Well well well, the stuff you learn.
Professor John Finnis is one of my teachers here. This term I have to front up for four hours of Finnis a week, so I’m becoming reasonably familiar with both his ideas and method. Granted, that’s sometimes by osmosis, but it’s good to be forced to confront ideas with which I disagree.
Finnis is a sharp and insightful thinker in the natural law tradition (sometimes disparagingly referred to as ‘natural law, or why you shouldn’t put a rubber on your willy’), devoutly Catholic, and what in political theory is described as a ‘political perfectionist’. Perfectionist thinkers - and not all are natural lawyers - argue that it’s legitimate for the state to dick with individual autonomy, to greater or lesser degrees.
By way of example, Joseph Raz (a positivist) thinks that autonomy can only be legitimately exercised among ‘valuable alternatives’. Unfortunately, he never tells you what those ‘valuable alternatives’ actually are. Raz is essentially a liberal, and I suspect his perfectionism comes about in large part because he doesn’t like inequality, but doesn’t really know what to do about it. He wants everyone to have lots of (good) choices, by gum, and he’ll do violence to liberalism in order to bring that about. His liberalism shows in his reluctance to prescribe. Finnis has no such fears. He’s happy to adumbrate what he thinks constitutes ‘the common good’, and, well, yeah. If that’s got the classical liberals among you out there ever so slightly freaked out, good - that’s kinda my point.
Finnis’ view of morality, US anti-discrimination law, the legitimacy of preventing private property owners from discriminating on their land and the - shock, horror - vital question of whether Plato and Aristotle were homophobes or not all came to a head in Romer v Evans, better known as ‘the Colorado Gay Rights Case’. Colorado, you see, had enacted an anti-anti-discrimination law, one designed to detach gays from the protective embrace of the 14th Amendment. The wiki entry (which I’ve linked) gives an interesting but ultimately very abbreviated account of the suit. The really fascinating stuff took place in the courts below, where Finnis was an expert witness (although, curiously, he wasn’t cross-examined).
For a range of odd but not improbable reasons, Romer finished up turning on whether homosexuality was condemned in Classical Greece, particularly by the likes of Plato and Aristotle. This piece from Lingua Franca describes the process neatly:
Because some of the legal strategies pursued by both sides depended on testimony offered by classical scholars, natural law theorists, and specialists in ancient philosophy, the case became a lightning rod for discussion about the relevance of the humanities to ‘real’ life - and, by implication, about the motives and methods of public intellectuals. Not all of this discussion was especially respectful of the life of the mind. There were those - among them writers at The New Republic and The New Yorker - who found something comic in the sight of academic superstars earnestly debating Plato’s views on anal intercourse in a Denver, Colorado, courtroom a good 2,300 years after Plato himself presumably rejoined the realm of pure Ideas.
So, a beautiful court-ordered ‘battle of the experts’, then. As much as anything, the case exposed the very different way that classicists (a type of historian), philosophers and lawyers look at the same set of texts. Classicists use ancient texts to tell them about the society in question; their concerns are empirical and specific. Aristotle in particular is mined for all the fascinating asides he provides about other Greek city-states and their forms of government (mainly in the Politics, but elsewhere as well). Philosophers (of the natural law/Thomist variety at least) are far more universalizing, seeking - at least sometimes - to apply ancient philosophy to the modern world. Add lawyers to the mix - people who just want to know what the Hell each word means, and you’ve got a mix more explosive than dynamite.
The plaintiffs hired an eminent classicist (Professor Martha Nussbaum). She argued that the Greeks approved of homosexuality. The defendants had both Finnis and one of his leading students, Robert George. Both argued that the Greeks disapproved and - more importantly - that such disapproval was legitimate even now. Of course, no one was really right - or really wrong - and the case dissolved into a Passchendaele of legal mud and blood. Finnis and George accused Nussbaum of perjury over her translation of a single word (and thereby hangs a tale, well-told in a couple of places). Nussbaum argued that “prior to the Christian tradition there is no evidence that natural-law theories regarded same-sex erotic attachments as immoral, ‘unnatural,’ or improper. Hence any natural-law theory that condemns gay or lesbian sexual conduct and relationships as a violation of natural law or the natural human good… is inherently theological.”
As you’d expect, the Supreme Court killed the law, and reserved some bitter comments for the Colorado legislature, which it accused of holding a ‘peculiar animus towards homosexuals’.
There are still truckloads of articles floating around the academy (and probably the blogosphere as well). I’m not sure how many are available to people without access to legal databases, so I’ll direct you to this page of google results instead. There are contributions from all three antagonists, a couple of books, a thesis, you name it.
And perfectionism? Nasty, illiberal stuff. The more you dig, the more you see it’s all about telling people how to live their lives.
121 Comments
The law was vile but that seems a lot like the Chewbacca defence.
Romer finished up turning on whether homosexuality was condemned in Classical Greece
Not really. It started off in the lower courts with a discussion of classical Greece, but that entire discussion was irrelevant to the ultimate Supreme Court ruling overturning the statute.
There’s no mention of Greece, Plato, Aristotle, Finnis, Nussbaum or the others in the Court’s opinion:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/94-1039.ZO.html
It’s interesting how we still think that what this or that long-dead state did has a bearing on what we should do. If the Greeks approved of homosexuality we should. Does that likewise go for slavery?
In the end it doesn’t really matter how a political system regards homosexuality. It’ll continue regardless cause it’s, um, natural. Naturally it’s better if the govt minds its own business in regards to your sex life.
‘Perfectionism’? Well the word says it all.
Adrien -
…so long as the sex is between consenting adults.
skepticlawyer, the Lingua Franca article you linked to is fascinating. BTW, it notes that Finnis’ testimony was in affidavit form, which explains the lack of cross-examination. Not only that, but apart from the highly specific dispute with Nussbaum, he’s been pretty tight-lipped since, it seems.
I find it strange and somewhat disturbing that your Prof used such positivist means to promote a natural law end.
Interesting sidenote - Nussbaum’s partner is Cass Sunstein who wrote one of the recent defences of capital punishment.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=691447
Given her own bleeding heart sensibilities, I wonder what she thinks of his work.
Why do you hate science, Jason?
Here’s evidence those 11 pro death studies were based on faulty statistical methodology.
http://top40-charts.com/songs/media.php?sid=21628
I truly despise that song.
One thing you’ve got to like about Nussbaum is the demolition job she did on Judith Butler.
http://www.akad.se/Nussbaum.pdf
Fascinating. The BCL is paying off already.
Prof Finnis isn’t as antithetical to positivist methods as some natural lawyers - indeed, the degree of fit between his position and that of some aspects of postivism leads perfectionists like Raz to argue that minimal tweaking would place Finnis in their camp. It’s also possible that the bulk of the case occurred during term, which explains the affidavit evidence, but even so I’m always chary of stuff that central not being tested in open court.
And as Tillman pointed out (and which I pointed out in the post, too), all of this highly entertaining stuff took place in the lower courts. By the time it got to the Supreme Court, I think everyone was kind of over the academic superstars fighting each other for the entertainment of New Yorker and TNR readers.
SL
I wrote a uni History essay on “whether homosexuality, as we understand it today, existed in ancient Greece.” I’ll edit it and post it. Nussbaum (whom I otherwise think is a goddess) was wrong on this point. As was Foucault.
aml
I will also respond to Nussbaum’s bitchslapping of the painful bint, Butler later. Nussbaum both hits and misses I’m afraid.
