Customer Reviews

Greek Homosexuality

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When one considers that male-male relations had their dominant Western etiology in Greece antiquity, it's only natural to look back to the ancient records and artefacts to illustrate and examine how these relations existed in their antique form. What we see is probably different from what we expect.

First, it's important to distinguish "homosexuality" from its practice in antiquity to what it is today. In Greek culture several centuries before Christ, homosexuality as we know it today did not exist, except in Sparta. While Dover does not make this as explicit as he could, one cannot read the extensive material Dover covers without forming this conclusion. In Greek antiquity, the relationships were more oriented toward man-boy relations rather than man-man relations. Identifying these man-boy relations as "homosexual" is certainly tendentious, at best.

Second, the "mentoring" that older men functioned for their younger devotees in exchange for the devotee's sexual favors is in stark contrast to anything "homosexual" in our own age. Indeed, today we more likely to lock the older man up in prison for paedophilia, rather than extol him for his service of introducing younger boys to upper Greek society. The cultural context of Athens is anything but homosexual, but truly something else.

Third, the ubiquity of the man-boy pattern (primarily around Athens) as opposed to the man-man pattern (primarily around Sparta) illustrates another distinguishing form of "homosexuality" in antiquity. The historian must go where the artefacts are, and the artefacts are not from Sparta, but from Athens, where the man-boy paradigm prevailed. The book's title might have been more appropriately been retitled "Athen's Paedophilia" rather than "Greek Homosexuality."

Dover's account is both exhaustive and replete. His historian's viewpoint reports the facts and artefacts dispassionately as his discipline allows, but it might seem to many a bit too confining now that other histories have subsequently appeared. (For an excellent history of homosexuality over the ages, I heartily recommend Crompton's "Homosexuality & Civilization" by Harvard University Press.)

If one's purpose is a limited understanding of sexual mores as it was practice in Athen's antiquity, then this book certainly achieves that goal. However, this book really isn't a "gay" or true "homosexual" history at all. It's only by a stretch of definition that man-boy sexual and social enculturation in Greek antiquity really reflects any "homosexuality." If this limited scope is your interest, then this is really the best book of its kind. But if your interest is more broadly "homosexual," then Crompton's book is the one to turn to.

An excellent, extremely thorough study of homosexuality in Ancient Greece. Dover distinguishes between actual gays, gigolos, and heterosexuals who behave as if they are gay. The author provides mounds of thoroughly critiqued evidence to support every point, as well as candidly admitting to errors in past editions of the book--and correcting them. Yes, it's a history book, but it's also incredibly fascinating. The style is very readable, and the text is approachable by the layman as well as by the scholar. I couldn't put it down. Excellent work!

Dover has one of the only full accounts on Greek Homosexuality to its full extent. Dover was able to write this in a time when homosexuality was swept under the rug and still able to write it unbiased and simply educational. Dover truly set a landmark.

Two things hindered my reading of this book. First Dover's over parsing of words in one sentence using just about every punctuation mark. It was distracting and I would have much preferred if he had just put the words down and gave us the derivatives during translation and how it affected to-days ideas.

Secondly - I could not follow his numbering on the vases! Don't get me wrong, this is not the first book I've read dealing with ancient vase painting....but his reference numbers were indecipherable.

But I like that there were lots of vases and lots of good descriptions and references to stories and events.

Dover was very precise in his discussion of homosexual behaviour and the rites of different localities. He was also very detailed in how the homosexual or pederastic relationship came about, expanded and gave many references to rules and regulations. He cited many examples using the vases. It helped me get a more indepth idea of the entire relationship.

Also included were relationships between women and women and women and men.

I felt this book was more a reference book for scholars studying vases and homosexual behaviour in antiquity than a book for the lay person.

At last, a wonderfully honest, open, open-hearted, and sound scholarly treatment of Greek homosexuality, a text that is likely to rewrite much of the scholarship that has shied away from this subject in the past. Congratulations!

The book is well researched and that is not my problem, what I do however do not like is when one buys from a seller from Amazon (even if the book is used) it should still have all its pages. I am missing quite a few plates and will need to purchase another copy if I am to complete my study of the topic. Annoyed.

