The Greeks & Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece

by James Davidson

Kenneth Dover's 1978 GREEK HOMOSEXUALITY remains the most recent single-volume treatment of the subject as a whole. Drawing on fifteen years of ensuing research, James Davidson rejects Dover's excessively theoretical approach, using a wide variety of sources unknown to him - court cases, romantic novels, satirical plays and poems - to present a view of the subject that, in contrast to Dover and to Foucault, stresses the humanity of the ancient Greeks, and how they lived their loves and pleasures, rather than their moral codes and the theorising of philosophers. Homosexuality in Ancient Greece remains a central area of debate in the classics, in ancient history and lesbian and gay studies. Greek civilisation centrally underpins our own, providing a basis of so much of the west's culture and philosophy, yet the Greeks were more tolerant of homosexuality than virtually any other culture, certainly than the western civilisations that followed. The extent to which Greek attitudes to sexuality and in particular their privileging of 'Greek Love' were comparable and different to our own underlies the continuing debate over the formation of sexuality and the much wider question of the roles of nature and nurture in the formation of human behaviour and personality.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, LGBT, Ancient History, Gay, Historical, Queer

634 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2006

About the author

British historian

Reviews

[Edmund Marlowe · Rating 1 out of 5]

Topical propaganda posing as history

This is as bad as a so-called history book can get. For a generation now, devotees of ancient Greek culture have had to grind their teeth while modern gays of the semi-educated variety have laid bogus claim to be its heirs, consoling themselves that surely no academic would ever stoop to lending them his authority. Now one has done just that.

Everyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Greek history has always known this claim to be nonsense. Greek homosexuality was practiced between clearly differentiated lovers (men in the active role) and beloveds (boys in the passive role). Its whole ethos was premised on this inequality, it being society’s means of inducting its youth into the fighting skills and higher culture of their elders. Much as one may wish it had been otherwise, adult men taking a passive role were despised and unkindly ridiculed. There was no concept of sexual orientation; it was expected that most men were capable of attraction to both women and boys.

Now, however, Davidson would have us suddenly discover that actually, despite the mountains of evidence carefully sifted over a generation by such great scholars as Kenneth Dover and William A. Percy, the ancient Greeks thought and behaved just like 21st century American gays striving after assimilation at any moral cost. So sex was not only illegal with boys under the age of …, you guessed it, 18, but carried the death penalty! Not only did the Greeks celebrate their inclusion of homosexuals in the military, but they also made a special place for them in their religious rites, just as today’s have-your-cake-and-eat-it “Christian” gays demand. They even had same-sex marriages too.

And God forbid that anyone should think Greek homosexuality had much to do with sex! Just like 21st century gay couples, whom we are assured are really just like other respectable, middle-class couples, Greek homosexuality too was about loving couples and fidelity rather than anything naughty. To achieve this sanitisation, Davidson feels he has to try to undermine the credibility of Professor Dover, who placed sex in the foreground of Greek love, and it is his persistent use of cheap, snide remarks to this end that undermined any will I might have had to try to be charitable about his book. Thus we are assured that a “happily-married, heterosexual” professor could not hope to understand such things as whether the Greeks practiced sodomy. Being gay today is apparently much more useful for understanding the remote past than objective study of the historical sources.

Needless to say, Davidson’s effort has been found worthless by the experts in the field. It would be out of place here to catalogue the endless misrepresentation, mistranslation, misleading paraphrasing and outrightly false reporting of ancient and secondary works that are used to justify this “bold” rewriting of history, when I can refer anyone in doubt to the thorough and carefully-reasoned, online demolition of it by Professor Thomas Hubbard.

The best book I can think of to compare with this is the Anglo-German Houston Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), which explained on similarly tendentious and twisted lines how every advance in civilization was due to the superior Aryan race, including even Christianity (since Jesus had hitherto been disgracefully misrepresented as a Jew). The degree to which either author succeeded in genuinely deluding himself (as opposed to being consciously dishonest) is perhaps the most fascinating and unanswerable question about them.