After reading the Nussbaum/Butler contretemps I am almost persuaded to take one of those turbo-charged Gender Studies upper level classes this year that focuses on all that French post-structuralist nuttery . However, the course I am thinking about typically attracts 35-40 students with not one male! I imagine it will be a very intimidating experience for me, but maybe I am unjustly prejudging.
This about sums it up for me, too. I’ve just endured a tedious two hours of Finnis attempting to argue that Plato’s discourse theory is superior to that of Habermas simply because Habermas gives great weight to ‘modernity’ and the effect it has on the way we engage with each other.
One thing that some of the more conservative elements of the humanities academy haven’t grasped is the extent to which technology, liberal individualism and free markets have changed the way we engage with each other. I tend to agree with the classicists on Plato and Aristotle: they’re interesting for rummaging around in and learning how people did stuff in days gone by, but they describe worlds we cannot reach. Admitting that is no bad thing.
Skepticlawyer
Romer v. Evans had nothing to do with Aristotle, Plato or Greece (ancient or otherwise).
Romer v. Evans 517 U.S. 620 (1996) is a seminal US Supreme Court case applying the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the issue of gay rights. Romer impliedly overturned Bowers v. Hardwick 478 U.S. 186 (1986) (which held that there is no fundamental right to engage in homosexual acts) and set the Court up for Lawrence v. Texas 539 U.S. 558 (2003), in which the Court formally gave 14th amendment protection to homosexual.
Greece had nothing to do with Romer. Neither Kennedy in his majority opinion, nor Scalia in his dissent, made any mention of Greece or any Greek persons, living or dead. The Romer opinion and dissent are both quite short and to the point and each deals directly with the pertinent constitutional issues.
The discussions of Plato et al. occurred (as you hint) in a lower Colorado state court (not even the Colorado Supreme Court) - before the matter entered federal court.
The correct citation for the lower court proceedings you discuss is Evans v Romer 1993 WL 518586 (Colo. Dist.Ct. 1993). Not Romer v Evans - Evans v Romer.
If you refer to Romer v Evans, or “Romer” for short, you are referring to the US Supreme Court case in which classical Greek issues played no part.
You say:
question of whether Plato and Aristotle were homophobes or not all came to a head in Romer v Evans
Wrong - that came to a head in Evans v Romer, not Romer v Evans.
Romer finished up turning on whether homosexuality was condemned in Classical Greece
Wrong - Greece wasn’t mentioned in the Romer opinion or dissent.
The really fascinating stuff took place in the courts below
Fascinating, perhaps - but pointless and legally irrelevant given the means by which SCOTUS eventually disposed of the case. Romer v Evans is one of the most important cases of the 20th century, but the “fascinating stuff” you refer to was a sideshow that ultimately had nothing to with how it turned out and not even really that fascinating if you are interested in understanding the law, as opposed to witnessing an esoteric scuffle amongst a group of goofball academics in a lower state court.
There are still truckloads of articles floating around the academy (and probably the blogosphere as well).
Correct, except contrary to what you imply the overwhelming majority of commentary on Romer has nothing to do with Greece. A google search for “Romer v Evans” returns 7,460 results while a search for “Romer v Evans” Greece returns a mere 460 results. As you’d expect, more than 90% of the commentary on Romer doesn’t mention Greece at all.
Jeffrey Rosen in the New Republic described Evans as a “spectacle” “in which experts who were hardly expert lectured a judge who was scarcely qualified to judge”.
Your post misleadingly gives the impression that this spectacle carried on to the Supreme Court and was the defining feature of the proceedings.
It’s as if you had written a post explaining Star Wars to an audience who had never heard of the saga and said Return of the Jedi was all about Jar Jar Binks and a teenage Anakin Skywalker.
The reason I have taken pains to clear this up is because people already think there is enough silliness and shenanigans going on in the courts. I don’t think it’s very helpful to imply (as you do) that the US Supreme Court had anything to do with the Nussbaum, Finnis and Mansfield nonsense in an inferior state court where a befuddled judge allowed the case to run off the rails.
I wrote a uni History essay on “whether homosexuality, as we understand it today, existed in ancient Greece
Contingent ‘constructions’ notwithstanding did persons of the same sex bonk each other? Yep. And pretty much the same way. I’ve seen ‘em vases and ‘em wall murals hoss. I know what I’m talking about.
The human body after all hasn’t changed much. It’s just a little bigger. And there’s only so many ways to fit two (or more) of ‘em together. Of course the scope for protocol design is limitless.
Tilman - You’re misrepresenting what Skeptic is talking about. Romer v Evans is alluded to but she’s actually discussing something else centrally.
SL - One thing that some of the more conservative elements of the humanities academy haven’t grasped is the extent to which technology, liberal individualism and free markets have changed the way we engage with each other. I tend to agree with the classicists on Plato and Aristotle: they’re interesting for rummaging around in and learning how people did stuff in days gone by, but they describe worlds we cannot reach. Admitting that is no bad thing.
Not sure about this. After all the arguments they articulated are still resonate today. I was for example at a Multimedia conference where some discussion re video games cropped up. There were two sides to the discussion.
One said they’re bad, they make people do bad things, infect us with a predisposition for violence etc - That is Plato.
The other argued that they provide an outlet for natural instincts in a harmless way. That is Aristotle.
I find the ancients useful because they’re simpler. Often modern philosophers are unnecessarily(?) complicated. However the world has changed and traditionalists resist this, as they do. The catharis/monkey-see, monkey-do dichotomy is better answered by research rather than conviction. In my experience Aristotle and Plato are both right depending on the game. (And the player).
Grand Theft Auto is cathartic. Doom 3 is dangerous.
BTW Aristotle’s retort to Plato’s Republic vis a vis private and public property could’ve saved us a lot of trouble if people had listened.
Adrienswords
It’s interesting how we still think that what this or that long-dead state did has a bearing on what we should do. If the Greeks approved of homosexuality we should.
That’s a bit of a strawman there Ads.
In the end it doesn’t really matter how a political system regards homosexuality. It’ll continue regardless cause it’s, um, natural.
Actually it matters a great deal. Make that a huge deal. Until 1978 (I think) homosexuality was illegal in NSW. Imagine the police arresting you for being in love! Also, state proscription of homosexual behaviour feeds into homophobia and its associated violence. I am not saying that state liberalization immediately sees homophobia vanish in a “poof†of smoke,
but it helps.
Contingent ‘constructions’ notwithstanding did persons of the same sex bonk each other? Yep. And pretty much the same way. I’ve seen ‘em vases and ‘em wall murals hoss. I know what I’m talking about.
Adrien, you are correct on all accounts. However, my lecturer pointedly used the phrase “homosexuality as we know it today.†To me, was a very loud dog-whistle to discuss the social constructionists, which is what I did. It is also made me realise that “homosexuality†is a lot more than just men rooting each other and women rooting each other. It is also led me to answer the question in the negative.
I was for example at a Multimedia conference where some discussion re video games cropped up. There were two sides to the discussion.
Adrien did they actually discuss Plato and Aristotle? I had never considered video games in this way until your post, but Plato’s Book X of The Republic is sooooo, like, relevant to video games, as is Aristotle’s narratology.
skepticlawyer
One thing that some of the more conservative elements of the humanities academy haven’t grasped is the extent to which technology, liberal individualism and free markets have changed the way we engage with each other.
All of these have an ancient provenance particularly liberal individualism and its link to the culture of private land ownership that evolved during the Greek archaic age (roughly eighty to sixth centuries BCE. After the depopulation during the Greek “Dark Age†a lot of agricultural land became available in the hills of Attica, which was settled, defended and given legal title. It was these mesoifarmers who were the backbone of the hoplite phalanxes that underpinned Greece’s security and who agitated and won enfranchisement.