Dover reopened in Greek Homosexuality (1978) the study by classicists of a subject disdained since 1933, when Hitler crushed the German Homosexual Emancipation Movement. However, Sir Kenneth denigrated Greek pederasty by claiming that it was merely lustful. He hypercritically refused to use sources dating from after the 4th century - even Plutarch's Lives, which, like the works of Lucian and Diodorus, notoriously cited and paraphrased lost classical sources, which themselves often relied on earlier oral and written accounts. This simplified the crotchety don's task and distorted his conclusions. His "book" is really a collection of four essays. The longest and most original are about erotic vases and a seamy lawsuit involving a kidnapping. How such a skimpy selection of sources could be expected to yield a valid thesis defies reason.

Nicknamed "Bend-over Dover" by undergrads, Sir Kenneth, unlike so many other Oxfordians, seems never to have experienced a homosexual act, except once when, according to his autobiography, he was buggered while on military duty in Alexandria and complained that it hurt. He was led astray by his intended collaborator, the Canadian shrink Devereux, who taught him the distorted Freudian thesis that homosexuals are sexually retarded, i.e., that we don't fully mature from the oral and anal phases to the phallic. Sir Kenneth's homophobia was well documented a few years ago by James Davidson in the February 2001 issue of Past and Present.

"The Prosecution of Timarkhos" takes up 100 pages (19-109) - one half of the text. It is an extended commentary, a specialized task at which Dover is a master. The best things about the book are the illustrations, the analyses of the vase paintings, and the 30 pages of appendices.

Dover explores both the role of homosexuality in society as well as personal lives. His research is well laid out and provided an informed view of this subject. While the writing tends to be slightly more academic than I would like, I do not think this could be helped considering the subject matter and the (sometimes) positive views expressed by the author.

What I found particularly informative was Dover's fascinating theory on the social use of Homosexual pursuit among the citizen class. Particularly the information that hubris was a crime in democratic Athens. What has this to do with homosexuality, you ask? the first half of the book explains. Ancient greek homosexuality in no way resembles the modern version and it is mind-blowing to see how they differ and how analogous structures, in two different societies, may seem to be opposites. For instance, in speaking of homosexual pursuit Dover is constantly forced, when comparing Ancient Athenian society to modern, to use heterosexual pursuit as an analogy for homosexual pursuit. The resemblances between modern heterosexuality and ancient homosexuality are just that strong!

Once again I have to disagree with every other reviewer.

Greek Homosexuality is a strange book. It is also infuriating. I was never able to read an entire chapter of it. I threw it several times in the garbage can and then went out again to retrieve it because I thought I should know more about Greek gays. But the fact is that the more I read the less I understood what Greek homosexuality was. My own take is that the writing of Greek Homosexuality is an extreme case of a rampant scholarly disease called "not seeing the forest because of the trees".

If you want to buy this book because you are anxious to know whether homosexuality was widespread in ancient Greece and whether it was really accepted as a normal form of sexual behavior, let me tell you that the author has no definite answer to these two crucial questions. These are the kind of general questions he eludes or is honest enough to leave unanswered because the evidence is unconclusive. I spoke of honesty, but I sometimes put down the fuziness of all this to a wrong understanding of what it means to be objective. To be objective doesn't mean to just align dozens and dozens of pottery fragments and ancient author quotes and other scholarly references and then leave the reader to decide what this all means.

As I have just said, Greek Homosexuality is replete with hundreds of details about homosexuality in art, in law, in philosophy, in language. But the trouble is that it is almost completely devoid of enlightening syntheses. Therefore every time I read a few pages in this book, I ended up knowing less about homosexuals in ancient Greece than when I took it up. This sounds incredible, yet it is true. I have tried to read the whole book several times, but simply wasn't able to. I keep getting lost in thickets of disconnected details while the myriad qualifications with which they are hedged about and the dry and technical language get the better of all my intellectual machettes.

Therefore my conclusion is: Greek Homosexuality is un-rea-da-ble! But I will gladly admit that the numerous black and white photographs of male nudes depicted in Greek art are gorgeous and give the reader a fleeting sense of understanding the whole mess of details in the rest of the book.

Touto biblion ouk esti kalon...