Eros

The Myth Of Ancient Greek Sexuality

Bruce S Thornton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367315511
• eBook ISBN: 9780429980404
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality is a controversial book that lays bare the meanings Greeks gave to sex. Contrary to the romantic idealization of sex dominating our culture, the Greeks saw eros as a powerful force of nature, potentially dangerous and in need of control by society: Eros the Destroyer, not Cupid the Insipid, is what fired the Greek imagination. The destructiveness of eros can be seen in Greek imagery and metaphor, and in their attitudes toward women and homosexuals. Images of love as fire, disease, storms, insanity, and violence—top 40 song clichés for us—locate eros among the unpredictable and deadly forces of nature. The beautiful Aphrodite embodies the alluring danger of sex, and femmes fatales like Pandora and Helen represent the risky charms of female sexuality. And homosexuality typifies for the Greeks the frightening power of an indiscriminate appetite that threatens the stability of culture itself. In Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Seualily, Bruce Thornton offers a uniquely sweeping and comprehensive account of ancient sexuality free of currently fashionable theoretical jargon and pretensions. In its conclusions the book challenges the distortions of much recent scholarship on Greek sexuality. And throughout it links the wary attitudes of the Greeks to our present-day concerns about love, sex, and family. What we see, finally, are the origins of some of our own views as well as a vision of sexuality that is perhaps more honest and mature than our own dangerous illusions.

PART ONE
The “Controlless Core”

ONE

The “Tyrant of Gods and Men”

LET’S START WITH a famous “love story” from ancient Greece, as told by Apollonius of Rhodes in his Voyage of the Argo (ca. 250 B.C.).

The handsome young hero Jason has been sent on a quest for the Golden Fleece by his wicked uncle Pelias, who hopes Jason will never return from such a perilous journey. After many dangerous adventures, Jason and his Argonauts, the flower of Greek heroism who accompany him, reach the exotic land of Colchis, whose king, Aeetes, understandably is loath to part with the fabulous fleece. At this point the goddesses Hera and Athena enlist the aid of Aphrodite, who bribes her roguish young son Eros to make the beautiful daughter of Aeetes, the enchantress Medea, “fall in love” with Jason. Overwhelmed by “love,” Medea uses her magic knowledge to help Jason overcome the impossible tasks her father has set for him—yoking fire-breathing bulls and conquering the “earthborn men” who spring from the plowed soil—and to charm the serpent guarding the fleece. They make their escape with the fleece and, after further adventures, return to Greece as husband and wife. Once again, “love” has conquered all.

Told in this fashion, the story of Jason and Medea is easily understandable in terms of our modern assumptions about love and sex. We find it admirable that Medea would give up her father and country for love. Our sexual idealism tells us that such intense sexual passion is a good, perhaps the Good, in comparison to which all other goods become insignificant, and for the attainment of which any sacrifice is justified. For the ultimate fulfillment of the individual can happen only when he loses himself in a sexual relationship whose intensity signifies the depth and meaning of the essence of a person, his spirit or soul or “true self,” a self defined in opposition to society and its rules and institutions. And the unique, magical nature of passion is reinforced by the fabulous details and locales, the exotic lands and monstrous serpents and fire-breathing bulls. Hence we approve of Medea because she lives up to the Romance Paradigm, like Juliet or Iseult or Guinevere or their thousands of descendants populating countless novels, films, plays, advertisements, and popular songs. “Deny thy father and refuse thy name”— this is our Romantic credo when it comes to sexual passion.

