Dominique Blanc

Greek love

Hi, Dominique, and thanks for your note. I hadn't put Greek love on my watchlist and hadn't realized such a sprawling discussion had ensued. My interest in this topic is very specialized — specific to attitudes toward love and friendship among men in the Late Roman Republic, sort of 'the eros of politics.' You may also be interested in my comments on Mark Antony on a pederasty talk page and the little section on Clodius Pulcher I wrote (note especially the implication of Leach's remarks on Cicero). In the article on Quintus Lutatius Catulus, the section on his poetry is relevant, as "Greek love" at Rome seems to go hand-in-hand with the importation of Greek literary culture. (Don't confuse Catulus and Catullus.)

I think it's good to establish the correct usage of the term and its history (I do that especially in potentially inflammatory matters of religion requiring the utmost objectivity; this article of mine begins in such a dry and boring fashion I doubt anyone ever gets to the 'good parts'). It's good to trace when "Greek love" was called "Greek", but I'm certain the Romans can be shown to have talked about this kind of amor as Greek. It seems silly to go looking in the secondary sources for the exact term, and to allow oneself to see only a tree, and not the forest; discussions of these sorts are of the "angels dancing on the head of a pin" variety, and are usually attempts to substitute for the broad reading required to understand the social context (especially of Catullus, and the pertinent scholarship) . The relation between amor and amicitia is indeed interesting. I'll keep you in mind as I come upon things you might find useful. Brian Krostenko's work on concepts of "masculinity" in Rome ought to be of use to you, and I know some of this is online via Google Books in limited preview. Best wishes. Cynwolfe (talk) 17:48, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Reply to Cynwolfe

July 2011

Thank you for responding in such an open and natural way. I acknowledge my own comments were rather studied and ‘over-thought’: I too have difficulty in finding an appropriate way to balance idealism, realism and tolerance of incivility, and how to cope with covered or open hostility. Fortunately, my life is sheltered enough from exposure to the last. The archive to the Pederasty article contains much to and fro about the subject and one’s putative interest in that subject. I would venture that your status as a female editor should give you some protection against the nastier insinuations, apart from your genuine academic frame of reference and exceptional verbal skills. But it stings none the less.

The issue of child-protection has become an ‘industry’ in our time, and no aspect more inflammatory than sexual abuse of minors. So it is understandable that study or examination of the ‘problem of the Greeks’ will arouse controversy and even raw emotion on the part of those who will insist on viewing everything from the platform of the 21st century. There is, as I see it, a more fundamental problem in that much of secondary source material reflects the views of those with a vested interest in imposing modern interpretations of sexuality on the ancients – no surprise to you, I’m sure. In this respect the gay-homosexual lobby are the worst offenders, even among recent authors of respected published works. That doesn’t mean that they have nothing important or valuable to say, but the more persuasive or readable books readily available to the general public present a picture of the Greek world which is alluring but in many respects compromised. It is easy to come up with names to whom this faint praise is directed.

I have come round to the position, which may not necessarily be served by all the evidence, that the ‘idealised’ man-boy relationships were not homosexual in the sense that we understand this today. I would go further, and suggest that the Greeks, as a culture, were not homosexual as is sometimes claimed (of course there are shades of Dover in all of this). These pederastic relationships were no doubt real enough to the participants, but they were temporary: certainly the erastes could look forward to marriage, and the eronomos would grow out of his adolescence, even if he maintained in later years a philia non-sexual friendship with a former lover. As for ‘heroic friendships’ - alla Achilles and P.- the evidence that they were ‘gay lovers’ is not borne out by the evidence, a reading which even Crompton recognises (with obvious regret).

