The myths of Eros
Keith Windschuttle
Partisan Review
Fall, 4, 1997

Sexuality, the French historian Michel Foucault assures us, is "discursively constructed". Humans have sexual impulses derived from nature but how these manifest themselves in social relations is always a product of "discourse" or of the prevailing ideology. Moreover, our underlying nature, Foucault maintains, is nothing as fixed or certain as what we moderns call heterosexuality or homosexuality. Nature made us androgynous creatures but today we accept more limited sexual preferences simply because of the dictates of discourse. In The Uses of Pleasure (1984), volume two of his History of Sexuality, Foucault says the ancient Greeks were more in tune with their natural instincts. Greek men, Foucault claims, were bisexual and "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".

This claim has since been taken up by the homosexual liberation movement to argue that those of us who remain exclusively heterosexual are conformists and reactionaries who deny nature and allow ourselves to be blindly led by ideology. According to Jonathan Ned Katz, author of The Invention of Heterosexuality (1993), rather than being timeless, the concept of exclusive heterosexuality is an invention of the modern era, specifically of the psychotherapy movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The bisexuality of the ancient Greeks, he concludes a lá Foucault, indicates our true sexual potential. This claim is supported by no less eloquent an authority than Gore Vidal. In his introduction to Katz's book, Vidal describes heterosexuality as "a weird concept of recent origin and terrible consequences".

However, other political movements that have looked to ancient Greece to provide a touchstone for their views have seen it providing a different perspective. Instead of the gay view of the Greeks posing a counter-example to our own repressive times, radical feminists have seen ancient society itself as the very foundation for the terrible lives that women are supposed to have led ever since. Both Eva Cantarella in Pandora's Daughters (1981) and Eva Keuls in The Reign of the Phallus (1993), claim Greek women were "locked away in the dark recesses of closed-in homes" and subject to a "phallic ethos" in which they were "deprived of interests and gratifications" and excluded from love "which found its highest expression in relationships between men". Wives were kept at home for breeding purposes while the men went out and enjoyed themselves with prostitutes and boys. Except for current taboos against homosexual pederasty, feminists believe this is the model that has largely prevailed down to our own times.

The Afrocentric movement has also developed its own thesis on the ancients, but this is different again. The Greeks were not the founders of Western civilisation: they stole all their ideas from the Africans. Greek culture and scholarship derived from Egypt, Afrocentrists claim, and Egypt itself had its roots deep in the African continent. In particular, according to several Afrocentrist writers and academics, Aristotle got all his ideas from that great repository of African knowledge, the library at Alexandria, which the Greeks then subsequently, and characteristically, destroyed. In the hands of some of the more macho Afrocentrists, this perspective acknowledges, but shows little respect for, the gay interpretation. The black American cleric, Reverend Al Sharpton, has declared: "White folks was in the caves while we was building empires … We taught philosophy and astrology [sic] and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it."

It is plain that in each of these political theses, relativism rules. Each movement selects from the ancients those pieces of evidence that appear to confirm its prejudices. Unfortunately, the uncommitted bystander is left wallowing in a swamp of mutually incompatible and, in some cases, mutually hostile claims. The only way to extricate himself is to turn to that one creature now equally spurned by all of our contemporary advocacy movements: the traditional historian who tries to look at all the relevant evidence, to see beyond discourse, ideology and racial and sexual politics, to get to the truth of the matter.

In 1996, the proponents of the Black Athena thesis were engaged by two classical historians, Mary Lefkowitz and her colleague Guy Maclean Rogers. In Not Out of Africa and Black Athena Revisited, they demolished the Afrocentrist claims. The intellectual precursors of ancient Greece, they demonstrated, were Levantine not African. Aristotle could not have got his ideas from the library at Alexandria since it was not created until 25 years after his death and, anyway, Alexandria at the time was a Greek colony and the library held predominantly Greek manuscripts. Neither Egypt nor Africa was in any sense the mother of Western civilisation.