The more outlandish claims in both books tempt one to laugh until one remembers the huge appeal and influence of Chamberlain on a Germany longing to hear just such a message. Similarly, Davidson’s drivel is now likely to be cited as an authority both to claim a close association between classical Greek culture and 21st century gay culture, and to discredit all that Greek love truly stood for. The only consolation I can find is that it is so very caught up in the ephemeral concerns of the decade in which it was written that it will date quickly; even people in the 2030s will surely see more in it about the previous generation than about the Greeks.

Edmund Marlowe, author of Alexander’s Choice, the story of a boy inspired by real Greek love, https://www.amazon.com/dp/191457107X.

[Liam Ostermann]

Although I've read this book at least three times in the past I didn't review it then and I keep reading virulent attacks against the book but they seem to be criticising things the book doesn't say. So to be sure I know what I am talking about I must read it again and only then will I review and rate.

[Trent · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing re-examination of same-sex relationships and practices in ancient Greece, which manages to upend virtually everything we've come to believe was common (for instance, Davidson debunks the idea that the typical relationship was between an older man and a youth, pointing to evidence such as restrictions against "age-classes" mixing to conclude that the members of a couple were more likely 2-4 years apart in age at most). While at times the text can be heavy going and confusing for a non-Classicist (I certainly got my Aeschines and Alcaeus confused), it's also marvelously entertaining: for instance, when the author uses the song "The Girl from Ipanema" to illustrate his idea of how part of the same-sex ethos was about admiration (a sort of fan's crush). This book won the Publishing Triangle's Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

ILL

unbelievably fascinating

TOC from Worldcat
pt. I. The Greeks had words for it. Eros in love --
Grace, sex and favors --
Age-classes, love-rules and corrupting the young --

pt. II. Sodomania. Sexing up the Greeks --
Sex versus homosexuality --
Language as a mirror of the world --

pt. III. Greek love and Greek religions. Ganymede rising --
Noonday Phaedrus, Cephalus at dawn --
Pelops and Hyacinthus at new year --

pt. IV. Men of war. Achilles and Heracles --
Crete and Sparta --
The secrets of Elis, the sacred band and Alexander : regional variations --
Syzygies --

pt. V. Eros off duty. Sappho, Samos and the tomb of the diver : lyrics of Greek love --
Words and pictures : the Athenian system --
The fourth century : politics and the professionals --
Conclusion: a map of Greek love.

[reed · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an academic book, huge and dense, lots of footnotes. I just dipped into it here and there. Davidson is a great writer though - very entertaining. His overall goal is to look at same sex relationships in ancient Greece calmly and curiously as a correction both to the earlier generations of scholars who were scandalized by it and the scholarship of the last twenty years which went in the opposite direction and suddenly insisted that every mention of male-male love should be interpreted as an allusion to anal sex.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my college days I read K.J. Dover's Greek Love, and believed every word of it. It seemed bold and eye-opening at the time. Now more than a generation later, Davidson shows how limited and misstaken it was. Davidson's revisionist tome is both erudite and enjoyable, if long. At times he rides a few hobby horses a little too long (going on a bit about Foucault or Margaret Mead, for example, which takes away from the main narration and thesis).

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read via inter-library loan. Probably the best and most definitive work on the subject I've yet seen. A bit dry at times, but fascinating reading. Please note that the topic is Greek *love*, not just sex, so anyone expecting the titillation of reading a book about sex is due for some disappointment! Anyway, worth reading for Classicists, especially Hellenists.

[michaelben]

Ooof this was a long slog. I think you need to be a classicist and/or a philologist to fully appreciate this text. I am neither. It is well-written (i.e., style of prose), but that's all I'm qualified to say.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too much personal investment?

James Davidson is a renowned classicist but sadly I feel that too much personal emotional investment in this topic has rather stilted or skewed his usual insightful readings. Romanticising the Greek ideal of elite masculine 'homosexuality' is not so much a reappraissal, I fear, as a throw-back to a more C19th view of the Greeks a la E.M.Forster et al who found a legitimisation of their own feelings.

