Imagine if future archaelogists dug through 20 feet of decomposed human faeces and unearthed a 1970s-era adult bookshop in San Francisco. Finding a few faded copies of Hot Rods magazine, they conclude that Western civilisation for thousands of years had openly celebrated homosexuality.
Absurd, right? After all, it was only slightly less than a century ago that homosexuality was illegal in most Western countries. Aside from the law, public opprobrium was so complete that most exposed homosexuals became social outcasts. Violence against homosexuals was depressingly common.
Yet, we are regularly treated to a no-less absurd assertion about Ancient Greece. It’s an almost universally accepted myth that Ancient Greece was a hotbed of non-stop pillow-biting and Pride parades. But no matter how many people believe it, that doesn’t make it true.
The basis of this commonly-accepted belief is a handful of classical sources, taken wildly out of context and exaggerated beyond credence, by activists posing as scholars.
So, what was the truth about Hellenic homo-humping?
The first thing that must be borne in mind is that “Ancient Greece” was not a uniform culture, either in time or in space. Classical Greece spanned about 2,000 years (from the birth of Minoan civilisation to conversion of the Eastern Roman empire, say, or the Gothic invasions of the third century). It was also spread across dozens of major (and up to 1,000 minor) city-states. Although these shared much in common, such as the Greek language, they could also be as wildly divergent as Athens and Sparta.
Pretending that “Ancient Greece” was a homogeneous entity is as ridiculous as arguing that 10th-century Britain was the “same” as 20th-century Sweden.
It’s also ridiculous to argue that, even if homosexuality was more-or-less tolerated or accepted in Ancient Greece, that was the same as ‘gay culture’ today. Or that homosexuality necessarily has anything in common with, say, transgenderism, not to mention the whole, questionable edifice of “Queer Theory”. Indeed, many “LGB” people today are openly hostile to the “TQ+” lobby.
No matter what some of them may have thought about homosexuality, there’s no reason to believe the Greeks would have been any different.
So, on what basis is the ‘pro-LBGT+ Greece’ claim made?
One of the primary pieces of supposed evidence is the claim that many Greek sculptures and paintings show men in romantic or sexual relationships with other men. But, how many is “many”? What percentage of surviving Greek sculptures and paintings do they comprise? And do they really show a permissive or approving attitude of homosexuality?
A dominant surviving medium of Greek art is pottery. According to K J Dover, who wrote Greek Homosexuality (1978), about 600 such pieces contain what may even be considered homosexual themes. This sounds like a knock-down argument then, that the Greeks were really into bum-stuff. Except when you consider that those are only 600 of more than 80,000 surviving pieces. Or about 0.75 per cent.
This makes this corpus of ‘homosexual art’ about as significant as a copy of Saucy Schoolboys found stashed behind the shelves of the state library.
Even so, that number alone does nothing to qualify what the potteries really depict. In fact, only a few dozen even depict explicitly sexual acts or themes. Even of those few dozen, some depict mythical creatures – satyrs being particularly common.
But satyrs were most certainly not the depiction of homosexuality that the “LGBTQ+” lobby would have us believe. In Greek culture, satyrs were wild, bawdy, half-animals that were usually depicted with exaggerated erections. Satyrs partly functioned as a kind of crude joke – think of the classic comedy “poof” – or as a representation of the darker, more bestial, side of human sexuality. In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades pays Socrates a backhanded compliment, comparing him to a satyr in both looks and manner: “insulting and abusive… acts as if he knows nothing”. “A savage and wild people,” according to Pliny, who also called them “perverted” and “horrible”.
They were often depicted as trying to seduce or outright rape human women – usually without much success. In fact, satyrs are almost always depicted in the company of women. Their lusty attempts with women having presumably failed, satyrs are sometimes depicted as resorting to masturbation and bestiality.
All in all, such Greek art hardly seems to be the glowing endorsement of homosexuality that moderns would wish.
But Dover even more tendentiously interprets what are plainly heterosexual intercourses as apparently “homosexual”. For instance, Dover claims that the fact that “vase-painters most commonly represent heterosexual intercourse as penetration from the rear, the man standing and the woman bending over” somehow indicates a coded homosexuality. In another example, a man gesturing to his bared buttocks is, even Dover admits, quite possibly an insulting gesture, or that “the resemblance of the position of his arm and hand to a pointing gesture is accidental”. Dover even interprets obvious battle scenes – presumably because they featured naked warriors – as homosexual.
All in all, the claim that homosexuality is “commonly depicted” in Greek art is obviously a wild exaggeration, if not an outright confabulation. Nor does it do anything to advance the case that Greeks saw homosexuality as ‘normal’ or ‘beautiful’.
The vast surviving corpus of Greek literature does little justify the claim, either.
One of the biggest hurdles for moderns claiming to interpret Greek, or indeed, many ancient cultures, or even modern cultures, is the boorishness of the contemporary mind. For too many Westerners today, ‘love’ is synonymous with ‘sex’. Hence we see the proliferation of the claim that the characters of Frodo and Sam, in The Lord of the Rings books and films, are ‘gay’. When Sam says, “I love him”, calls Frodo “dear Mr Frodo” and tenderly strokes his hand, what else can it be, moderns think, but more-or-less homosexuality?
