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Socrates and Alcibiades
Victorian view of the balance of affection and restraint between the most famous eromenos and erastes
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends (1868)
Greek love is a relatively modern coinage (generally placed within quotation marks) intended as a reference to male bonding and intimate relations between males as practised in Ancient Greece, as well as to its application and expression in more recent times, particularly in a 19th-century European context (See "Scholarly Examples of Its Use" below). The term is thus a synonym for pederasty, though it has also been loosely applied to homosexual behaviour in general.
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Institutional Greek pederasty, which sought to formalize the erotic relationship of an adult male (erastes) with an adolescent boy (eromenos), appeared on the Greek mainland, possibly from Crete, as early as the 7th century B.C. Both in Sparta and Athens, the bonding of adult men and adolescent boys was an established cultural and social phenomenon, associated with educational practices and the instilling of high civic and philosophical ideals. Apart from literary evidence - the Socratic dialogues of Plato, for example - there is also evidence from Greek vases displaying that the intimate association of men with boys was represented in a range of emotive and expressive guises. These relationships, however, often transcended the physical or the erotic, the adult being invested with responsibility for the moral and spiritual welfare of the boy: abuse or exploitation of the younger partner was not tolerated. The spiritual and educational aspects were the focus of what came to be known as \'Platonic love\'. John Addington Symonds encapsulates this relationship as:
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Intergenerational relationships of the kind portrayed by the "Greek love" ideal were increasingly disallowed within the Judaeo-Christian traditions of Western society, though there was more tolerance within Asian cultures until recent times. The Pashtun culture of modern-era Afghanistan is sometimes cited as a society where man-boy relationships - in many respects exhibiting similarities to the pattern of "Greek love" - were practised openly in the pre-Taliban days.[1] In Western Europe, ‘boy-love’ or boy-worship as an aesthetic ideal flourished within groups of artists and poets who drew inspiration from the Hellenic past, and who consciously identified with the art and mores of the ancients - for example, the Florentine Renaissance artists and the Oxford Hellenists in Victorian England. It is to the latter group of ‘Uranians’, as they were called, that we may look to identify a conscious awareness of pederasty as an essential ingredient of Hellenism, and the impulse to acknowledge and declare this aspect of life in Ancient Greece at a time when Victorian justice upheld the illegality of all male-male sexual relations. The Uranians embraced a number of distinguished men of letters, including William Johnson Cory, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and John Addington Symonds (see above).
‘Greek love’ as an expression would have been readily understood by those acquainted with the mores of the Ancients even before the Oxford Hellenists defined the focus of their Romantic impulses. Almost a century before, Byron and his school-mates at Harrow would have read the Classics and understood the meaning of the term, as recent biographers (CromptonCrompton, Louis:Byron and Greek Love - Homophobia in 19th century England. GMP Publishers Ltd 1998/The Cromwell Press. Introduction p.11 & MacCarthyMacCarthy, Fiona: Byron, Life and Legend. John Murray, London 2002. p.39) have suggested. The poet, Shelley, a pupil at Eton, immersed himself in Greek literature, his Platonic studies leading to an eventual translation of the Symposium (1818) and in the same year a ‘Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love’ which stands as the first published essay (after Bentham’s unpublished writings of 1785) on the subject of homosexuality. The significance of this document lies in its repudiation of the evasions of contemporary scholarship which had cast a veil over the reality of Greek love as a sexual practice. Shelley did however share the prejudices of his age regarding the physical expression of pederasty, but his essay can nevertheless be considered as ‘a pioneering work in a field not fully and freely explored by an English scholar until Kenneth Dover’s authoritative study of 1980’.Dover, K.J.:Greek Homosexuality. Harvard University Press, 1978. Postscript 1989 (Crompton)Crompton, Louis: Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England. London: Faber and Faber, 1985
If Shelley could hardly be termed an apologist for ‘Greek love’, John Addington Symonds was unequivocal in his admiration for the institutional practice of pederasty as ‘a social phenomenon of one of the most brilliant periods of human culture, in one of the most highly organised and nobly active races’. He defines the term:
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His Uranian colleagues were similarly persuaded, though it is necessary in evaluating their position as an historical group, to be aware not only of the different emphases and interpretations brought to bear on their ideal of pederastic love, but also of other contemporaneous theories and concepts of sexuality taking place elsewhere. This is crucial to an understanding of Greek love both in its original sense and its wider applications. While this clandestine group of neo-Hellenists was finding support and inspiration from an ancient culture, the voices of Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, Karl-Maria Kertbeny and Richard von Krafft-Ebing were being heard across Europe, articulating their theories of ‘homosexuality’ (coined by Kertbeny), sexual orientation and gender inversion which were to make an increasing impact in legal, medical and sociological circles. The Uranians, almost all classically-educated Oxonians, stood aside from such scientific controversies, secure in the knowledge of their spiritual, philosophical and emotional antecedents. Their Hellenic appellation derives from both Plato’s ‘heavenly’ love and the birth of Aphrodite as described in Hesiod (Theogony), but it should not be confused with ‘Urning’, a term coined by Ulrichs to denote ‘a female psyche in a male body’ (\'Urning\' also derives from Classical sources, particularly the Symposium). The Uranians did not see themselves in this light, and were also opposed to Ulrichs’s claims for androphilic, homoerotic liberation at the expense of the paederastic. (refer Uranian Poetry).