Now another classics scholar, Bruce Thornton, has come along with a book that provides a proper examination of the meanings the ancient Greeks gave to sex. Thornton's book is titled Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality (Westview Press, Colorado, 1997). It is at once a stunning work of scholarship—the most comprehensive and impressive study of its subject yet undertaken—as well as a book that destroys all the pretensions of the prevailing company of sexual radicals. Though an academic, a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, Thornton has produced an eminently readable and accessible account of the classic texts. Most importantly, he reminds our own romantic era of something the Greeks recognised far more clearly than we do: the dangerous and destructive powers embodied by this force of nature.

Thornton advances his investigation by critically examining the literary remains of ancient Greece to discern their attitudes towards sex. He takes the reader through a grand tour of dramatic tragedy and comedy, poetry, oratory, legend, history and philosophy from the eighth to the first century BC. His emphasis is on what these primary texts say themselves, and he has very little recourse to secondary commentaries, partly because he wants his intended audience, the intelligent but non-specialist reader, to directly confront the Greek mind, but also because so many of the dominant academic interpretations today are accompanied by what he calls "the whine of ideological axes being ground". For those wishing to explore the latter, however, he offers a pungent and incisive critical bibliography at the end of the book.

To the ancient Greeks, Thornton writes, Eros was one of the gods who appears very early in the story of creation. He simply appears out of Chaos, the mysterious chasm filled with darkness. This makes him a force of nature, one of the fundamental building blocks of the cosmos. Thornton shows Eros has a double life in Greek literature: an anthropomorphic god but also the inhuman force of sexual attraction inherent in every living creature. Euripides calls him the "this most unconquerable god", this "tyrant of gods and men" since all the gods, including Zeus the king of the gods, must obey him. Though represented as a boy, Eros is by no means innocent or naive. He is more street kid than cute cupid. His power, moreover, is not confined to the realm of sexuality. He is lust. He represents all desire that is destructively excessive. We still retain some of this meaning today when we speak of the lust for power or the lust for wealth. In the form of sexual desire, Eros is a representation of how sex attacks the mind, something simultaneously out there in nature and inside us.

The Greeks, Thornton shows, saw the destructive powers of sex and violence as two sides of the same irrational coin, "each interpenetrating and intensifying the other, creating a violent sex and sexual violence that exploded into profound destruction and disorder, a double chaotic energy threatening the foundations of human culture and identity". The Greeks most famous war, the expedition against Troy, originates in the seduction of Helen by Paris. The disasters of Homer's Iliad also begin with sexual conflict. The quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon starts over two girls and rapidly escalates to a contest over heroic honour. In Sophocles' drama Electra , Klytaimestra wants to murder her husband Agamemnon for sacrificing their daughter Iphigeneia, but her revenge is also fuelled by her own illicit affair with Agamemnon's cousin Aegisthus. The Chorus sees it that way, saying "Eros was the killer" and his daughter Electra agrees, ascribing her motive to her uncontrolled sexual appetite. After Klytaimestra kills the girl she boasts that the murder "will give relish" to her sex with Aegisthus, a statement Thornton says demonstrates the Greek understanding of how violence becomes sexualised.

Another of the most revealing works of Greek literature is the Voyage of the Argo . In search of the Golden Fleece, Jason and his Argonauts travel to Colchis where they find it in the possession of Aeetes the king. Eros makes Medea, the daughter of Aeetes, fall in love with Jason. She then helps her lover overcome her father's obstacles and together they make their escape with the fleece, returning to Greece as husband and wife. Unlike the romantic version of the story in the twentieth century film, however, the tale told by Apollonius of Rhodes in 250 B.C. is a bleak one. Medea is portrayed as blinded and deluded by her passion for Jason. She is a traitor to her family who steals its most precious possession and then helps her lover murder her brother Apsyrtus. In one version of the story, Apsyrtus is an infant whom Medea cuts up, throwing the pieces into the sea so that her pursuing father must slow down to pick up the dismembered limbs for proper burial. "Wicked Eros," Apollonius wrote, "great plague, great curse to humans, from you come destructive strife and mourning and groans, and countless pains are stirred up by you."

