Customer Reviews

The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens

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If a book can be said to have a dual personality, Reign of the Phallus is it. The author, who has a vast knowledge of Greek pottery and who keenly analizes it, reveals interesting and penetrating aspects of classical Athens. She describes a society in which women are secluded wives or common prostitutes, with little in between. She describes men who are violent and dominating in their sexual relationships with both women and other men. She butresses her arguments with plentiful data and a massive number of pottery illustrations. However, she consistently reveals her biases as she presumes conclusions and then gathers evidence to support them. Several of her arguments are anachronistic -- sometimes by centuries! The author's greatest failing is to interpret images to fit her theses -- calling attention to many images and declaring them supportive, but dismissing images that are contrary to her theses. The text would be a good tool for a freshman college expository class, where it could be used to illustrate inconsistencies, unsupported assertations, and selective evidence. In spite of the author's political agenda, Reign of the Phallus can be rewarding for readers willing to sift through the assumptions and biases that structure the book. It provides a view into classical Athenian society revealed by the symbols and icons and stylized structure of its pottery. After finishing the book, I felt that the author gave me a look into classical Greeece, but who then went overboard in pushing her portrait of men who were opressive and violent in all their relationships, expecially sexual ones. The book was a lot of work.

Scholars of the social and private life of antiquity face the difficult task of constructing a coherent narrative out of bits and pieces of information widely scattered through classical art, litterature, and archeaology, and Keuls does an excellent job of this. Her analysis of pictorial art and its various representations of men, women, boys, prostitutes, and sex acts is particularly illuminating. On the down side the book is not always very well organized, and the discussions of group ritual, including tragedy, as an examination of and cathartic release from the pressures of sexual antagonism offer some very interesting insights but could have been better developed.

My biggest problem is with the book's tendency, already noted by some reviewers, to overreach, to read certain historical and mythological complexities purely according to its own thesis. Thus, Keuls takes the prevalence of the Amazonomachia, the story of an Amazon assault on prehistoric Athens, as a sign of Athenian preoccupation with aggressive women and the battle of the sexes. But the Greeks are of course known for their artistic tendency to approach history through myth, and the myth of the oriental Amazons' assault on Athens almost perfectly mirrors the assault of the Persians in 490 and 480. These struggles were central not only to Athenian pride but also to their moral justification for empire, and it would surprising if Athenians _didn't_ reproduce them as often as possible, sexual politics aside.

I also don't think much of the book's biggest claim, that the women of Athens were responsible for the mutilation of the Herms in 415. Keuls acknowledges that, if she's correct, the women's responsibility could not be kept for long, but vaguely explains this away by saying the truth was "too shocking to acknowledge." This does not really address the obvious problems of attributing responsibility for one of the greatest mysteries of Antiquity to a group that couldn't keep it a secret. More simply, while Keuls represents the mutilation as a protest, it was to the Athenians an act of sabotage, exposing the expedition and the city to the deadly wrath of the gods. Protest is one thing; sabotage, deliberately endangering their men, their city, and themselves is something else altogether. The simple fact is that only a really well disciplined, organized, and ruthless conspiracy (my money's on oligarchic revolutionaries) could have carried the mutilations out and gotten away with it.

But don't get the wrong idea. This is a good book on the fascinating subject of ancient social and sexual mores, though readers would do better to start with Dover's classic "Greek Homosexuality."

Keuls's controversial contention that she's solved the mystery of who smashed the herms of Athens has overshadowed the real strength of this book, which is the documentation. She has amassed a wealth of vase paintings, as well as references to women in Athenian legal documents, that paint a clear picture of the reality of women's lives in ancient Athens. By the end of the book, she's proved her case that women's lives in the world's first democracy weren't that much different from modern women's lives in Saudi Arabia - except the slaves in general, and the slave prostitutes in particular, certainly had it worse.
It's a must read for anyone who still believes all Athenian women were heroines like Antigone.