I tend to agree with the classicists on Plato and Aristotle: they’re interesting for rummaging around in and learning how people did stuff in days gone by, but they describe worlds we cannot reach .
There is not one modern political philosopher or jurist whose work is not largely footnotes to Aeschylus, Plato, Aristophanes, Aristotle - and of course, the Xian Bible - whether they are aware of it or not. Last year I read Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and was blown away by just how relevant it still is to modern-day debates bout democracy. It is true that science and technology have long bolted from the ideas of the ancient Greeks, but politics has moved very little, if at all.
The whole scholarly area devoted to sexuality in the ancient world has an eerie cloud hanging over it, with scholars, overwhelmingly schooled only in the humanities, beginning their articles and books with “I totally reject the essentialism of biology…..†without a single word uttered after that to indicate that they even understand the biology that they claim to be rejecting!
With all the subtlety that has characterised the historiography - including archaeological, semiological, and philological evidence - on attitudes towards status asymmetric male homoeroticism, surprisingly no comment has been made about the disapproval, to say the least, that attends such relations in modern western societies.
One major difference between homosexuality today and in classical Athens, is that it is highly censured - indeed illegal - for adult married males to engage in intercrural, let alone, anal, sex with minors today. What a 5th century Athenian male citizen would make of the recent Michael Jackson circus must surely be worthy of research!
The evidence overwhelmingly supports the existence of a particular type of homosexual relation - namely, a relation of structured inequality between males of different ages (“men†and “boysâ€) and/or different social statuses (freeborn men and slaves, citizens and non-citizens). Further, the hierarchy or asymmetry in age and/or status that defines and structures the social relations between the two male partners correlates, in the case of socially approved relationships at least, with an asymmetry in sexual role: the older or socially superior partner is supposed to be the one who initiates the relationship, who pursues the other, who feels a passionate sexual desire for him (he is known as the erastes), who seeks to gratify that desire in the sexual act, and who is presumed to penetrate phallically the body of the other, whereas the younger or socially inferior partner is supposed to be the one who is pursued (carried off or seduced or purchased, as the case may be), who is less desiring than desired (known as the eromenos ), and whose body is acted on and perhaps even sexually penetrated by the other.
This type of homosexual relation between males, which the Greeks of the archaic and classical period designated by the term paiderastia, or “pederasty,†is conceptually and sociologically distinct from what is referred to nowadays as male “homosexualityâ€: of course in 2008, many gay men often - or even always - choose partners who differ from themselves in age or race or nationality or body type or preferred sexual role, reciprocal relations between adults and even persons of similar ages constitutes the norm for gay male relationships in most western societies today.
To be sure, men may identify themselves as ‘tops’ or ‘bottoms’, but sexual roles are not rigidly polarised and it is not considered outlandish for two men to take turns “fucking†each other - though some modern historians of sexuality have tended to overplay sexual mutuality and to mute real polarities or asymmetries in sexual roles among gay men. Indeed, many gay men in modern societies, maybe the more “aggressive†sexual partner, the more predatory, the more “dominant†and yet be the one who is penetrated. Such men are sometimes known as “hungry bottoms.â€
There is evidence for a consistency or regularity in the patterning of male same-sex eroticism in the ancient Mediterranean world from the Bronze Age to the end of the Roman Empire in the West - a period of roughly two thousand years! However, Koehl’s link of “homosexual expression in the Greek world†with Minoan male initiation rituals has yet to be corroborated by other scholars, and prima facie, seems tenuous to say the least.
Greek pederasty of the sort practiced by the Athenians of the classical period was often a highly conventional, elaborately formal, and socially stylised affair, involving lengthy courtship and conspicuous public display. It would be a mistake to conflate a social convention and a rite of passage. To whit, there was no question of a boy growing up in classical Greece being admitted to the society of adult men just because he had not sexual relations with an older man in his youth.
One of the great historiographic challenges is to “read†both literary and visual arts “texts.†As Foucault observed:
The Greeks of the classical period said less than they showed. The vase paintings are infinitely more explicit than the texts which have come down to us, even the texts of Greek comedy. But many painted scenes would be mute (and have remained so until now) for lack of reference to a text that articulates their erotic meaning. A young man gives a boy a hare: it’s a love gift. He caresses the boy’s chin: it’s a proposition.
This observation of Foucault’s as part of a rarely, if ever, acknowledged positive review of Dover, is particularly significant given the opprobrium with which his work was initially received by classicists.
Historiographical background
While post-modernism’s genesis is vague. it is hardly controversial to note that “sexuality†has been a dominant leitmotif of this new style of historiography. From the late 1970s to early 1990s, a handful of seminal texts which explored sexuality in the ancient world, propelled the scholarship of understandings of gender and sexuality in ancient Greece into the dynamic scholarly field it is today.
While Ian Morris, Kenneth Dover, and other rigorously trained classicists - both philologists and archaeologists - rightly point to the need for corroborating archaeological evidence, the corpus of scholarship on understandings of gender of the ancient Greeks sometimes reveals a less scrupulous rendering of the field.
And like the Hun, patiently camped on the banks of the Rhine awaiting the eventual Winter freeze before launching their invasion - and eventual sacking - of Rome, so the late 1970s and 1980s saw the barbarians of the structuralism, post-structuralism, and particularly feminism, who, energized by the resounding victories of the “women’s liberation” political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, had taken their march, to smash misogyny and patriarchy, to the academy. Ill-equipped to the challenge themselves, these gadflies, perched on the precipice of classical antiquity studies, buzzed around the periphery of the humanities waiting for the edifices of the post-enlightenment German and Oxbridge gentleman’s club of Classics to begin to thaw and, more hopefully, crumble. As the rhetoric of classicist, Eva Keuls fumed:
The story of the phallic rule at the root of western civilisation has been suppressed, as a result of the near-monopoly that men have held in the field of Classics, by neglect of rich pictorial evidence, by prudery and censorship, and by a misguided desire to protect an idealised image of Athens.
It is useful to return briefly to the 19th century as background to this historiographic debate as not all classicists share the Foucauldian rejection of biological essentialism and replacement with West Coast via Left Bank social constructionism. In the 1860s, Walter Pater and others led the “Hellenistic Movement†that argued for a physical and corporeal interpretation of “Platonic Love†to undergraduates reading Greats in the tutorial rooms of Christ Church and Magdelene beneath the spires of Oxford.
However, the Platonic humanist and romantic reading of the mid 19th century quickly was silenced by the “scientific” model when Havelock Ellis and John Symonds co-authored the first medical textbook on male-on-male sex. However, like the later Freud, Ellis’ Sexual Inversion in no way pathologised “homosexuality” a word he, incidentally, despised, and declaimed responsibility for creating.
Nevertheless late Victorian and Edwardian upper class Brits continued with what they called “the higher sodomy” - quoting from Plato’s Symposium while being rogered senseless by Oscar Wilde, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and so on.
Eventually the medical profession prevailed, and the Hellenistic version suffered the same fate as Oscar Wilde, its most celebrated graduate.
However, from the late 19th century onwards the followers of Ellis and Freud were not the only medical professionals involved in the scientising of “invesrion.” Despite Freud’s insistence that “paraphilia” be neither criminalised nor penalised, it was not until 1974 that “homosexuality” was removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of medical diseases.
The Oxford Hellenistic reading of Plato was closeted, if not aggressively censored, as the imperious Cambridge don in EM Forster’s Edwardian Maurice, demands that his student “omit the unspeakable vice of the Greeks†while the student is translating an unnamed Greek writer.