I fear I am much less enthusiastic than you about Crompton, Davidson and others of the ‘conflation’ school: homosexuality as an ‘identity’ which embraces many variations of an all-embracing theme, by which one can assume if the Cretans and Greeks institutionalised pederasty, androphiles, effeminates, Lesbians & the whole hierarchy are subsumed under that broad heading. Davidson is voluble and repetitive in pushing his argument, this intended to demolish the (sexless)philia of Achilles and P:

For a notoriously homosexualizing society to also have a passionate homosexual relationship at the core of its national epic, and for same-sex couples all over the Greek world to have heroic models already provided for them, is simply too great a coincidence. There is no evidence at all for this prior asexual version of Greek Love. For rigour’s sake, let us be economical. There is but one single phenomenon.

(The Greeks & G.L. p 299).

This ‘amazing coincidence’ approach reappears in other places and publications including the somewhat nauseating review (of Alan Bray’s ‘The Friend’) entitled, Mr and Mr and Mrs and Mrs, in which he refers to Dover & Halperin as excluding Sappho and the heroes A & P from the history of ‘Greek Homosexuality’ –

...as if the fact that a spectacularly homosexualising culture produced some of the most spectacular (but non-sodomitical) lesbian love poetry and has a spectacular (but non-sodomitical) homosexual relationship at the centre of its foundational epic is simply a rather amazing coincidence.

This is all getting far too long, but I discover more en route. Davidson’s own teacher, Oswyn Murray, throws an interesting sidelight at the end of his review of ‘The Gks..’ It encapsulates something I have been forming in my mind about how one can relate the phenomenon of pederasty to our world, as a kind of extension of the Socratic principle of ‘love and teach’, but let me extract this final quote:

From Oswyn Murrays’s review of Davidson’s ‘The Greeks & Gk Love’

This is an excellent book on an important historical phenomenon. But I am puzzled by Davidson's refusal to relate it to the modern world. Plato seems to have been the first to internalise the experience of love, to insist that it belonged with the unruly desires that a true philosopher should seek to control. The erotic discourse of philosophy that he evolved was an attempt to persuade the soul to proceed from the love of the beautiful male form to the love of beauty itself, and the highest form of the Good. Socrates was the master of seduction, whose lack of physical beauty merely highlighted the beauty of his soul. The dialogue form adopted by Plato was a form of persuasion based on the discourse of Greek homoeroticism, designed to persuade the youth of Athens, not to be corrupted (as the prosecutors of Socrates thought), but to be spiritually ennobled through the pursuit of true knowledge.

The Platonic vision of the place of eros in the pursuit of knowledge, implausibly extracted from the practices of an Athenian elite of rugger buggers, has inspired the entire Western tradition of education: it is not possible to educate the adolescent young without engaging them in a pursuit based on love, as all great teachers have recognised. The basis of my forty years of teaching, like that of my pupil James Davidson, has always been the mutual love between teacher and disciple, created in the pursuit of knowledge. The modern attempt to suppress the role of love in education is merely a disguised expression of the homophobia that has been outlawed among adults; however we may seek to limit the physical expression of their sexual urges, the best teachers must always in some sense be paiderastai, lovers of the young, as George Steiner has recognised:

Eroticism, covert or declared, fantasized or enacted, is inwoven in teaching, in the phenomenology of mastery and discipleship. This elemental fact has been trivialized by a fixation on sexual harassment. But it remains central. How could it be otherwise?

I append the full review:Ho paidos kalos estin Dominique (talk) 13:51, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Dominique (talk) 20:26, 13 July 2011 (UTC)Dominique (talk) 10:42, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

I have to explain (or confess) that I read your original post immediately, and it provoked such a burst of soul-searching that I didn't know how to respond. Still don't, but wanted to say that this suggests the quality of your reflections. Cynwolfe (talk) 17:27, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your kind reaction – not at all deserved, however. The ideal of kalos kagathos has always appealed as a beautiful and good idea! A happy discovery was Oswyn Murray’s review and his musings on the ‘pedagogical eros’ as a universal attribute of good teaching – surely an element relevant to the wider implications of GL across the millenia. I recall a telling definition of musical talent – by a great Russian piano pedagogue – as ‘passion plus intellect’. An irresistible partnership in the service of the human race, I would suggest...Dominique (talk) 20:33, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

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