Thornton punctuates his work throughout with contrasts between Greek perceptions of sexuality and what he sees as the comforting but ultimately self-deluding views of the late twentieth century. The ancient world associated Eros not only with violence but with all the destructive natural forces within ourselves that always threaten to overcome civilisation: madness, enchantment, disease, mental dissolution, agitation and drunkenness. "This loss of control frightened the Greeks," Thornton points out, "whereas to our Romantic sensibilities it is what we seek." We want our erotic selves to find fulfilment without hindrance or check.

Thornton is particularly scathing in his comparisons between Greek thought and the sexual liberation theorists of the 1950s and 1960s such as Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse who condemned "civilised morality" and "repressive reason". They claimed the "life instinct" would be served by "erotic exuberance" and that the "liberation of the instincts" would generate a new kind of freedom. They created the ideological climate for the sexual revolution of the 1960s and beyond. The Greeks knew better, Thornton argues. They saw sex not as a liberating power but a force with the potential to generate destruction and disorder, a chaotic energy threatening the foundations of human culture and identity. Indeed, they recognised the central problem of human identity was the weakness of our cultural and social orders before the relentless power of the sensual, the instinctive and the irrational.

The Greeks saw sexuality as central to the basic duality of the human condition—natural passions and drives and appetites that cultural order attempts to control and subordinate. However, nature and civilisation, he notes, were not diametrically opposed to each other. While the nature of the untamed forests and mountains threatened to constantly encroach on the cultivated space that humans inhabit, there was also the concept of tamed nature, nature domesticated, its life-giving energy subordinated to the human mind and its technologies. The Greeks thought it was not possible to eliminate the world of wild beasts but it could be tamed and domesticated in order to serve civilisation. Similarly, sexuality needs to be tamed so its potentially destructive powers, which will always exist, can be redirected to human purposes. This was accomplished in the institution of marriage and by the sexual fidelity of husband and wife. In Greek thought, the civilised human life is defined by marriage and the household where legitimate children are born and reared.

Women are particularly interesting to Greek literature, Thornton argues, because in them this fundamental human problem, this conflict between nature's chaos and culture's order, is magnified. The Greeks thought that women, with their greater emotionalism, their unbridled sexual appetites, their tendency to surrender to their passions, are closer than the male to the chaotic forces of nature, to the earth and the world of beasts. They are more in tune with the forces and cycles of the natural world. To dismiss these attitudes as sexist or misogynist, Thornton writes, is "to purchase a cheap moral authority at the expense of a deeper understanding of the Greek exploration of human identity and its defining contradictions". Through the figure of the goddess Aphrodite, Greek literature fully recognised that the allure of female sexual beauty subjected men to the power of women. Aphrodite's powers render absurd the modern feminist interpretation of Greek women as cowering victims of a misogynistic patriarchy. "This tells us very little about antiquity," Thornton writes, "yet quite a lot about the late twentieth century politics of victimhood and the liberal-democratic assumption that all power resides in political rights and institutions." Such a view, he says, renders meaningless the figures of Pandora, Helen, Klytaimestra, Medea, Lysistrata—all women whose magnificence depends on a recognition that men are vulnerable to, and hence fear, the sexual power of women.

Moreover, the notion that women never left the house, and that they were shackled in some Hellenic purdah, is given short shrift by Thornton . Many Greek literary sources offer plenty of evidence that women could and did get outside the house for a variety of reasons. The best known is Aristophanes' comedy Lysistrata , which portrays the women of Athens not only leaving their houses but occupying the Acropolis and organising with the women of Sparta a boycott of sex with their husbands until both sides cease their military hostilities. Thornton argues that feminist claims about Greek women being confined to the house is a misinterpretation of the fact that the household was the woman's realm, the place where she exercised authority and control over her husband, children and servants.

Thornton also provides little comfort for those lesbian separatists who see the seventh century poetess Sappho as their founding inspiration. He argues that she has been a victim of mischaracterisation for 2500 years. Sappho was a wife and a mother who wrote epithalamia or wedding songs celebrating not lesbian love but the briefly flowering beauty of young women who were themselves about to become wives and mothers. Only one of the poems from her nine books survives intact, but several of her fragments have been translated in the modern era, with the translators filling in the gaps. Many modern readers are unaware the translators are thus essentially writing Sappho's poems for her. Thornton argues that her famous Hymn to Aphrodite is not a poem about a mutually sustaining sexual relationship between women but a partly theological and partly philosophical work that attempts to redefine human understanding of the power of the goddess. Though her poetry does sometimes speak of her erotic suffering with desire for a beautiful girl, the only certainty about the claim that Sappho was a lesbian is that she came from the island of Lesbos .