The first thawing rays were provided, perhaps ironically, by a robustly heterosexual Oxford classical philologist, Sir Kenneth Dover. Dover’s Greek Homosexuality , published in 1978, provided an establishment-sanctioned signal that the “love that dare not speak it’s name” was now the fodder of serious fin-de-siecle classicists.
Dover’s visual analysis of hundreds of Attic vases revealed a cornucopia of copulations of every gender permutation, position and fetish. Though not as trained art historian, Dover’s vase analysis was coupled with his encyclopedic knowledge and sensitivity to all extant Greek literature. To wit, Greek Homosexuality provided an unassailable imprimatur to the no-holds-barred assault on biological essentialist conceptions of gender and sexuality that was waiting to happen.
The second influence was a Parisian arriviste. In 1975 Michel Foucault, decamped from the Left Bank to the slings of San Francisco’s S&M dens. He quickly established himself as a celebrity within the rising force of the New Cultural History movement headquartered at UC-Berkeley - where it was associated with the journal Representations - among whose avatars included cultural anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, and historian Peter Brown . Feted by this coterie, Foucault began expanding his scholarship beyond his previous territory of 18th century French lunatic asylums and prisons , to the erotic identities and sensibilities of Ancient Greece and Rome. To Foucault’s credit, he embarked on this odyssey even though he was ignorant of Latin and Greek and indeed ignorant of history before the Europe of the 1700s. While, immediately following the publication of Volume 2 this ignorance was to provoke scathing reviews in some Classicist’s circles, as a non-closeted homosexual he was warmly embraced by the feminists re-grouping in Classical Studies. Martha Nussbaum’s particularly harsh review proved to be somewhat ironic given her role as expert witness in the Colorado Gay Rights Case two decades later.
Foucault’s legacy of conceptualising gender and sexuality as being - far from biologically circumscribed and bounded “essences,†- part of an ongoing “discourse on power.†Indeed, “gender” and “sexuality” were each an episteme that “rippled” through time and space. He added that “antiquity†had become a dispositive historique and Classical Studies a “regime of truthâ€
Foucault matter-of-factly declared that such discourses had existed since antiquity, and quite probably beyond. The money-shot for the baying social constructionists was that this “discourse on power” varied over time and space, and that the nature of that discourse during ancient times revealed a disjuncture between the gender conceptualisations of past millennia and the present. That is, the categorically different understandings of gender and sexuality in ancient Greece, provided evidence, and indeed proof, that the sexual dimorphism and “normalcy of heterosexuality” discourses that had only arisen in the late part of the 19th century were a sham.
Ancient Greek men, Foucault argued:
Could simultaneously or in turn, be enamoured of a boy or a girl….To their way of thinking, what made it possible to desire a man or a woman was simply the appetite that nature had implanted in man’s heart for ‘beautiful’ human beings, whatever their sex might be.
The third seminal scholar on ancient Greek homosexuality was a bourgeois gay American male classicist of self-declared feminist sympathies, Jack Winkler, published a scholar-feted collection of essays Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece in 1990. This collection brought together a number of essays written during the 1980s on topics as diverse as classical authors - Homer, Sappho, Longus, and Artemidorous - erotic magic in the corpus of magical papyri, women’s religious festivals, and the regulation of homoerotic conduct in classical Athens. The methodologies ranged from classical philology to feminist anthropology to archaeology to the emerging efflorescence of literary theory, psychoanalysis, Straussarian linguistics, and other French epistemological exotica.
Winkler argued that ancient Mediterranean societies did not have “categories of persons,†types of blank individuals, in the modern sense. Rather, Greek indigenous understanding of gender developed in the context of a belief system, in which, first of all, the two genders - male and female - were conceived as opposite ends of a continuum, that all males and females found themselves travelling along. The two genders - male and female - were not “simply opposite but stood at poles of a continuum which could be traversed….Woman was not only the opposite of man; she was also a potentially threatening ‘internal émigré’ of masculine identity.†“Masculinity†was conceived as an odyssey in itself, a journey, and difficult to achieve. Merely being born anatomically “male†was only the beginning, not the end of that journey.
Masculinity was seen as a constant struggle akin to warfare against enemies both internal and external, and thus required great fortitude to maintain. In a situation where it so hard, both personally and culturally, to “be a man,†Winkler observed, “the temptation to desert one’s side is very great.†Negotiating the fault lines of ethics and public-acceptability, and avoiding the disgrace of crossing the lines of deviance and disease was as complex, and enticing, as it was fraught with consequences. efflorescence of forces that judged one’s masculinity.
But sex is not, except in an uninteresting sense, a natural fact.
If this is not the fatuous sentence in modern history, what is? What is it then? An unnatural fact? A natural illusion? He justifies this drivel by claiming that:
Anthropologists, historians, and other students of culture (rather than of nature) are sharply aware [not just “bluntly†or “dully†aware?] that almost any imaginable configuration of pleasure can be institutionalised as conventional and perceived by its participants as natural.
Post-Foucault, the historiography associated with norms of Athenian homosexuality has overwhelmingly, almost obsessively, focused on its being a quintessentially Athenian expression of polarity; of binaries: the driving binary is between penetrating and being penetrated. I argue that rather than a binary, the norms distinguished between those men who held the virtue of self-mastery and those who did not. Of course, one might rationally object that I am drawing a mere semantic distinction, for the absence of this self-mastery is well-attested in the criminal code, and broader public disapprobation, ergo, absence of self-mastery, far from being a character trait fit only for metaphysical speculation, was identified only by the physical behaviour. I argue that a man and a boy engaged in an ethically-approved love affair were not engaging in some binary ’zero-sum game.’
In the court case Contra AeschinesTimarchus has not been charged for homosexual activity per se, rather Aeschines’ is prosecuting to deny Timarchus’ right to address the Assembly, as “If any Athenian hsall have prostituted his person, he shall…never not be permitted to address senate of Assembly.” (1.20). This law enacted against “youths who recklessly sin against their own bodies.” (1.22). The reasoning went that any such men “who has made traffic of the shame of his own body…would be ready to sell the common interests of the city also.” (1.29)
I want to take issue with this reductionism, particularly the notion that the norms regarding Athenian homosexuality focused overwhelmingly on penetration. In , Socrates explains how Diotima led him to understand how appetitive activity is not part of the good life. Plato set The Symposium in 416 BCE, pointedly just before Alcibiades’ disastrous sponsoring, and leadership of, the Sicily campaign. The date of actual composition is unclear, but seems to have been sometime between The Thirty and before the trial of Socrates This choice of date was clearly calculated by Plato show that Alcibiades’ dissolute character and his destructive role for Athens leading up to The Thirty had nothing to do with Socrates.
Through Alcibiades ode to Socrates, Plato provides a vivid example of the ethical economy governing Athenian homosexuality; an ethics of which Alcibiades was the antithesis. In this sense, Alcibiades is a proto Dorian Gray: “I was incredibly proud of my good looks, you see.” (217a). And like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Alcibiades’ behaviour becomes more abominable as he ages, even though his physical beauty does not. He is ashamed: “I don’t know if any of you has seen the genuine Socrates, opened to reveal the effigies he has inside, but I saw them once, and they struck me as so divine, so glorious, so gorgeous and wonderful that - to cut a long story short - I thought he’d genuinely fallen my charms.” (217a-b).
In his speech, Alcibiades increasingly equates “knowing” Socrates erotically, with “knowing” him intellectually. Of course, this is the kernel of Platonic erotic metaphysics. And putting paid to any hint that The Symposium represents some form of rapprochement between the two, Socrates subtly abjures Arsitophanes “since Dionysus and Aphrodite are all he’s ever occupied with.” (177e). Of course, it is the spirits - such as Critias and Alcibiades - filled with Aphrodite and Dionysus who will augment Athens’ demise. For Alcibiades as eremenos to be so brazen, so active in having his own desires by pursuing the older erastes, was an abomination to the Greeks; an example of kiniados.