I don't find the idea of male/male sex at all problematic but I don't feel that Davidson has added anything to the exemplary work already done (Winkler, Richlin etc)and elides too much of the politics of sex which is what makes classical civilisation, Roman as well as Greek, both so fascinating and 'so good to think with'.

Always an erudite, witty and engaging writer, too much of this book was way too 'out there' (e.g. some of the readings of myth, Homer etc).

So overall I think this is an interesting book for the classical scholar aware of the debates and problems of uncovering ancient sexuality, but it is perhaps too misleading in its conclusions to the average interested reader.

[Dylan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here's my concession to gay pride weekend. I saw this in a display at the library and I thought, "People write such nonsense on this subject, but this book is hefty and tome-like, so perhaps it will be sensible." Well, it isn't!

Every time he uses the word "stripling" - which is often - he capitalizes it. He spins first-person narratives about what it might have been like to be abducted in fifth-century Crete. However, I must admit that I have continued to read it, in a good-lord-listen-to-this-one spirit.

[B. Hallward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Taken as a whole, Davidson's theories and readings are too speculative to be convincing and the book lacks sufficient focus. However his critiques of past scholarly treatment of ancient greek homosexuality are interesting and cogent, and the strongest part of the book.

[Monty Milne · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mass of interesting material, and an attractive narrative style (although it is a serious academic tome and not by any means a light read).

This is a revisionist work but what it does is illustrate complexity rather than offer solutions. We learn that nothing is as straight as it seemed - if Greek homosexuality was essentially pederastic then why the legal protection for minors? Why were relationships between adults of the same age group supported and encouraged in some contexts but subject to the death penalty in others? And what about the religious and spiritual importance of the subject - one of the most difficult things for 21st century readers to understand?

The problem is that Davidson doesn't really give us any answers, he just spends hundreds of pages taking us on an admittedly fascinating journey which doesn't reach any satisfactory conclusion. Right at the very end, he muses what it was all about, and suggests maybe it was all something to do with ancient initiation rites whereby adolescents marked the transition from boys to warriors, an initiation with roots in the ancient Indo-Aryan past. But that single sentence, so tantalising in its brevity, is a bit of a let down after wading through so much material to get there. The main thing I took away was that everything I thought I knew about the subject (thanks mainly to Sir Kenneth Dover et al) was much more uncertain and open to challenge than I had realised.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Explores the topic of legendary (and often infamous) "Greek Love" (aka male homosexual relationships). According to this author's research, there wasn't one simple tradition. Male-male romance and sex ranged from a usually-chaste adoration similar to the medieval "courtly love" tradition to outright male prostitution and everything in between: close friendships, wild crushes, intimate relationships and de-facto marriages. Surprise, surprise: "Greek Love" was as complex and baffling as...modern love and sex.

Much of this book is speculation, as ancient Greek is an especially complex language and the truthfulness of accounts is often in doubt.

Somewhat scholarly (with plenty of references) in scope. I'm sort of browsing it.

[Aidan · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a rather messy text at times, not the clearest read by all means. But it has its moments. There is fascinating information contained within the book, and the ending, especially, was very interesting. Davidson eventually put the Greeks into perspective with the Celts, the Irish, the Indo-Europeans, Scandinavians, and the Aryans (historical). That alone is a worthy development. He also finally mentioned Mycenaean palace culture, and the chariot-pairs from the early first millennium BCE, -- which he really should have gotten into a lot earlier than the concluding chapter of the whole opus.

Eventually, whether these little gems to be found here are worth it to wade through his messy parts, is for everyone to decide for himself.

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

I find it difficult to read non-fiction in an area that is totally outside of my field of knowledge. In many ways this book is also outside my field of interest, as I’m not that into ancient history and I mostly read it as a way of getting some sort of handle on Ancient Greece for an upcoming visit (to modern Greece), so I was doubly disadvantaged. The problem is that I like to critically engage with a text - challenge the author, connect the ideas with others I've heard, consider the implications for my own life - and if I am too far from home base I can't do any of these things.