Further, the Uranians did not identify with the concept of ‘homosexual’. In the introduction to his ‘Love in Earnest’ (1970), Timothy D’Arch Smith writes:
Adult homosexuality, indeed, has little to do with the themes of the poets here treated who loved only adolescent boys and it is for this reason that I have deliberately eschewed the word ‘homosexual’. It is unpleasantly hybrid and modern psychiatrists would give another term to the boy-lover
a position which thirty years on found ready agreement in Michael Kaylor’s acknowledgment that the concept of the ‘homosexual’ was inapplicable to the dynamics of ‘boy-love’Kaylor, Michael Matthew: Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde. Brno, Czech Republic: Masaryk University Press, 2006 (pp.15 notes, xiv Preface, 58) [2] (The author has made this volume available in a free, open-access, PDF version.)
One cannot overlook in this apparent irony how the Uranians themselves saw their championing of the Hellenic ideal. Their immediate Hellenist precursors were the influential literary and reformist figures of Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, and Benjamin Jowett who had already set out the Grecian values of philosophy and education which provided fertile ground for their passionate adherents:
The immense spiritual significance of the Greeks is due to their having been inspired with this central and happy idea of the essential character of human perfection […] [It is] this wonderful significance of the Greeks [that has] affected the very machinery of our education, and is in itself a kind of homage to it. (Arnold)
Of the Greek authors who at the Renaissance brought a new life into the world Plato has had the greatest influence. The Republic of Plato is also the first treatise upon education, of which the writings of Milton and Locke, Rousseau, Jean Paul, and Goethe are the legitimate descendents. [….] He is the father of idealism in philosophy, in politics, in literature.(Jowett)
Through such statements, the Victorian ‘Greek chorus’ (as Kaylor described it) “unwittingly facilitated a ‘suspect’ aspect of the ‘Hellenic element’ that assisted in the emergence of the Uranians as a group, a ‘suspect’ aspect that linked the ‘essential character’ and ‘wonderful significance’ of the ancient Greeks to their celebration of paederastic love and its attendant pedagogical practices.”
Passion for youth and passion for the education and moral welfare of youth – such was the call to arms of the Oxford Hellenists who brought wisdom, learning, and instinctive perceptions bred by a highly cultivated aesthetic milieu. But the balance between pedagogic responsibility and pederastic inclination was (perhaps unsurprisingly) achieved with varying success: after all, the sober environment of Victorian England was a far cry from the blue skies of Hellas. For the Uranians and those who shared their desires, Kaylor identifies “two forms of erotic positioning in relation to this ‘boy-worship’— as well as the fulfilment and outcome of such an erotic attachment — one ‘conciliatory to social orthodoxies’, the other ‘pervasively dissident’. The three major figures highlighted in his study Hopkins, Pater and Wilde, “represent different responses to this ‘boy-worship’: Gerard Manley Hopkins sublimated most, if not all of his paederastic desires; Walter Pater seems to have actualised his paederastic desires only once, threatening his academic position so thoroughly that he sublimated thereafter, a choice that later matured into an appreciation for such sublimation; Oscar Wilde actualised most of his paederastic desires, a ‘madness for pleasure’ that ruined many lives, and not just his own.”
