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Eros: The Myth Of Ancient Greek Sexuality

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First of all, ignore the ridiculous Kirkus review of this book! Bruce Thorton's "Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality" is a badly needed voice of sanity on this subject. Indeed, as Thorton himself says, "Most of the writing on ancient sexuality these days grinds the evidence in the mill of an 'advocacy agenda' supported by some fashionable theory that says more about the crisis of Western rationalism than it does about ancient Greece." He could have been talking about the Kirkus review. By thoroughly examining the ancient sources themselves, Thornton reveals what the Greeks actually thought and said about sexual relationships.

The Greeks understood, perhaps, something we moderns do not; the Greeks understood the "inhuman chaos of nature" and perceived human order as the triumph of the mind and culture over the brute forces of nature. Eros, Thornton explains, is not "love" but "sexual desire." It is a representation of how sex attacks the mind and breaks man's will. Eros is a "disease of the soul." Consequently, sexual attraction as madness is a theme that recurs throughout Greek literature. The Greeks saw sex and violence as two sides of the same irrational coin.

To the Greek way of thinking, mind must control the irrational. Subjection to passion and appetite is a form of slavery. The Greeks understood that women possess "a power that speaks to the irrational in men." And ultimately, "what disturbs men about women is what disturbs men about themselves...." Unlike those who would like to portray women as powerless victims of a male patriarchy, Thorton shows how and why the Greeks saw female erotic power as dangerous; it intensifies the chaotic passion of all humans. Women in ancient Greece were not powerless; "one does not fear what one perceives to be powerless." As Thorton points out, "The modern reductive view of Greek women as oppressed victim tells us very little about antiquity yet quite a lot about the late-twentieth-century politics of victimhood...."

Thornton does discuss pederasty and the symposium in his book and places them in their proper context. The habitually passive homosexual was considered unnatural and an aberation in the Greek world. He goes on to explain why the family and the production of heirs and future citizens was so important; legitimacy was much more important for an ancient Greek than it is in our modern society. He explains why the Greek wife, unlike her depiction in so many recent works, was so crucial to the smooth functioning of the society. The quality most sought after in a wife was self-control as she was the person charged with the management of the household. The Greek household was not a simple home as we moderns recognize it. Household management was an important function that included the management of the slaves, raising the children, the spinning of wool, the weaving of cloth, and overseeing agriculture as well as a hundred other crucial tasks. Many Greek households were mini-factories or estates. Greek men and women formed a joint enterprise.

This is a work of sanity that returns to what the Greeks themselves actually said about sexual relations. It presents a more balanced picture of Greek sexuality than the many writings that depict the Greeks as some sort of aberrant culture in order to further a political agenda. Sure they were different than we are, but human nature has pretty much remained constant over the last several thousand years. Perhaps that is Thornton's greatest sin in the eyes of some; he dares to portray women in ancient Greece as not powerless victims, but partners in the joint management of Greek society. Read this book if you want a clearer picture of what the Greek world was all about.

This is a superb treatment of Greek sexuality and culture in general, and anyone interested in a clear-eyed, unbiased look at ancient culture should buy it and read it carefully. Thornton presents a well-documented, convincing case that the Greeks viewed sexuality as enticing, necessary...and potentially very destructive. Thornton even dares to draw moral lessons for our own times from the thoughts and actions of the Greeks. The viciousness and malice of the Kirkus review presented above shows just how badly we academics need authors with Thornton's combination of courage and erudition. And it shows just how much truth can sting. Buy this book, but be careful when you start it--you won't be able to put it down till you're finished!

The Kirkus review of this book does indeed demonstrate the cheap moral superiority of our smug twentieth century.If you are tired of the feminist orthodoxy cant that passes for "thought," read this book.