But our sexual idealism has little or nothing to do with what’s going on in Apollonius’s story, and an understanding of Jason and Medea’s relationship in the misleading terms I have sketched it would miss completely its import for an ancient Greek. Not that Apollonius of Rhodes does not reflect certain conditions similar to those that nourish Romantic Love—that’s why it’s so easy to fit Jason and Medea into a modern romantic mold, as did the screenwriters of the film Jason and the Argonauts, which ends with the couple kissing safely on their getaway boat. Apollonius, after all, wrote in the mid–third century B.C., in that new world we call Hellenistic, created in the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s spectacular carnage. In this new world Aristotle’s old “polis-dwelling animals,” men who had defined themselves as parts of the polis whole that encompassed the religious, social, political, and artistic dimensions of their existence, had begun to transform into individualists, people and poets for whom the private and the everyday cohabited with the exotic and recherché. For them the quality of personal emotional experience and sensibility—including of course sex and love—was more important than the donkeylike braying of grand political and epic themes rendered moot anyway by the imperial bureaucratic machines of Alexander’s successors. But despite an individualistic social and cultural milieu conducive to the obsessive concern with sex and to an erotic sensibility that are the fertile soil of sexual idealism, Apollonius’s story and erotic imagery are understandable only in terms of a long Greek tradition of thinking about eros as an inhuman force of nature destructive and chaotic, overthrowing the mind and orders of civilization.

A closer look at the details and imagery in Apollonius recovers for us that tradition and its complexity, for his poem is a storehouse of traditional Greek erotic metaphors. Take Eros, for instance, the little scamp who wounds Medea with his bow. In Apollonius we first meet him playing knucklebones, an ancient form of dice, with Zeus’s boy-love Ganymede, and cheating him blind—a naughty, greedy little boy easily bribed with some new toy, scolded by his mother Aphrodite, whom he easily gets around. The whole scene is redolent of middle-class domesticity and familial psychology, and our own Eros or, more frequently, Cupid—the chubby putto that adorns a million Valentine’s Day cards—is easily recognizable in Apollonius’s spoiled brat. But this view of Eros as Aphrodite’s cute but troublesome son is a late one, and when we begin to inquire into his lineage we find something very different from our greeting-card Cupid, something more frightening and monstrous, something closer to what Medea experiences when the boy leaves the serene, blissful halls of Olympus and enters our world of chaos and death.¹

Hesiod places the birth of Eros very early in the story of creation: He simply appears with Tartarus and Earth out of Chaos, the mysterious “chasm” filled with darkness. This parentage makes Eros a force of nature, one of the fundamental primal building blocks of the cosmos. Variations on his descent give him the same inhuman identity. Acusilaus, a little-known writer of the early fifth century who presumed to correct Hesiod, makes Night and Erebus, Homer’s underworld, Eros’s mother and father. Sappho has him born of Heaven and Earth, and Alcaeus of Iris and Zephyr, the rainbow and the west wind, certainly a more romantic mother and father to our sensibilities, though we should always remember that the gods and nature, no matter how beautiful, remain for the Greeks alien inhuman forces. Even the more famous anthropomorphic parents of Eros first given him by Simonides, Aphrodite and Ares, are redolent of disorder and violence, for Ares of course is the god of war, most hateful of the gods, and he passes on to his son some of his martial destructiveness. What these various antecedents show us is an Eros as elemental stuff of existence and one of the primal forces of nature, far removed from Apollonius’s cute rogue, let alone Watteau’s rosy-bummed cherubs.²

Eros, though, is not just a boylike god. He is sexual desire, and when Apollonius’s Eros reaches earth, he leaves behind the domestic serenity of Olympus and becomes a concrete embodiment of sexual desire, a representation of how sex attacks the mind, something simultaneously out there in nature and inside us. Hence Eros/eros has a double life in Greek literature: an anthropomorphic god, but also the inhuman force of sexual attraction inherent in every living creature, “the race of mountain-dwelling and sea-dwelling whelps, as many creatures as the earth rears and the sun looks upon,” as the Chorus of the Hippolytus sings as it witnesses the destruction of prim Phaedra’s sanity by forbidden sexual desire for her priggish stepson Hippolytus. Human beings also are not exempt from this defining force that is “seated in the souls of men,” according to Xenophon, or as Plato puts it, is one of the “puppet’s strings” that make our bodies dance. And Eros/eros rules the gods too. Even Zeus, king of the gods and embodiment of cosmic order, must obey this “most unconquerable” god, as Euripides calls him, this “tyrant of gods and men.” Everything that moves and breathes is under the sway of this necessary power.³

