Greek Love

Oliver Taplin, about the best classical scholar out there, reviews a new book on Greek homosexuality or "homobesottedness" that takes aim at the powerful intellectual influence of Kenneth Dover and Michel Foucault. Sounds like a challenging read for the post-primary season. Money quote:

Homophilia, same-sex love, is for Davidson "serious, permanent and real". So it is central to his mission to refute both the claim that "homosexuality" is a modern notion, and the associated thesis that in ancient Greece it was nothing to do with orientation, but was just a matter of the power of the penetrator and the subjugation of the penetratee - "sodomania".

There's an interesting take on pederasty:

Take "pederasty", a good Greek word made from paida, boy, and eran, to desire (the verb of eros). This sounds suspiciously close to "paedophilia", as hounded by the News of the World, the grooming of under-age children for sexual abuse - not such a "good" Greek word. But, as Davidson shows, with a wealth of evidence combined with deft deployment of cultural anthropology, this arises from a misunderstanding of paida, glossed as "boy". In a society, like many others but unlike ours, where age is measured not by mere years, but by "age-classes", a word like "boy" may include the whole life-stage between late teens and early 20s. Sexual importunings directed towards under-age boys were, he shows, as criminal then in Greece as they are now.

They were just into twinks. Then this:

He argues with fervour, often verging on contempt, that the whole caboodle comes from an unholy alliance in the late 1970s between an English classical scholar and a French sage. Kenneth Dover was (and is) dedicated to discovering the truth and to calling a spade a spade; Michel Foucault was as dedicated to showing how what masquerades as "truth" is merely a construct, a means for exerting and perpetuating power. They could both agree, however, that Greek pederasty was all about the machismo of being the penetrator and inflicting humiliation on the subjected receptacle, the pathic anus. Davidson is, it seems to me, largely convincing in his polemic against this. Certainly the phallic penetration-obsession, which has infused so much of the discourse in the last 25 years, has no basis in the Greek - they did not have words for it. Their language of sexual congress, whether homo or hetero, was mainly about mixing, being together, moving together, shading in coarser slang towards banging and knocking. But not this horrible invasive vocabulary of forcible intrusion.

The Greeks and Greek Love is an extraordinary achievement, ranging far and wide across times and places, across cultures and disciplines. It also slaloms across styles and modes from the learned to the tabloid, from formal dialectic to loose musings, from tight argument to what seem more like jottings from a notebook.