside of dwellings, while the...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION: THE MEDITERRANEAN OBSESSION
• 1. SEX AND SOCIETY IN THE EUROPEAN MEDITERRANEAN: GREEK, ROMAN AND RENAISSANCE
• 2. WINCKELMANN AND PLATEN
• 3. ENGLISHMEN IN SOUTHERN EUROPE
• 4. FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS
• 5. MEDITERRANEAN MEN IN ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY
• 6. THE SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT
• 7. CONTEMPORARY ECHOES
• CONCLUSION: THE BIRTH AND NEAR DEATH OF A GAY MYTH
• BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
• NOTES