The power of eros, moreover, is magnified and given wider scope by being implicated in all the other desires and appetites in the human soul. In ancient Greek the noun or verb forms of eros occur in contexts not explicitly sexual and usually imply a desire destructively excessive, something like our use of the word “lust” to describe a powerful desire for something other than sex. In Homer eros sometimes is used to mean simple desire, as in the delightful formula used after one of those Homeric feasts of broiled beef-chines and baskets of bread: “When they had set aside their eros for food and drink,” or in Priam’s cry to his wife Hecuba, trying to dissuade him from his journey to beg the mangled body of Hector from Achilles, that he would just as soon die once he had held his son in his arms and “set aside his eros for lamentation.”⁴

But usually the implication of destructive excess, of overwhelming desire sexual in its intensity, colors the use of eros in what are not sexual situations, creating an effect nearly impossible to duplicate in English. In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Klytaimestra, having heard of the sack of Troy and the imminent homecoming of Agamemnon, hopes that “no eros to violate what they shouldn’t fall upon the army”—a lie, of course, since she’s planning the assassination of her husband to avenge the sacrifice of their daughter Iphigeneia for a fair wind to Troy and to give the kingdom to her lover Aegisthus. Ironically, the “eros to violate what one shouldn’t” describes Klytaimestra’s own excessive sexual passion and violence, her own various confused “lusts.” Euripides exploits the same complex richness of the word eros in his Bacchae. The straight-laced Pentheus, his own sexual ambivalence soon to be exposed by the god Dionysus, whom Pentheus has been trying to drive from the city, says he will pay anything to witness the orgies of the Maenads, which he imagines are filled with sexual riot. Dionysus reveals his intuition of the real motive of the prince, sexual obsession, when he asks Pentheus, “Why have you fallen on this great eros?”—indeed, Pentheus will fall, literally and metaphorically, from the pine tree he climbs to gratify voyeuristically the eros within him he has failed to control, that has led him to the humiliation of dressing up as a woman.⁵

Prose writers use eros in the same way to indicate desires whose near-sexual intensity leads to a destructive excess. Herodotus says that the Spartan Pausanias, commander of the combined Greek forces that defeated the Persians at Plataea in 479, had an “eros” to be a tyrant over all of Greece, a desire that led him to marry a Persian princess. Once again, sex is found implicated in other irrational and destructive desires, here the lust for political power beyond the accepted bounds of the city-state whether oligarchic or democratic. Even the “objective” Thucydides can take advantage of these connotations of the word. He communicates the mindless enthusiasm of the Athenians for the attack on the rich, powerful, distant city-state of Syracuse—one of the world’s greatest military disasters, undertaken for seemingly no logical purpose whatsoever—when he says that “eros” for the expedition “attacked” the Athenians (the identical phrase, by the way, that the orator Isocrates later uses to describe another famous armada, the Greek attack on Troy). The Athenians didn’t just want to attack Syracuse, they lusted for it, were attacked as if from without by a powerful force that blinded them to the prophetic warnings of the general Nicias, who tried to dissuade them.⁶

So much for that cute boy cheating Ganymede at dice. Eros is much more sinister than our etiolated Hallmark Cupid—it is a force of nature, a window into the irrational where swarm myriad other desires whose excess leads to our destruction, something very different from our “love,” and that is why to say Medea “falls in love” with Jason is to distort and trivialize her experience, as though eros were a mud puddle passively awaiting the unwary. Greek eros rather is something that actively conquers, that tames and breaks and subdues. We can see this characterization of sexual desire in a verb frequently used with eros, damazo, “tame,” “break,” “overpower,” “conquer,” “kill.” Zeus, seduced by his sister-wife Hera so that he forgets about the fighting between the Greeks and Trojans, thus giving the Greeks a respite from Hector’s carnage, says to her, “Never yet has eros for a goddess or a woman so encompassed and conquered the heart in my breast” and goes on to enumerate by name, with a male tactlessness only the king of the gods could get away with, all the other nymphs and mortal women he had seduced.⁷

