Ancient greece gay male sex
LGBT History Month - Homosexuality in Ancient Greece
This February in the department we have been reflecting about LGBT history, not least following the wonderful lecture by Prof Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones on Alexander the Superb . In this post, Dr Ben Cartlidge dwells on a puzzling feature of the ancient Greek evidence for male homosexuality.
The inspiration for this came out of the paper I gave last term at our Classics and Ancient History seminar, entitled ‘Just friends? Sexuality and linguistics in Bronze Age Greece’. This post is not a recap of the paper, but an initial statement of a puzzle I came across in the research for it. The paper was focussed on the figure of Achilles in the Iliad; this post is focussed on the figure of Achilles in art and literature of the fifth-century B.C.
The classic work on Greek homosexuality, Kenneth Dover’s recently reprinted book of the same name, constructs a visual grammar of ancient Greek male homosexuality. Dover was able to point to a series of vases on which homosexual male courtship is conducted using a particular set of gestures. Such gestures include reaching down towards the younger partner’s genitals while touching his face with t
Friday essay: the myth of the ancient Greek ‘gay utopia’
In our sexual histories series, authors explore altering sexual mores from antiquity to today.
In recent years, we have seen significant advances won for LGBT rights through hard-fought legal cases and well-targeted political campaigns. Yet it is worth remembering that for decades, recourse to such methods was not accessible to LGBT people. The law-court and the parliament were deaf to their pleas. For many, it was only in their dreams that they could escape oppression.
One should not underplay the importance of such fantasies. They provided succour and hope in a grim world. It was comforting to conceive a time before Christianity told you that the acts of love that you committed were a sin or the regulation pronounced that your widespread displays of affection were acts of “gross indecency”. The persistent dream of a “gay utopia” is one of the constants in gay and queer woman historical imaginings over the last 200 years.
One place in particular attracted the longings of gays and lesbians. This was the world of ancient Greece, a supposed gay paradise in which same-sex treasure flourished without discrim
Greek Homosexuality
Homosexuality: sexual attraction to persons of the same sex. In ancient Greece, this was a normal practice.
Introduction
Violent debate, enthusiastic writings, shamefaced silence, flights of fantasy: few aspects of ancient population are so hotly contested as Greek pederasty, or - as we shall see below - homosexuality. Since the British classicist K.J. Dover published his influential book Greek Homosexuality in 1978, an avalanche of new studies has appeared. We can discern two approaches:
- The historical approach: scholars are looking for the (hypothetical) roots of pederasty in very ancient initiation rites and endeavor to reconstruct a development. Usually, a lot of fantasy is required, because our sources undertake not often consult to these ancient rites.
- The synchronistic approach: scholars concentrate upon homosexuality in fifth and fourth-century Athens, where it was integral part of social life.
In the present article, we will use the second approach, although we won't overlook the first one. There are many sources of evidence: lyrical poetry, vases, statues, myths, philosophical treatises, speeches, inscriptions, medical texts, tragedies, comedie
In our sexual histories series, authors explore changing sexual mores from antiquity to today.
In recent years, we have seen significant advances won for LGBT rights through hard-fought legal cases and well-targeted political campaigns. Yet it is worth remembering that for decades, recourse to such methods was not available to LGBT people. The law-court and the parliament were deaf to their pleas. For many, it was only in their dreams that they could flee oppression.
One should not underplay the importance of such fantasies. They provided succour and hope in a grim world. It was comforting to imagine a time before Christianity told you that the acts of love that you committed were a sin or the law pronounced that your public displays of affection were acts of “gross indecency”. The persistent dream of a “gay utopia” is one of the constants in gay and lesbian historical imaginings over the last 200 years.
One place in particular attracted the longings of gays and lesbians. This was the planet of ancient Greece, a supposed gay paradise in which same-sex love flourished without discrimination. It was a powerful, captivating hope, one which scholars of ancient Greece have sta
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As with any form of social history, understanding and interpreting ancient relationships is often hard and nuanced. It requires us to look into the minds of long-dead ancient peoples using artefacts left behind to archaeology. We interpret these artefacts within the framework of our reconstructed view of the past using up-to-date language which is often problematic. It is often the case that ancient cultures simply did not have analogous terminologies to latest categories of homosexual, straight, queer etc., and so recognising and separating our own personal and modern classifications of relationships and sexual desire from the ancient evidence is necessary. Parkinson’s ‘A Little Gay History’ prefers the designation same-sex desire for having fewer new overtones than lesbian or gay, and so we will follow his convention here.
Similarly, emotions are particularly hard to reconstruct from the ancient record, they leave no physical trace and their interpretation varies wildly, even in latest languages and cultures. For example, researchers have identified ten basic emotions which exist in humans, one of which is disgust. However, Polish does not have a pos that directly m