One of the things I most look out for when I'm adrift in this way is inconsistencies. If someone can't keep their story straight, that's often a sign they're making stuff up. It's not always such a sign, as there are many reasons a story might not be watertight (believe victims of sexual assault!), but in the case of a non-fiction book it's a red flag. There are a few such instances in this book. The most obvious to me is the notion that sex with underage boys and adultery were both punishable by instant death in Athens (at some point, idk, classical period?). Firstly, this seems pretty wild. Adultery is a very common crime and if you executed everyone who committed it your hemlock supplies might end up running low. In fact, at one point Davidson himself cites evidence against this really being a punishment for adultery, but he fails to connect this discrediting with the earlier claim about sex with underage boys. Then in later parts he again uses the whole formulation - sex with underage boys and adultery were both punishable by instant death - as if it were still believable.

One other weird inconsistency is a big part of Davidson's argument is that Athenians couldn't have sex with boys under 18, and implies that this was a good thing (which obviously it was). However he then goes into depth on the idea that boys matured later in ancient times, and argues as if this further demonstrates Athenian abhorrence of having sex with children, but surely the opposite is the case. If you're having sex with an 18 year old who is physically less mature than 18 year olds today, aren’t you closer to sexual exploitation of children than if they matured at the same age as today?

Anyway, I think he overstates the importance of the age question. In trying to get my head around the puberty argument in the previous paragraph, I looked up the age of consent where I live. It’s 16, which is younger than Davidson’s claimed Athenian age of consent by two years. But more to the point, this age of consent doesn’t make it morally acceptable for me, at age 40, to have sex with a 16 year old boy. Nor would it be socially acceptable. Similarly, there’s potentially nothing morally wrong with two 15 year olds having sex. All of which is to say that you need a lot of cultural context to understand the role of age in sex and there is so little surviving evidence from ancient times that it’s hard to argue we have this.

Which, funnily enough, is where this book is at its strongest, when it’s explaining just how much interpolation and extrapolation is required when talking about Ancient Greece and particularly about sexuality. After a patchy opening section about the language of gay love in Ancient Greece which is at times confusing and other times charming and illuminating, the book hits its straps in a section called Sodomania. This is three chapters which look at how Greek homosex relations have been used in history and why they are such a contentious field. In revealing just how scant the historical record is, and how much work is involved in trying to build some sort of sophisticated understanding around it, Davidson gives a fascinating glimpse into the practice of ancient history. Could it be that one reason Ancient Greece figures so prominently in “Western” culture is that we have just enough surviving artefacts to make just about any argument we want about it but not enough artefacts to conclusively disprove anything? Of course, to some extent this puts the obsession with age which I discussed above into context. The notion of “Greek Love” was used in attempts to justify the molestation of children and the sexual exploitation of the young from at least the nineteenth century up to the 1970s. Some in the gay community still struggle to come to grips with the fact that Oscar Wilde, for instance, had sex with poor boys as young as 15, and maybe even younger. This book highlights the work that has been done by the study of Ancient Greece in the past to justify or at least contextualise this.

I’m surprised that this review has turned out as sceptical and negative as it has. I quite enjoyed the book. The writing is fun and lively, the ideas are thought-provoking. I have a much better understanding of Ancient Greece than I did before reading this book, and particularly how little we really know about what went on. Especially when you get beyond Athens, the historical record is very thin. This will help me read interpretive signs on my Greek trip with a grain of salt, as there is every likelihood their authors are at least partially guessing.

I've marked this book as "Read" even though I didn't ingest every word of it. I got well past halfway and skimmed the rest as it does contain a lot of information and some whole sections could be excised while others could be shortened. Anyone wanting to get the guts of it without having to get through 600 pages and without doing what I did and spending more time on early sections than later, possibly more interesting, ones, would be well served by reading the first chapter of each section. If things are going especially well, consider reading the second chapter of the second section as well.