But “conquers” here doesn’t adequately communicate the full range of meanings contained in the Greek. Elsewhere in Homer this same verb is used to describe the breaking of a horse, a warrior killing another, and the sexual subjection of a young girl to her husband;⁸ thus a wife is a damar, a “thing conquered/ tamed/broken/subdued,” and an unmarried girl is admês, “unwed,” “untamed,” “wild,” as Homer calls the ingenue Nausicaa, the pert Phaiacian maiden who boldly confronts a naked and sea-battered Odysseus, who has washed ashore on her island, and craftily flirts with him all the way to the city. Sappho plays on these various shades of meaning in this word when she describes the young girl’s confession to her mother that she can’t weave her web because she is “conquered with desire” for a young boy. Weaving, the training for the young girl’s proper role as a wife “subdued” by her husband, is here interrupted by her subjection to an illicit sexual passion. Eros doesn’t just “conquer” the heart, it attacks the mind, breaks the will like a horse-tamer breaking a horse, lays low the soul like death.⁹

This is precisely the effect that Apollonius’s Eros, once he leaves the trivial serenity of Olympus, has on the unfortunate Medea, as can be seen in the traditional images and metaphors Apollonius uses to describe the impact of Eros. Consider the scene in which he shoots Medea with an arrow, an image for us that is the dullest of clichés:

Meantime Eros passed unseen through the grey mist,

causing confusion, as when against grazing heifers

rises the gadfly, which oxherds call the breese. And

quickly beneath the lintel in the porch be strung

his bow and took from the quiver an arrow

unshot before, messenger of pain…. Gliding

close by Aeson’s son [Jason] he laid the arrow

notch on the cord in the center, and drawing wide

apart with both hands he shot at Medea; and speechless

amazement seized her soul…. And the bolt burnt deep

down in the maiden’s heart, like a flame; and ever she

kept darting bright glances straight up at Aeson’s son,

and within her breast her heart panted fast through

anguish, and her soul melted with the sweet pain….

So, coiling around her heart, burnt secretly Love the

destroyer; and the hue of her soft cheeks went and came;

now pale, now red, in her soul’s distraction.¹⁰

Consider the wealth of images and metaphors Apollonius uses here: the familiar bow and arrow, from war; the gadfly and the snake (“coiling”), from nature; fire, in the bolt burning like a flame; disease, in the elevated heartbeat and the pain; insanity, in the “speechless amazement” and the distracted soul or mind. These images come from a long tradition of Greek literary depictions of Eros and present us with a description of Eros’s impact on Medea much more sinister and serious than the modern reader might realize. In the following sections of this chapter we will look more closely at this tradition of imagery that Apollonius self-consciously manipulates and exploits and that despite the poet’s literary self-consciousness and slightly ironic manipulation suffuses his scene with an awareness of eros’s destructive power that we moderns have sugarcoated with our Romantic idealism.

But when we look at this imagery from disease, madness, arrows, or fire, we have to remember that these metaphors are effectively dead for us, used so much for 2,500 years that they have little specific direct impact. When we hear Elvis sing of a “hunk of burning love,” Patsy Cline call herself “crazy,” Hank Williams complain of the “lovesick blues,” or Sam Cooke ask Cupid to “draw back his bow,” the metaphors, dulled by repetition, can’t conjure concrete images that really move us, that as Keats says we can “feel on our pulses.” Remember too that these images for the Greeks related more directly to their everyday experience. We don’t depend daily on fire for our energy, and so are not as subjected to its power. But ancient peoples had to use fire every day, and the widespread use of wood as a building material meant that accidental fires were frequent, the damage extensive, the resultant injuries excruciatingly painful. Thus the impact of Homer’s simile comparing the Trojan warriors’ attack on the beleaguered Greeks to a “savage fire attacking a city of men, suddenly kindled, blazing, and houses are destroyed in the great blaze.”¹¹

Or how many of us have experienced arrow wounds, one of the most dangerous and painful of all injuries? Seven decades ago, Hemingway could give his Count Mippipopo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Translation
• Introduction: “Custom the King of All”
• Part One The “Controlless Core”
• Part One The “Fancied Sway”
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Critical Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index