The insatiability of women was a trope deeply imbedded in the Greek representational psyche; poetry, art. Philosophy, drama, etc. In The Iliad, it was Aphrodite who arranged the abduction of Helen that started the Trojan Wars, Hera……. In Work and Days, Hesiod sang of Zeus sending Pandora to man as revenge for Prometheus stealing fire from Zeus and giving it to man. It is women who are the frenzied Maenads in Euripides The Bacchae.
There is much evidence of links to the demonstrable fact of male ejaculation proving his satiation, whereas women ‘were never satisfied.’ (We must remember that it is only in very recent years that the word “clitoris” was even mouthed in Australia, let alone discussed in magazines and theatre productions, such as The Vagina Monologues). Aristotle’s Problemata describes a feminised male pathic who was not able to ejaculate, and therefore was eternally aroused. This insatiability (aplestia) was what disgusted Aristotle, not the pathic’s mere receptivity or passiveness. (4.26).
In Gorgias, Socrates rejects Callicles claim that ‘the naturally and just man, will be able to minister to and satisfy every appetite by his superior courage and practical intelligence.’ (492a). By deftly comparing a man responding to the need of an itch by scratching with the need of lust to be satisfied by passive homosexuality, Socrates persuades Callicles (who is appalled at the comparison), that the good life rejects acceptance of behaviour merely on the basis ‘it satisfies a need.’(494e3-4, 496d). Thus the feminised man, a slave to his ‘needs’ is susceptible to being used sexually
In Against Aeschines, it is crucial to note that Aeschines, never refers to Tymarchus - the passive prostitute - as kiniados. Only Demosthenes, whose nickname was “Batalus, for his effeminacy and lewdness…if anyone were to strip Demosthenes of those exquisite, pretty mantle of yours, and the soft pretty shirts…they would be at quite a loss to say whether they had in their hands the clothing of a woman or a woman.” (1.131). So wanton is Demosthenes example on boys, that Aeschines compares him to Socrates’ bad influence on Critias. “Did you put to death Socrates, the sophist, fellow citizens, because he was shown to have been the teacher of Critias, one of The Thirty who put down the democracy?” (1.173)
In Aristophanes’ The Acharnians, Dikaiopolis, mishears Pseudartabas: “What does he say? He says that us Ionians are wide-assed idiots, that’s what if we expect to get gold from Persia?” The ambassador corrects him, “No, he said we were going to get gold in wide carts.” Pseudartabas answers “No” when Dikaipolis interrogates, “Tell us the truth, or I’ll paint your face, Lydian purple. Is the Great King going to send us gold?” Dikaipolis finds their mannerisms “strangely like Greeks. I verily believe they are Greeks! In fact [examining the eunuchs closely] I seem to know this one very well indeed. Cleisthenes, isn’t it, the famous wrestler? O though that shave close thy passionate ass! You cheating monkey - with a beard like yours, you come here got up as a eunuch!” (110-120). The point about lack of self-control being a ‘feminine’ trait is highlighted when Lysistrata despairs, “I didn’t realise that we women were such a total lot of nymphos. The tragic poets are right about us after all: shag, calve, and disposes of, that’s the way we live.” (137-140).
The ‘Eurymendon’ Vase is an ambiguous piece of evidence. One the one hand………..On the other hand, it has been argued that the ‘Greek’ was actually a Thracian - in his cape and small beard - and the ‘Persian’ was actually a Scythian, and that any Greek exploiting an opportunity to gratify oneself sexually would be seen as far from heroic, but as degenerate as those who took advantage of Agathocles. (Ferrari Pinney, G. (1984) “For the Heroes Are at Hand,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, pp.181-2
Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods, provides a vivid illustration of the types of masculine representation circulating in classical Greece. Zeus and Dionysus represent the macho vs. mild. The latter, Lucian implies, is the more civilised way. Adult citizen males acted as active subjects of eros: Boys, women, prostitutes and slaves were the passive objects of eros. However, “passive objects” they might have been, but they still sought and obtained a benefit from the transaction, philia, which loosely translates to “affectionate love.”
. However, the evolution of the artistic and literary depictions of Dionysus unsettles this purely “phallic” model. In fact the image of Dionysus as an effeminate but libidinous and desirable god highlights the paradoxes that fuelled the Athenian gender economy.
Vase paintings show the increasingly libidinous public space of the symposia and the growing anxiety over the boundaries of masculine idenity as he moved from boy to man, and represent significant differences compared to the Archaic vases. Vase B from the early Classical vase depicts two symposia scenes: in the first scene, two completely naked hetairai and two completely naked but bearded males are depicted; in the second scene a bearded male is substituted by a naked youth. In both scenes, hetairai are further signified by jewellery and the wearing of make-up. By the mid Classical period, Vase C depicts a young hetairai attempting to seduce a boy. She is completely naked and straddling him and does not return his admiring gaze.
These vase paintings support Foucault‘s argument that women were understood, by males, to be the more libidinous sex: they were by their nature less capable of controlling themselves. Thus the paradox arises that while men are lovers, women and boys beloveds or eromenoi, it is the erotic passion of women that is the more ungovernable: hence the obsessive jokes in Aristophanic comedy on women’s irrepressible desire for sex.
The ideological move of drawing analogies men’s domination over women with their control over their own appetites has the paradoxical consequences that less manly males are perceived as erotically more active. Hence the representation of Dionysus as simultaneously wanton and sexually appealing.
In fact, by the late 5th century, visual representations of Dionysus depict him as effeminate, as opposed to the fully-bearded and masculine representation on late Archaic and early Classical black-figured vases. This development occurred simultaneously with a change in the representation of men in pederastic scenes from bearded to beardless. In addition, a new prediliction for soft physiques among eromenoi seems to have emerged in the fourth century B.C , a century after the appearance of the beautiful boy, Kritios Boy. However, this paradox of the subject’s chthonic virility and the object’s sexual desirability has mythical roots. In The Illiad, Paris, is seduced from battle by Aphrodite who wings him away to Helen:
Come then, rather let us go to bed and turn to love-making.
Never before as now has passion enmeshed my senses.
This sexual dimorphism of a Paris or a Dionysus, in which the polarity and hierarchy of gender are subsumed, suggests the coexistence of active and passive roles and the possibility of reciprocal desire, in which each partner is simultaneously erastes and eromenos. In the complex polarity of the ideology of eros, women were capable of erotic desire, but it was not directed towards brawny heroes like Heracles, but to the softer male whom other men might also experience as desirable. As in Aristophane’s Lisystrata: “Another says to the shoemaker, who is a youth (“neanian”) and has a penis that is not a child’s..”
The implication here is that the wife will be attracted by the boy’s youthful appearance, rather than his adult masculine signifier, his penis. This paradox almost enters the farcical, when it is obvious that should a tryst take place, the shoemaker will play the active role of erastes rather than the passive role.
So Francois Lissarrague, in “The Sexual Life of the Satyrs,” uses the evidence of vase paintings to investigate the kinds of maleness at play among the seemingly hyper-masculine satyrs. His chapter acts as a commentary on twenty-nine reproductions of vase-paintings of satyrs, the ithyphallic half-animal, half-human creatures emblematic of sexual excess. As Lissarrague methodically examines the aspects of the satyrs’ posture and sexual behavior, it becomes clear that several assumptions one is likely to make are false.