[Liam Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned more from this one book about the greed of capitalists and how far from its ideology the GOP fell like milkweed seeds blown by an October zephyr over the meadows into a shallow creek to flow away to a lake and sink water logged to the bottom not to grow but maybe, just maybe to sprout if ever the lake dries up. Pinchot was a hero, Pulaski too, the Pulaskis are axes with hoes on the other end. Pulaski invented it and didn't get the patent. He got nothing from the GOP in office. Taft was an idiot and greedy like the NW Senator and logging and mining and railroaders. The end of the book is powerful, this is a story that needs to be told, it was told well by Egan.

[Spencer]

The Greeks & Greek Love: A Bold New Exploration of the Ancient World

[Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that is not kind to the slightly-interested reader. Perhaps this is not surprising considering it’s 700 pages, but I have always found it useful to know the “depth” of a book before I start it. For the deeply-interested reader, however, whether in the history of the homosexuality in general or the Greeks in particular, this book answers all the questions you could ever have. Starting from an almost 50 pages long discussion on the multiple words that Greeks used for “love”, Davidson strives mightily to give the reader all the context they would ever need. He accomplishes this through copious references to any and all primary sources at our disposal, from myths (and their endless variations), to speeches, plays, epic poems, etc. In this way, Davidson also discusses the wild swings in treating these texts, from the “asexual” reading of the Victorians to the “sodomania” he describes in the post-WWII scholarship. This was an unexpected but not unwelcome discussion, wherein Davidson links the evolving attitudes of the general society to the way they read these texts. The rest of the book, then, is free to speak at length about what Greek customs regarding homosexuality looked like in different parts of Greece, from Sparta to Crete to Athens, as well as the role it played in their mythology, history and even war. While the depth at which Davidson deals with this topic prevents me from recommending this book to the only-slightly-curious reader, I can definitively say that the read is worth the time of anyone who is driven mad by all the coyness around this topic and who just, truly, wants to understand what it was all about.

[Ângelo Merayo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book offers an extraordinarily comprehensive exploration of love and sexuality in Ancient Greece, with particular attention to male homosexuality. Davidson’s work is meticulously researched, drawing on an impressive range of sources and references—spanning the arts, literature, law and history.

One of the book’s greatest strengths lies in the way it challenges and dismantles longstanding misconceptions shaped by modern anachronism and homophobia. Davidson not only questions dominant narratives but carefully reconstructs a more nuanced and historically grounded understanding of same-sex desire in Ancient Greece.

It’s the sort of book that leaves you feeling genuinely enriched by the end. Insightful, engaging and intellectually rewarding, it’s essential reading for anyone interested in classical antiquity or the history of sexuality.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I debate between three and four stars. Davidson does an admirable job re-examining Greek love and challenging previous academic canon works such as Dover. But his laboured writing made the book hard to follow, especially when it spans over centuries and many different sub Greek cultures. One can get quite lost reading it.

[E. Trist · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dishonest drivel by a pseudo-historian gay propagandist. There are so many well-researched alternatives to this on the same subject which base themselves on the primary sources rather than making them up. There couldn't be anything less "bold"than reimagining the ancient Greeks as progressive 21st-century Americans.

[Norrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Davidson is an entertaining and excellent writer, I can see many reviewers claiming that this research is nonsense because homosexuality couldn't possibly have been prominent in ancient societies and have the nerve to call researchers ill-educated. Even when presented with evidence, they will still deny it. Well done Davidson

[Xander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well researched and enjoyable, although there are points that it drifts.

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I greatly enjoyed this, especially the challenge to Dover. Not flawless or definitive, but speculative and interesting.

[Zack Whitley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Davidson isn't really a storyteller and this book was probably too scholarly and deep to be my before-bedtime-reading. There's not a strong narrative and Davidson doesn't have that rare ability to reach general readers the way some other academic writers do, but this book is loaded with information (some of it interesting, some of it not) and I found myself enjoying this book more often than not.

[EJ Easlick · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was an excellent book, but kind of hard to follow. It would benefit from solid conclusions to each chapter that sum up the important points. Because it was kind of hard to discern what I was supposed to take on board within all the intricate detail. It was very well researched and is probably now the standard text on this topic. It is long and exhaustive, presenting everything germain to homosexuality in ancient Greece.