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Acting Serious, Living Rationally, Thinking Gay |
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Currently appearing in As You Like It at the White Bear Theatre, London |
All Rights Reserved Text: World Copyright Martin Foreman Copyright of pictures acknowledged where possible Having problems viewing this page? It performs best in Mozilla Firefox. 
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Men and Youths in Ancient Greece Cavafy Gay in Greece in 1975 Greece Today
In the eighth century BCE the writer Hesiod described the origins of the world and the gods in his Theogony. In that work, Eros was a virile youth who had emerged out of the Chaos that existed as Creation. Neither humans nor gods could avoid Eros' arrows, which bestowed the ecstasies and agonies of love on all who were hit by them. By the fifth century BCE, however, the god had dwindled to child in the eyes of his worshipers. The son of Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, he played in her arms or attended her toilet. At times, however, he was mischievous and her punishment was to redden his backside with her slipper, bringing tears to his eyes. He still conferred love on his victims, but he had taken on other duties as well, overseeing the fertility of plants, making music and joining the mourners at someone's death. In later years, Eros grew older again. By the last century BCE, his fate was closely linked with Psyche, the human soul. These two adolescents could not live without each other but they did not fully understand either their own needs or the needs of their partner. This led to much unhappiness, with artefacts of the time showing how Eros often tortured Psyche and how Psyche would subdue and bind Eros to her will. At the end of their torments, however, the pair learnt to live together peacefully and bring each other happiness - as depicted in the exhibition poster above. (We should not be surprised by these changes in Eros’ personality. All religions are moulded by the needs of their believers; in Christianity, for example, perceptions of Jesus, the Virgin and God Himself have changed significantly in the last two thousand years.) The idea of Eros firmly embedded in our minds, the exhibition moves us on to the realities of sexual life in ancient Greece. We can never know exactly who does what with which parts of their anatomy and with whom and how often and for how long (it's only in the last fifty years that we have begun detailed research into such basic information), but a lot can be deduced from the artefacts and writings that have survived. And from these sources the Musuem has focused on three topics - prostitution, homoeroticism and the bucolic life. It's a small exhibition, covering several centuries, which means that it is more general than specific and we should remember that generalisations should always be treated with care. (Life in Athens differed greatly from life in Sparta, for example; likewise the lot of women in Athens improved considerably between 600 and 300 BCE.) Nevertheless, the displays offer interesting insights, reminding us that female prostitution was widespread and took different forms - in whorehouses, on the streets, in the houses of courtesans - that phallic symbols were widespread as sources of humour and that "free" women might be as isolated from public life as are women in some Muslim countries today. As for homoerotic life in ancient Athens . . . there is no doubt that it flourished – but what allowed it to do so? and what form did that life take? Start with these facts: respectable women could not enter public life; the male body was considered the epitome of beauty; free, wealthy men of all ages spent hours each day exercising naked in the gymnasium (gymnos = naked). Stir into that mix the predominantly homosexual orientation of some men and the predominantly sexual orientation of many others (I want to have sex and it doesn't matter who with) and you have a social world in which male relationships are accepted without comment.
Within these parameters – which to a freeborn Athenian citizen were as natural as slavery, commerce and death – both partners could lead lives as fulfilled or as frustrating as any modern love affair. The heart would leap when love was returned and sink when love was spurned. And like any modern affair, love and lust were frequently commemorated in pictures and words. Urns and other pottery reveal gentle scenes of men offering their intended lover a gift – often a rooster. Alternately, his reaches out to the youth’s genitals, without necessarily touching them, an approach reproduced so often that it appears to have been socially acceptable. Poetry is equally tender. Thus we have Meleager’s poem: At noon in the middle in the street, Alexis / Summer had all but ripened the fruit / and the summer sun and that boy’s look did the same for me! or a brief note on a shard from one man beseeching his lover to visit him. And we cannot forget Plato’s description of gay men in the Symposium, as one being divided each seeking for its other half, or his poems in the Greek Anthology to his beloved Aster (=”star”) (Sweet boy, star of love and beauty / you stared up alone at the midnight skies / If only I were Heaven / to gaze upon you with a thousand eyes.) According to this exhibition, the fifth century BC was the golden period for love between men and youths. As more women came into the public sphere, there was more scope for men to interact with them. As a result, the number of poems and artefacts in Greek culture commemorating male love diminishes. By the time of the Roman Empire, young men could still be objects of affection – as they were in some of Catullus’ (Latin) poems, but the status of eromenos was no longer one to which most free-born Greek youths aspired. Today, although the laws in many countries allow older men to copulate with sixteen year olds, the societies in which we now live in generally look down on the idea of intergenerational sex. That may change, but it is unlikely to do so in our lifetimes. We can only look back and wonder what we, as gay men, have lost and what we have gained in the intervening centuries. 
Of course what men were expected to do and what men did were not always the same. Both words and pictures reveal that men were familiar with anal and oral intercourse despite the mockery that would ensue if their acts were known – see this border on a bowl from the Benaki Museum. 
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