An even greater distortion is evident in modern interpretations about Greek male homosexuality, especially the purported cult of pederasty so widely celebrated by modern gay writers. According to the latter—especially K. J. Dover, David Halperin and Michel Foucault—the Greeks were indifferent to same sex relations, and indeed considered them perfectly normal. The only restriction was that the participants had to observe certain protocols and conventions. In the case of "boy love", the custom was that the boy had to be courted and play hard to get, that his reputation be protected and that he not receive any money. Some of these writers say the boy should not be anally penetrated—the older man was only allowed to rub his penis between the boy's thighs, as depicted in scenes on some ancient Greek vases—but others, such as Eva Cantarella, claim that "anal penetration was normal in pederastic relationships".

Thornton offers two chapters on Greek homosexuality which, hopefully, should demolish these myths once and for all. He shows convincingly that there is no evidence in their literature for the supposition that the Greeks viewed the sexual penetration of men and women in the same light. Sex between males was an offence against the laws of hubris and of sexual outrage. The passive homosexual, the male who allowed himself to be anally penetrated, was viewed with "shame" and "outrage". Plato and Xenophon both viewed sex between males as a depravity that all right-thinking men should abhor as much as they would incest. Aristotle saw homosexuality as a deformed condition brought about either by natural disorder or by habit, but something that was decidedly "abnormal". There are homosexual characters in some of Aristophanes' plays but they are associated with corruption and decadence. In Knights, Aristophanes is saying that corruption in Athens has reached the stage where the shameless pursuit of all appetites, including active and passive homosexuality, is the most important qualification for a politician.

On the one hand, Thornton argues, the Greek philosophers saw homosexuality as an historical innovation, one that was "contrary to nature", a result of the depraved human imagination and vulnerability to pleasure. On the other hand, dramatists like Euripides saw it as a "product of nature" which those afflicted found hard to control. But even in the latter cases, homosexuality is portrayed as a crime that unleashes destructive forces that overthrow reason and law. For instance, in Euripides' play Chrysippus , Laius, the father of Oedipus, kidnaps and rapes the son of Pelops and thereby initiates a chain reaction of erotic disorder culminating in the incest and parricide of Oedipus and the blight of Thebes that destroys the life of humans, herds and crops alike.

How, then, did the myth of Greek bisexuality gain any currency? Partly by misinterpretation of the literary remains, Thornton argues, and partly by selective use of evidence. Foucault's reading, for example, omitted the great volume of classical drama and poetry and was confined to a narrow selection of fourth century medical and philosophical works. While it is apparently true that there was an aristocratic homosexual tradition, this represented only a tiny elitist minority at any time. The concept of "boy love" is derived from a real tradition in which older aristocratic men did act as educational and social mentors for adolescent youths from other aristocratic families. However, the notion that this relationship involved homosexual intercourse would have been abhorrent to all concerned. It is true there are illustrations on vases depicting homosexual acts between older men and boys, but there is no reason to believe these tell us any more about what was representative in ancient Greece than mail order magazines of child pornography indicate what is normal and accepted in our own times.

Reading Thornton's discussion, it remains possible—perhaps even likely—that Socrates himself had homosexual inclinations, since he speaks of his struggle to overcome his desire for the beautiful youth Alcibiades. Plato nonetheless assures us that Socrates did not succumb to this temptation and did not act out his desires. However, the possibility that one of the great thinkers of ancient Greece might have been a closet homosexual tells us nothing about other Greek men of the era, nor about the natural instincts of men at large.The argument by Foucault and Katz—some men in ancient Greece were homosexual, therefore the sexual taste of the human species is androgynous—is not only spurious logic but an insult to the kind of reasoning that Socrates gave his life to sustain.