Dr. Thornton's views are from a "Greek" perspective and his conclusions can't be judged by modern standards of love and romance. The discussion of Odysseus and Penelope's relationship is very enlightening. It is perhaps the best discussion of marriage in the ideal sense that I have ever read. As a matter of fact, it is an inspiration. I re-read my Homer. Waiting for Odysseus

Well, no, actually, I don't like it. But my review isn't for people who don't like it but for people who do. You are being sold a bill of goods here. And I'm sorry for you.

I've been reading Bruce Thornton's book for a few days and I feel it necessary to comment because I see that many of the favorable reviews of his book take Thornton's assessment of his place in scholarship at face value. Thornton (and his work buddy VD Hansen) both assert that Thornton's scholarship holds the line against a torrent of wrong think from other scholars who unfairly bring their modern political biases to bear on the Greeks and use them to score modern political points. In order to make this argument Thornton has to bring his modern political biases and partisan political approach to bear to make the Greeks themselves rebut Thornton's perceived enemies. As we anthropologists say: its turtles all the way down.

Thornton's point, which he makes over and over and over again, is that if you thought that the ancient Greeks were modern romantics, you'd be wrong. For instance, if all you knew about Jason and Medea came from seeing the execrable Hollywood movie "Jason and the Argonauts" you might think that Jason and Medea were just like Romeo and Juliet...or that nice witchy woman with the wrinkling nose in some suburban sit com! As I pointed out to my children you might also think that sea serpents were made of cardboard and moved by wires. But mercifully no modern scholars that I know aside from Camille Paglia (the only woman of whom Thornton approves) bothers with this kind of cheap comparison. In academia, when you pick a straw man interlocutor to bounce your ideas off of, we generally discover you don't have much to offer to the real discussion. This is Thornton's problem. He is writing against a stupid reader of Greek sources who doesn't really exist.

Thorntons argument at the level of linguistics and semantics is quite obvious and straightforward. Some of the surviving sources and a close linguistic analysis show that Eros, for the greeks, was quite a difficult and destructive force. They even used metaphors for war to describe desire! And, conversely, they used metaphors for sex and desire to describe war. They used the phrase "arrows of love" and "piercing" to describe the the moment that love strikes. Of course even today we use metaphors to connect disparate things and create new images. But for us, Thornton asserts, these metaphors are "frozen" and therefore meaningless and banal. But there is quite a bit of evidence in his own book that many of these images were both frozen, banal, and even risible to the Greeks themselves. For example the very word "eros" was clearly used as an extension of the word lust, desire, hunger, and want as in the Homeric use of the word to describe a mere desire for a good meal. Today we might use the word "jones"--a word that comes from the drug culture and which for people with an addiction means something pretty serious. But when we use the term we don't really necessarily mean we are really addicted to something. We just mean we want it.

When a metaphor connects two disparate things to each other the metaphoric connection goes in both directions. When a woman's eyes are compared to arrows that pierce a man it is of course trivially true that the pain of the wound is one aspect of the metaphor. But another aspect is distance, things acting at a distance. Apollo's arrows also act from a distance when they bring disease and death to the troops in the Iliad. While Greeks had a great experience of warfare and physical pain I don't think Thornton is under the impression that they never experienced lust, love, and the sex act as quite pleasurable in and for themselves. While choosing a handy metaphor for connection/action at a distance (the arrow) the fact of the matter is that unless sex was quite different for the Greeks than for the rest of humanity almost all adult males and females enjoyed sex, orgasm, and pleasure and would have as readily associated a beautiful girl's glance with pleasure as with pain. And, naturally, all the metaphors about sex in Lysistrata are also about war, but war is also about sex and treated rather good humoredly. I mean, its true that after guns we no longer look at battering rams as all that big a deal and no doubt a greek city state regarded battering rams as rather serious in time of war. But we joke about serious things all the time, and use serious imagery all the time, without being unable to tell the difference between the penis as battering ram and a real thing.