Keuls' provocative take on, as the subtitle states, "Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens", is well worth reading, despite the sometimes overwhelming amount of information and graphics used to support her analysis. Dealing with the end of the Periclean age, specifically in and around 415 BCE, Keuls charts the 'phallocracy' underlying Athenian society. This phallocracy was responsible, in the author's mind, for the subjugation of women, institutionalized homosexuality (but only as a right of passage for young men, not as an adult lifestyle), the "detailed reinterpretation of Greek tragedy in this light" (13), the relationship between the private life of male Athenians and public affairs, and Keuls' idea of who mutilated the Hermes (phallic posts omnipresent in Athens) in 415 BCE. To support her points, Keuls uses vase painting (a lot of them) to literally illustrate the seemingly endless references to the phallus, rape, and sometimes graphic forms of sexuality in general, not to mention depicting the ideal image of 'good' women, constantly spinning thread or engaged in other respectable occupations. For me, this book reinforced other information I already knew, and provided another way to look at -- and teach -- this era in history. The volume of information is sometimes overwhelming, and I think it would take two readings to fully appreciate what the author has accomplished.

Judging from Greek mythology and art, the Ancient Greek appear to be obsessed with sex - but why? The author does a good job of explaining this obsession in terms of literature, art, and history. By understanding the suppression of women in Greek culture, one is able to understand many taboo aspects of Greek culture. The author states that museum's have censored many works of art due to the pornographic themes, and as a result Modern society has been misguided.

Although I did not agree with the authors interruption of every piece of art in the book, I did find the subject of female and male prostitution 'interesting'. It was also 'interesting' to learn what the Ancients Greeks considered beautiful in terms of male and female sexuality, and why the Greek's altered the size of certain body parts in art. Needless to say , I found this book interesting and very entertaining; however, I would only recommend it to a mature audience.

I found this book quite interesting, not only because of it's informative content but also because of it's 20th/21st century "feminist" undertones and subjective interpretations. Words such as "denigrate", "sequester", "gynophobia", etc. could only be the unfair outcome of applying paradigms from our modern social times in the West to a Great civilisation of thousands of years ago. Here are some brief thoughts and considerations. How long has it taken the Christian church to accept women as priests? A subject which continues to be controversial to this day. In ancient Greece it was women "Priestesses", that had the ultimate authority or power to administer religious rites. Deities were devided in female and male gods and goddesses. Economy is derived from the Greek word "oikonomia" from "oikonomos" meaning "Manager of a Household". In ancient Greece, women although removed from political affairs and responsibilities, they had great responsibility in running and managing all of their household affairs. In theatrical plays, both comedies and tradegies, women characters were given extremely powerful and poignant roles, (Medea, Lysistrata, Electra, etc.). They weren't allowed to perform on stage, but they weren't in Shakespeare's time either. And finally how long has it taken for the electoral system to allow voting by women in the West (Ref: Suffrage movements in 19th/20th centuries where women frustrated by their social and economic situation...!)? How could someone, make these rather sweeping interpretations and draw hyperbolic conclusions from the study of a set of artistic "erotica" vase paintings and of comedy and tragedy plays, defeats comprehension. I wonder what interpretation would be given to the so called "erotica" photo-pornographic filth and obscene material available in abundance today! However, whatever the case and view one wishes to maintain or adopt, it is clear that the subject of ancient Greece continues to evoke an immense interest and fascination...

Eva Keuls neither pulls nor withdraws her massive load of...exhaustive resources, for depicting such a blatantly gutsy look at a slice of Greek history.

As a fan of non-fiction, and also an aspiring author (am currently working with an editor with my first manuscript), I originally picked up Ms. Keuls comprehensive work for my own research into art history. I was pleasantly surprised by Ms. Keuls no-holds-barred honesty.

Few scholarly works have ever stimulated my...mind, the way hers has. There were times that I actually had a sweaty forehead and palms, greedily looking forward to what she might expose in each respective chapter.

Although I may not have agreed with all of Ms. Keuls' conclusions---particularly the extent of the beastliness of men, or the lopsided portrayal of the treatment of women of that era---her painstaking research has me wondering whether some of her critics have really read her book to...completion.

Thanks again Ms. Keuls. Regardless of your motives, I am honored by the countless hours you toiled in order to bring readers and researchers such a fabulous work of art.