To what extent does the sexual world of the Uranians mirror the pederasty of the Ancients? Certainly the intergenerational aspect is clear, even if the ‘boy’ was occasionally in his late teens or early twenties i.e. older than the traditional ‘eromenos’; the pedagogical element so essential to the Greek experience (as William Percy is at pains to remind us in his Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece, 1996 ) was present except, for instance, in the case of Wilde, the dissident, though his writings can be construed as didactic and inspiringly so. Greek relationships were essentially asymmetrical, an aspect alluded to by the Uranians in their desire to emulate Grecian values within their own ‘culture’. Donald Mader viewed the use of these allusions as a “conscious and deliberate strategy for a sexual cultural politics through art” and as a “tool for valorization in a strategy for social acceptance.” He continues:
Surveying the allusions, one sees that they are largely to asymmetrical relationships, either clearly age-structured, or between a god and a mortal, or a warrior/hero and his protégé […], or various combinations of these. […] Such relationships today are regarded as inherently morally culpable, paternalistic and patronizing at best, exploitative or even ‘abuse’ at the worst; to hold up such relationships as an ideal is accordingly viewed either as self-justification on the part of the ‘superordinate’ party, or hypocrisy. Yet this inequality is part of the objective outline that Uranians saw in their Greek mirror; the Greek relationships were asymmetrical, and the Uranians saw themselves in this outline and filled in their own features.Mader, Donald H., The Greek Mirror: The Uranians and Their Use of Greece, Journal of Homosexuality, 49., 377-420
The dilemma for the Victorians, put succinctly by A.C. Benson, one of Pater’s first biographers, resided in the educational value attached to the ‘essential character’ of the Greeks and their sanctioned practice of paederastic pedagogy:
But if we give boys Greek books to read and hold up the Greek spirit and the Greek life as a model, it is very difficult to slice out one portion [the paederastic], which was a perfectly normal part of Greek life, and to say that it is abominable etc. etc.David Newsome, On the Edge of Paradise: A. C. Benson: The Diarist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p.192.
There are many examples of distinguished literary figures throughout history whose lives and writings provide a personal perspective on pederastic love as a phenomenon - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, George Gordon, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, André Gide, Thomas Mann, Stefan George, and Paul Goodman, to name but a few.
Since the publication in 1964 of Greek Love by J. Z. Eglinton (the pseudonym of Walter Breen),Eglinton, J. Z.: Greek Love. New York: Acolyte Press, 1964 [3] the term "Greek love" has been prominently solidified in Humanities scholarship, as is displayed by the fact that it is employed in the titles of books by major cultural critics, as, for example, Louis Crompton\'s Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England (1985),Crompton, Louis: Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England. London: Faber and Faber, 1985 David Halperin\'s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: and Other Essays on Greek Love (1990),Halperin, David M.: One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: and Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge, 1990 [4] and James Davidson\'s soon to be released The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece (expected in November 2007).Davidson, James: The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece. London: Orion Publishing, forthcoming November 2007 [5]
Examples of possible further topics to be considered under this title:
| Part of a series on Love |
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| Historically |
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| Courtly love |
| Greek love |
| Religious love |
| Types of emotion |
| Erotic love |
| Platonic love |
| Familial love |
| Puppy love |
| Romantic love |
| See also |
| Unrequited love |
| Problem of love |
| Sexuality |
| Sexual intercourse |
| Valentine\'s Day |
To display various contexts in which the term "Greek love" and its attendant concepts have been applied, consider the following chronological examples:
[As regards E. M. Forster\'s novel Maurice:] The first [half] is dominated by Plato and, indirectly, by John Addington Symonds and the apologists for "Greek love"; the second is dominated by Edward Carpenter and his translation of the ideas of Walt Whitman.Kellogg, Stuart: Literary Visions of Homosexuality. Binghamton, NY: Haworth, 1983 (pp. 35-36) [6] See also DeJean, Joan: "Sex and Philology: Sappho and the Rise of German Nationalism", in Re-Reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission, ed. by Ellen Greene. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. pp. 122-45 (pp. 139-40)
"Greek love" did not hold the central place in the history of lesbians as it did in the history of homosexual men.Aldrich, Robert: The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy. London: Routledge, 1993 (p. xi) [7]
One of the most impressionable students of the classics the English public schools have ever formed, Byron invested sexual desire only in Greek boys. For Byron "Greek love" means love of Greeks.Christensen, Jerome: "Setting Byron Straight: Class, Sexuality, and the Poet," in Romantic Poetry: Recent Revisionary Criticism, ed. by Karl Kroeber and Gene W. Ruoff. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Pp.290-299 (p. 291) [8]
In this context such late-Victorian writers as Pater, Symonds, and Wilde, urged by Victorian liberalism to save the English polity by taking Greek history and philosophy seriously, will begin to glimpse in Plato\'s defense of transcendental, "Uranian" love a vocabulary adequate to their own inmost hopes, and to see in "Greek love" itself the promise of a Hellenic individuality and diversity with the most positive implications for Victorian civilization.Dowling, Linda C.: Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994 (p. 66) [9]
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Winckelmann\'s, Goethe\'s, and Moritz\'s languages of self-fashioning do not, of course, operate in isolation. [...] They were languages evolving within the contours of an emerging and formative discourse of German Classical aesthetics – an aesthetics deeply indebted to notions of "Greek love".Gustafson, Susan E.: Men Desiring Men: The Poetry of Same-Sex Identity and Desire in German Classicism. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2002 (p. 11) [10]
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