Thornton's big insight, as he sees it, is to continually assert that no modern people have real knowledge of (variously) fire, death, pain, arrow wounds, bullet wounds (except people living in ghettos!), famine, suffering or the disorders of the natural world. Apparently no one he knows in California has survived an earthquake, forest fire, landslide, unmedicated childbirth, war (no vietnam vets, no wwII vets, no battlefield nurses, no cambodian refugees, no bosnian refugees, no torture victims) etc..etc...etc... His other big point is that it is specifically effeminate male scholars, feminists, romantics, englightenment people, etc...who refuse, for political reasons, to recognize the greeks really hated and feared the potential disorder brought about by uncontrolled and uncontrollable eros. Well. No. Thornton's position as student of Greek history isn't any more realistic, or priviliged, or authoritative than anyone else's. One could, for example, grasp that Romantic visions of madness would not be greek visions of madness without asserting that greek visions of madness were any more real, or accurate, than Romantic ones (or Freudian for that matter). Feminists who want to study Sappho, or Greek women generally, aren't under any more modern illusions than Thornton who wants to read back into the Greeks his particular late twentieth century white male anxieties about lack of masculinity, loss of warlike strength, and fear of both the female and the feminist.

Maybe that seems harsh but the very preface of the book drips with Thornton's social, sexual, and emotional anxieties about his place in the academy and with his determination to project his anxieties back onto the Greeks to give them a kind of authority they would otherwise lack. The whole thing reads a bit like someone having a nervous breakdown as he castigates feminists for looking at the Greeks through the modern lens of their (supposed) partisan and ill informed beliefs but then he continually brings his own modern experience to bear on his Greek texts to try to make them relevant to his own modern political and social concerns. For instance he asserts that feminists can't understand Sappho because she came from an aristocratic, clan based, society. Well--that's the kind of argument that feminists, and marxists for that matter, and anthrpologists have been making for years. That's the whole point of many such social science analyses of other cultures: that politics and economics inform cultural tropes and that culture and ideology support the social and political. I found myself writing "duh" in the marigins as often as I found myself writing criticism of his basic points.

In conclusion: the word by word analysis of the texts is perfectly good. But the author's running commentary is filled with such weepy anxiety, such tedious and dead pop cultural references, such a confusion between scholarly approaches to women and popular cultural approaches to women that the book becomes a dead loss. To reiterate: feminist scholars are not the people who think that Jason and Medea end with a romantic kiss. Feminist scholarship does not think that witches in greek society, medieval society, or even in modern society are well represented by the blonde bimbo from Bewitched. The association between madness and creativity is certainly different in the Romantic Era than it was in Greek society. Thornton's straw men are so active that he practically refights the peloponnessian war with them. This would be a small, tight, moderately interesting article on (some) obvious aspects of upper class greek ideas about sex and war without all the padding. With the padding, its indigestible.

Kate Gilbert

... as for the Kirkus review, well ... it's just plane stupid.

Speaking as a very sexually frustrated individual, I'm here to tell you that I fear women unleashing the power of eros. Most gang fights are about women -who did whos girl....Leftist academics don't know about all this, although some of them do graduate students because that's all they get...sort of a "you blank my beep and I'll make sure you get a PhD" as opposed to the good old fashioned "do me and the car I'm driving could someday be yours!" I think it terrible that things have to be this way, but no amount of legislating will prevent Marxist professors from approving their girlfriend's incoherent PhD Dissertations in exchange for moments of "release" from the struggle to get more Marxists PhD's so they can take over sociology departments first in GERMANY! TOmorrow IOWA!

This is not a fair and balanced work of scholarship. Thornton has an axe to grind. If this kind of apologetic for the status quo appeals to you then read Camille Paglia instead, at least she is witty. Kenneth Dover's book is still the best study around and it was written by a heterosexual Oxford don!

The Kirkus review is right on target. This book is an ugly, confused invective by an acolyte of the embittered former classics scholar Victor Davis Hanson. Thorton seems to mistake personal disappointments for scholarly argument.