So “large genitals are not the attribute of the superman, and it is not Herakles whom we find provided with a huge phallos, but rather Geras- decrepit old age- or the Pygmies- monstrous creatures, barbarous and misshapen.”( p.56) This emphasis on bestial sexual appetite sets the satyr apart from the positive constructions of male human desire: we may note how scenes showing satyrs coupling with deer or donkeys employ the motif of the amphora, placing their activity in the realm of the Symposium, subverting the close link between Eros and wine.
Even in tragedy, Euripides’ Hippolytus represents a manifestly virile youth who is passionate about hunting (109-110) but at the same time betrays an odd prudishness to the pleasures of Aphrodite (106). While these indications that there was space in the Greek gender economy for women to be the subject actively desiring a receptive man, there does not appear to have been any space for the same reciprocity in homoerotic relations. As Dover stated:
The distinction between the bodily activity of the one who has fallen in love and the bodily passivity of the one with whom he has fallen in love is of the highest importance.
This seeming contradiction of youthful desire when he is the subject in heteroerotic scenes, compared to the assumed erotic disinterest in playing the passive role as object in homoerotic settings might be resolved by allowing the youth, a period of sexual ambiguity and confusion as he passes from passive child to active adult male citizen. In fact, if a male failed to make this transition and “grow out of” his ambiguity, the Greeks broke with their tendency not to ascribe identities to “types” of people based on their sexual behaviour. To be labelled kiniados was a great disgrace as Winkler explains:
The kiniados, to be sure, is not a ‘homosexual’………………[but rather] a man socially deviant in his entire being , principally observable in behaviour that flagrantly violated or contravened the dominant social definition of masculinity.
Gleason sees in the kiniados a confirmation that in the Greeks “semiotics of gender:”
There exist [according to the axioms of Greek social life] masculine and feminine ‘types’ that do not necessarily correspond to the anatomical sex of the person in question.
Finally, Maud W. Gleason approaches sexual deviance through evidence of ancient physiognomy in “The Semiotics of Gender: Physiognomy and Self-Fashioning in the Second Century C.E.” This discussion centers on the elusive figure of the kinaidos, the effeminate anti-type to the adult citizen male. The physiognomist, meanwhile, set himself up as one able to read the signs of sexual deviance: as Gleason notes, “The fact that physiognomy was prepared to offer itself as a tool for decoding the signs of gender deviance makes it a fruitful source of information about the sex/gender system that permeated ancient society but rarely articulates itself in canonical texts.”(p.390) That the kinaidos can disguise his femininity should be seen as part of a system in which “masculine and feminine types do not necessarily correspond to the anatomical sex of the person in question.”(ibid.)
Being masculine is not the same as being male: indeed, some physicians believe that a mixture of both masculine and feminine traits is beneficial, but this is scarcely a universal view. Of particular interest is Gleason’s reading of astrology, in which the conditions pertaining to the birth of the kinaidos are discussed. While so-called public kinaidoi (such as prostitutes) are easily identifiable, hidden kinaidoi also exist: “it is precisely this sense of the omnipresence of potential deviants which kindled the vigilance of physiognomists, amateur and professional.”(p.399)
Gleason gives us a very useful reading of the relationship between the kinaidos and the modern homosexual, noting that, while Foucault’s distinction between ancient views of sodomy in terms of forbidden acts and modern views of the homosexual as a distinct personage is well-taken, much of what he says about the nineteenth-century homosexual could be applied to the kinaidos. The distinction lies in the fact that the homosexual is defined by the gender of his sexual partners, the kinaidos by his own gender deviance. The relationship between modern conceptions of homosexuality and practices of the ancient world is a thorny one: articles such as Gleason’s, which expands our knowledge of ancient reactions, and Halperin’s, which opens new approaches to canonical texts, clarify and complicate, in equal measure, our reading of what same-sex love signified in Ancient Greece.
Careful John. You’re playing with fire here. Metromonstrous Mickey the Wabulous Huckfit needs to believe he’s leading the crusade again the forces of Homophobic Rednecks - that would be you. If you continue to front up with this plethora of scholarly material his brain will explode.
By the way I’m familiar with this historiography. One of my assignments at Uni was to summarize “We Other Victorians” in 250 words.
Camille Paglia made the comment that pederasty was about aesthetics and that these ‘homosexual’ men lost interest in the boys the minute they grew a certain amount of musculature and body hair.
She also alludes to this feature in Sexual Personae. To be a man, to become a man, to be regarded as a ‘real man’ etc is not a matter of the possession of testes but accomplishment. Women don’t have to prove they’re women, men do.
It is important how society frames sexuality and hence how we regard it. The compulsion of slaves to engage in homosexual acts in antiquity probably has much to do with the anti-homosexual edicts of Judeo-Christianity. However a certain section of the population are exclusively homosexual and, as similar proportions have been observed in other species, probably always have been if allowed.
My point was simply that regardless the laws, the poufs will bonk. I personally think they should be free to do so. They make everything look so fabulous.
Apparently William Burroughs was such. He acted very much the tough hombre but was a coy little delicate flower dans la boudoir. Ginsberg found this out to his disappointment.
Also forgot to say that no-one at the Multimedia Con mentioned Plato or Aristotle but almost all of the arguments were Platonic or Aristotelean.
that women were understood, by males, to be the more libidinous sex: they were by their nature less capable of controlling themselves.
Funny how the polarity’s reversed these days innit?
I remember seeing an interview with an African grandmother. She was a member of a tribe that practised clitoradectomy. She was in favour of it. Of we need it, she said, if we didn’t do this nothing would ever get done. We’d be having sex all the time. She also said it was a control thing, as win women controlling men!
Personally I think it was established by a pscyhopath.
Adrien
It is blindingly clear that Michael F has a low IQ, low level of education, and narrow life-experience including knowing nothing about gays and aborigines. I think we can safely assume he will come nowhere near this thread.
But I am the Lord his God. He must obey.
Come forth Mickey.
We need to slake our sadistic impulses. Patrick is (even more) chickenshit (than you) and Graeme’s busy extracting the essences of male bovine gonads.
Don’t much about the Eurymendon Vase, but I do know mutual masturbation when I see it. “In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo. “
“It is blindingly clear that Michael F has a low IQ, low level of education, and narrow life-experience including knowing nothing about gays and aborigines.” Greenfield hasn’t altogether lost his taste for the nasty, pig-ignorant, vicious and completely wrong ad homs, I see. Judgmental prick too, is our Mr Greenfield. Oh dear, but can you imagine how galling it was for Greenfield to continually pop back over the “Let 1000 flowers blossom” thread in a vain effort to assert his intellectual superiority … only to have his butt kicked, his clocked cleaned and his mouth washed out - everytime.
http://catallaxyfiles.com/?p=3412#comments
http://catallaxyfiles.com/?p=3412#comment-79778
http://catallaxyfiles.com/?p=3412#comment-79456
Of all the mistaken statements you’ve ever made in your life Greenfield, including those to come, none could be more wrong - in ways you’d never understand - than “knowing nothing about gays and aborigines”. I got you right the first time Greenfield - you are a vile piece of work.
MichaelF -
Apologise for being a dickhead , you’re becoming such a fuck head now!
Adrien -
You’re not to far off either!!
I prefer to distinguish between feminists (equity) and gender feminazis. I myself am an equity feminist, but the Judith Butler hivemind of feminazis are a catastrophe when they touch the ancient world, particularly sexuality.
My point is that homosexuality did not exist in ancient Greece. Pederasty (or poo-jabbing little boys) did, but there is no evidence of grown men having sexual loving relationships, and absolutely no evidence of carpet-munching lezzies!