It’s because moderns are unable to distinguish between what the Greeks called philos, agape, and eros. Those three words, which all loosely translate as love, meant very different things. Things which cultures other than the contemporary West clearly understood.
To the Greeks, the agape was the highest form of love, and it covered everything from reverence for the dead, to communal affection, to the love for a spouse or family. Philos, similarly, referred to an intense, but non-sexual love, but most often to a ‘brotherly love’. This is the ‘love’ that Sam feels for Frodo, or Achilles for Patroclus. Australians and New Zealanders would understand it as ‘mateship’.
Finally, there was eros. Eros specifically refers to sexual attraction – and was often depicted rather harshly by the Greeks. Eros, to the Greeks, was an uncontrollable attraction, as depicted by Eros’s arrows striking their victims. Such erotic fixation often ended badly: Eros’s arrow striking Paris caused him to abduct Helen and ultimately bring about the destruction of Troy. In plays such as the Bacchae, the frenzied lust of the Maenads leads them to tear animals, even the youth Pentheus, to pieces.
As referred to earlier, Achilles and Patroclus are depicted in The Iliad as particularly close comrades-in-arms. When Patroclus dies in Achilles’ stead, Achilles is thrown into deep mourning, in similar fashion to Andromache’s lamentation for her slain husband, Hector. Does this mean they were gay? Many moderns think it obvious. Yet, even Homer was clear that both men slept with women, and that Achilles had sex with women – and never is he described explicitly as having sex with men. Still, some Classical Greek sources thought they were really were homosexual – but just as many argued that this was a grave error of misinterpretation.
Another aspect of Greek that causes much confusion is the practice of pederasty. Some later Greek writers thought that the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus was pederastic. But, while pederasty today exclusively refers to paedophilic sexual molestation of boys, in Ancient Greece, it meant something very different.
Pederasty was, in Greece, an intensely close relationship between a man and a boy. The lower limit for a boy seems to have been 12: anything younger was seen as deeply inappropriate. Instead, it seems that the pederastic relationship in Ancient Greece was most often closer to mentor and pupil. Did some pederastic relationships turn sexual? It seems so – and that was viewed little better than a teacher seducing a student today would be. Plato wrote that an older man who could not control his lust shamed himself and brought shame on another. Xenophon likewise stated that a physical relationship between teacher and student was unacceptable.
Bear in mind, too, that those trying to yoke Ancient Greek pederasty to the rainbow bandwagon are making a strange claim, indeed. They are, after all, arguing that Athenians buggering boys two and a half millennia ago justifies the LGBTQ+ agenda today. So, what are they saying, exactly?
Even allowing, though, for some tolerance of male homosexuality, that still doesn’t make Greece at all “LGBTQ+”. To do so completely ignores all of the letters of the ‘rainbow’, bar two: the G and the B. The L, T, and Q+ don’t even get a look-in.
An overwhelmingly patriarchal society, the Greeks apparently cared little for and wrote even less about female sexuality, especially lesbianism. One of the few sources to explicitly do so, Plato, describes lesbianism as heretical (rejecting Aphrodite’s rules) and “not seemly”. In fact, he describes homosexuality in general as “an outrage of nature” and a capital crime.
The sole possible depiction of lesbian sexual activity, an Attic red vase, may show one woman fingering another – or may just depict one prostitute grooming another’s pubic hair.
There is, of course, the poet Sappho, who wrote love poetry directed at both males and females. But, with the sole exception of a single fragment, these never refer to eros, sexual activity. The text, like much of Sappho’s poems, is fragmentary and broken, so interpreting it definitively is as much an act of the interpreter’s prejudices as anything else.
you anointed yourself all over, and on soft beds … delicate … you have satisfied desire …
Make of that what you will. But a single line, out of 650 surviving lines from a projected 10,000 lines of poetry, hardly seems justification for making a strong claim.
As for the “TQ+”, they simply didn’t exist in the Greek mind. While Greek literature and mythology contains several characters who were transformed from one sex to another, or in the case of Hermaphroditus, both, this is nothing like the modern ideology of transgenderism. For instance, the Cretan hero Seproites was transformed into a woman – as punishment for seeing the goddess Artemis naked.
Hermaphroditus’s dual sex was the result of a failed rape attempt by a female nymph. It is generally thought that this myth was an ancient religious symbolism of marriage: the literal union of male and female.
Certainly, the idea that ‘gender is separate from sex’, and that men can become women, or vice-versa, at will, would be laughable, indeed offensive to the Ancient Greeks. As indeed would the whole concept of a modern-day ‘gay lifestyle’. Same-sex marriage would have horrified them. “Queer”, the very, very modern ideology of Queer Theory, would have mystified them, at best.
Finally, using any ancient culture as a hobby horse for modern ideologies is a dangerous exercise. Even if the Greeks openly tolerated homosexuality (as we see, this is very far from proven), they also tolerated, indeed celebrated, the oppression of women, slavery, capital punishment, torture, genocide and much, much more. Can we justify all of those because ‘the Ancient Greeks did it’?
The past really is another country – and you wouldn’t want to live there.