John,
The word Lesbian is taken from the greek word lesbos (?). There was a huge amount of carpet munching on that greek Island.
And of course there were gays in Greece as there were in Rome. You think it just appeared since Oxford street was gentrified?
Dude?????
“My point is that homosexuality did not exist in ancient Greece. Pederasty (or poo-jabbing little boys) did, but there is no evidence of grown men having sexual loving relationships, and absolutely no evidence of carpet-munching lezzies!”
What an odd thing to say.
Odd? That goes some of the way to describing it.
I think the politically correct term is “eating spinach”.
JC
OK, you asked for it.
Lesbians in ancient Greece?
The tendency of many modern scholars to insist on a instrumental interpretation of Greek art and literature might have been acceptable to the cultural commissars who moonlighted as Stalin’s emissaries to the gulags, but their Sapphic contemporary counterparts beavering away in Women’s Studies and Gender Studies departments, are best avoided, even if impossible to ignore. Perhaps the canonical mission statement of gender feminists on ancient Greek female sexuality is from Ellen Greene
What alternative to the phallus is there . . . can we discern the rudiments of another way of representing desire—woman’s desire—even in the midst of patriarchal culture?
While the conventions of scholarly debate quite rightly, and properly, frown on the use of non-textual aspects of a scholar’s work - such as their political and ideological motivations - debates on “gender,” including gender in ancient Greece, have fused the personal, the political, the scholarly, and the bedroom, in an unprecedented manner. And as we will see, few scholars in the field exhibit any squeamishness when citing what would once have been dismissed as ad hominem arguments, and indeed would once have been edited out of any publication in a scholarly journal or book! This trend becomes even more explicable when one considers that the current reigning goddess of gender studies is Berkeley professor, Judith Butler, whose writings emphasise that all “gender” is a mere “performance” that we each enact as part of our role, chosen or divined by our station in the power structure.
That the assignations of gender based on anatomy and an alleged biological essentialism are an oppressive myth, whose sole purpose is to construct, motivate, and perpetuate the power structure and dynamics of any given society at any given time in history. The money-shot to Butler’s shtick, is the claim of the potential for individual’s to seize control of their “gender performance,” knowing that said performance has a potentially subversive, transformative, and liberating, if not revolutionary, political impact. It is the inspiration of these new theories of gender that provide the animus for the rhetorical strategies of this paper.
There is perhaps no greater emblem to this failing in modern Foucault disciples than in their treatment of Sappho. It is incredible that so many dozens of books and hundreds of academic articles can be published on the so-called power of one woman, and yet every other character and real woman in Greek history was a doormat! What is even more telling is that Sapphic Sappho scholarship is focused, not on any notion of female, feminine or girl power, but merely as somebody standing up to men. Surely, merely thumbing one’s nose is hardly an enviable display of real power, significance, or beauty!
The gender feminists claim that revulsion at female homosexuality has largely inspired past efforts to discredit belief in Sappho’s physical homoeroticism. In recent years the view that Sappho not merely indulged in, but exhibited an exclusive preference for, homosexual. Cantarella asked the question: “what was the impact of male norms in antiquity on ancient women?” In examining the iconography of heterosexual and homosexual courtship in Attic vases painting, Sutton observes that:
In the second half of the fifth century, female eroticism not only becomes respectable, but is portrayed as a means of personal happiness and social stability on vessels intended largely for feminine eyes.
Rabinowitz et. Al argue that “during the Classical era in Greece, there is much evidence of homosocial behaviour that does not imply an easy slippage to the homoerotic.” A term like “lesbianism” would not be appropriate. Goff criticised some of the contributions in Rabinowitz et. Al do “indeed slip with excessive ease…thereby forcing evidence…” Brooten argues that the disgust shown by ancient male writers for women called “tribades” is essential background to early Christian teachings on sexuality. The word tribas (from tribein, “to rub†ie sexually) appears in Greek and Latin only a few dozen times in all, and not before the Roman empire. The Oxford Classical dictionary defines tribadism as:
The sexual penetration of women (and men), by means of either a dildo or a fantastically large clitoris…[and the] female same-sexual practice that imperial Greek and Roman writers alike singled out for comment.
The women of Lesbos acquired very early a reputation for sensuality, even licentiousness, but same-sex desire did not initially contribute to it. As Nussbaum shows, from at least the fifth century, if not before, the sexual act associated with “lesbianism” was fellatio. The Greek verb lesbiazein, which is attested for the first time in the classical period, meant “to give head.”
As Nussbaum also notes, “Sappho was represented in classical Athenian comedies of the fifth and fourth centuries as the lover of various men, sometimes even as a prostitute.” A red-figure Attic hydria, attributed to the Polygnotus Group, from about 440 portrays Sappho in what may be a female homoerotic setting But - and this is fact as curious as it is overlooked - no extant ancient writer of the classical period found the homoeroticism of Sappho’s poetry sufficiently remarkable to mention it. Given the considerable response to artistic and literary representations of male same-sex activity, this absence of commentary on women raises questions. Perhaps, the silence was out of deference to Pericles notions that ‘women should be seen and not heard.’ But Sappho lived during the late seventh and early sixth centuries, 100 years before Pericles birth.
This leaves open two possibilities. Either Sappho’s Greek readers read her lyric odes to luxury literally “I love luxury (”habrosune), and for me love has obtained the beauty and brilliance of the sun.” and her more sensual works again, not as expressions of Sapphic carnality or despair, but as or as joyous wedding odes typical of the interests and aspirations of all Greek women of her age and class. The only fully-preserved extant poem by Sappho, Ode to Aphrodite, in which Sappho appeals to the power that is feminine sexuality and beauty represented by Aphrodite.
Iridescent-throned Aphrodite, deathless
Child of Zeus, wile-weaver, I now implore you,
Don’t–I beg you, Lady–with pains and torments
Crush down my spirit…
Come to me once more, and abate my torment;
Take the bitter care from my mind, and give me
All I long for; Lady, in all my battles
Fight as my comrade.
The second possibility is that archaic Greek readers readily recognised homoerotic desire in her poems but were so non-plussed, nobody ever thought it worth mentioning. This second possibility would be extremely difficult to sustain.
Sappho’s explicit poetic eroticism was not even mentioned the late first century BCE and early first century CE by the Latin poets Horace and Ovid. Sappho could now qualify as a “tribade.”
This term, an ancient Greek word borrowed by Roman writers and first used in Latin in the first century CE, was originally understood to signify a phallic woman, a hyper masculine or butch woman, and/or a woman who sought sexual pleasure by rubbing her genitals against those of other women.
The identification of Sappho as a tribade led to the word “lesbian,” however, it did not mean the same as lesbian does today. Thus is Lucian’s second century CE Dialogues of the Courtesans, a character remarks:
They say there are women like that in Lesbos, with faces like men, who are unwilling to let men do it to them, and instead consort with women, as though they themselves were men.
As Haleprin notes, Bernadette J. Brooten translates the phrase “unwilling to let men do it to them,” more literally but less idiomatically, as “who are willing to suffer ‘it’ from men”: But compare these interpretations with Catullus’ poetry, which were odes to the women of Lesbos, without a hint of acknowledgement that their eros was same-sex focused.
Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love,
and let us judge all the rumors of the old men
to be worth just one penny!
The suns are able to fall and rise:
When that brief light has fallen for us,
we must sleep a never ending night.
Give me a thousand kisses, then another hundred,then another thousand, then a second hundred,then yet another thousand more, then another hundred.
Then, when we have made many thousands,
we will mix them all up so that we don’t know,
and so that no one can be jealous of us when he finds out how many kisses we have shared.
Marilyn Skinner aims to trace a tradition of female poetic utterance, a female voice, whose fountainhead is Sappho who “does not replicate patriarchal modes of awareness but rather affords a substitute basis for organizing female experience.” Ellen Greene notes that
Skinner suggests, it is from Sappho’s position of marginality that she is able to construct an alternative to the phallic representation of desire. In the segregated female world of the thiasos, Sappho could express active female erotic desire and claim an authentic female subject position - what Teresa de Lauretis calls an “eccentric discursive position outside the male… monopoly of power,†a “form of female subjectivity that exceeds the phallic definition†of woman as object or Other.
Skinner continues the torture of Sappho: “Fr. 16 confirms the speaker’s superior insight into what is “the most beautiful†by opposing her comprehensive and relativistic definition of beauty to a series of overtly male, and patently, limited foils.†Ironically, Skinner seems oblivious to her “essentialising†the respective abilities of “overtly male, and patently, limited foils†attempts at appreciating “the most beautiful†compared to the insigights of the woman, Sappho. She is also tellingly silent on the next stanza of the fragment where Helen of Troy, whose kallos caused the mobilisation of “an army of horsemen and an army of foot, an army of ships.â€
While perhaps being no more than an unfortunate error of editorial decision making, the essay by Tina Passman unfortunately reveals a lot of the contribution of radical lesbian feminists to understanding ancient Greece:
The reason people have difficulties with Jane Harrison’s work is that she wrote like a dyke and lived like a dyke as any lesbian could see….matriarchies [of the past] were characterized by peace, balance and harmony. Women in this culture are wise and all-knowing; they regulate themselves, and they are further mirrors of the symbol of this power, the goddess…A radical feminist once criticized my work from a theoretical perspective. My self-esteem was diminished, my self-confidence and feeling of participation as a feminist classicist destroyed. This ort of criticism is doing the work of patriarchy.
One might observe that scholarship as barmy as Passman’s is helping “patriarchy” along quite nicely, also
The most sustained critique of Foucault has come from feminist scholars. Dubois points out that by beginning a history of sexuality with the Greeks, Foucault assumed “the inevitable primacy of masculine subject-formation, of women’s subjection and submission.†And that by focusing only on classical Athenian culture, rather than the lyric culture of Sappho, he wrote women out of the history of Sappho. Richlin continues that Foucault is dangerous because he is such an icon and perpetuates a traditional misogyny. Thornton responds to these feminist carpings that it is not a worthwhile or possible project to study the mentalities of non-elites through the use of “so-called no privileged data.â€
The Dykes of Delphi still remain to be discovered.
Greenfield,
You are obviously an afficionado. Can you recommend any good websites?
I already have memberships at hotspinach.com and coed-dormparty.com - are there any other good ones you know of?
Tillman
No I don’t sorry. These are just bits and pieces from essays I wrote for uni. It’s a pity the software doesn’t allow the references to show.
Though perhaps you might enjoy http://www.bigdicks.com and/or http://www.bigandbouncy.com
Thanks for the heads up.
John
That’s pretty low rent linking those images. Show a little self respect.
JC
Jesus! I didn’t even know those sites existed, I just made them up! Take them down Jason, PLEASE!
No evidence for lesbianism?
But I’ve seen it on the vases and I’ve read Sapphos!!!
That’s pretty low rent linking those images. Show a little self respect.
JC, you are the perv who thought to himself, “bigdicks.com - I’ll have to check that out!”
Adrien
And I have just written about both, and will write me if you want!
Jason:
I’m generally the last one to be talking about abuse and neither do I ask to be defended.
But this sort of low rent garbage #44 really is beyond the swamp of any standards. It’s not funny, it’s not witty and it’s just gutter, low rent stuff.
Tillman you really are unacceptable. It seems that when you lose an argument every time you offer some pathetic opinion you always reosrt to these gutter comments.
Troll.
JC
How dude, chill. I said it was unintentional. I apologise and take it down.
The last comment wasn’t direct at you John. See what Tillman had to say.
JC, I didn’t make you click on the link.
Why did you click on the obvious link to bigdicks.com if you weren’t interested in big dicks?
Look, there’s nothing wrong with it. And there’s also no accounting for taste.
SO don’t be so defensive.
JC
OK. Cool. Now, back to carpet munching ancient Greeks!
Tillman once again is back on the perv.
Fuck off nonce.
Adriens
Have you really seen carpet-munching on vases? As I said, I am only an undergrad, hardly a world expert!
But I did quite a bit of work for my essay and looked hard for evidence of chick-on-chick luuuurve, but absolutely none. I would love it if there really is some!
Yeah I seem to recall it but it’s been a while so I might be full of shit.
There is Sappho however.
Adriens
But there is nothing dykeish about Sappho, either.
http://catallaxyfiles.com/?p=3419#comment-80443
Ah bing!
I remember where I saw the vases. It was actually quite recently in some book about erotic art. I’ll try and dig it up for you and post the title. The pix included women wielding dildos btw. Can’t remember whether it was Greek or Roman.
My understanding of Sappho as a lesbian, or more accurately bisexual, came from before Foucault. To be honest I didn’t find Vols 2&3 of La Histoire de Sexualite all that inspiring. It was the first I paid most attention to.
But Sappho wrote love poetry to women, yes? Anyway it’s hardly surprising that all this attention is paid to one woman. We very liekly have a distorted view of the ancient because of the bottleneck aspect of extant texts. The burning of the Library at Alexandria (Julius? D’oh!) the generally sexist nature of the world not to mention the marginalisation of pagans and women by Christians in late antiquity have all contributed.
Adriens
Oh the Greeks were obsessed with dildos, after all they were only human!
But I am not aware of ANY evidence - literary, vases, grafitti, art - that suggests sheilahs were proking each OTHER with them.
If you believe there were no homosexuals in ancient Greece, but do not believe sexuality is socially constructed, where do think modern homosexuals come from? Widespread genetic mutation circa 1962?
I checked out the book again JG, it was on Romans not Greeks so no.
AJ’s got a good question.
AJ - it’s just the historical methodology (not unlike that of a certain Windbag I could mention) whereby anything for which positive documentary evidence can’t be found is assumed not to have happened.
I mean, the vases and ancient texts say little to nothing about nose-picking. We can clearly infer that the Ancient Greeks either had no boogers, had only runny boogers, or were too polite to ever pick their noses.
OR PERHAPS THEY JUST DIDN’T WRITE MUCH ABOUT NOSE-PICKING?!?!?!???
Actually there’s an extensive literature on nose-picking in Ancient Greece. There was always some nose-picking poetry read before the main feature in Athens. Sophocles won the prize for nose-picking poems three years in a row.
FDB,
They clearly also never relieved themselves as I am not aware of this activity being depicted either.
Must have made for huge bladders.
Actually it would appear that whatever the Ancient Greeks did, it was done standing sort of side-on to the observer before a poorly-rendered landscape with little or no perspective. How confusing for
themus!All those Ancient Egyptians walking around oddly like that too.
Was it the Bangles who hit on that idea?
FDB
There actually is visual art depicting nose-picking in acient Greece, also Aristophanes and medical texts.
AJ
Homsexuality as we know it today did not exist in ancient Greece, but male pederasty did. There is no evidence of any mutual carpet-munching by sheilahs. And I do not argue the “sexuality” has no element of “social construction.”
John
How do you actually know that homosex wasn’t around then. It may have been frowned.
And what exactly is the point of your comment.
If it wasn’t around, so what.