Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

by Thomas Cahill

  Sexual passion, as we have seen, is a god named Eros. To suffer sexual passion is, therefore, to be bested by a god. One must of course give in—there is no sense in trying to overcome a god—but the very idea of being bested by anyone was to a Greek sufficient humiliation as not to be a fit subject of high art. There is a difference between being realistic about sexual passion—admitting its existence, naming it openly, enjoying it blatantly—and giving it pride of place in the agora. An orgy could therefore be the very thing for a drinking goblet [34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39] or lovemaking be prized as an apt subject for a boudoir mirror [40, 41], but neither belonged in a public space, where only ideal dignity should reign. Better to draw and sculpt male genitals with a certain reticence—retracted against the groin as they might appear in combat or during a hard workout or emerging from what Joyce, parodying Homeric epithet, called the “scrotum-tightening sea.” Athletes were even known to tie up the foreskin as if it were sausage casing, so as to prevent the comedy of an involuntary erection in the course of exercise.

  Because, however, theatrical comedy was the realm in which no portrayal could be considered too provocative, comic actors were the only class of Greeks to draw public attention to their sexual equipment. They wore enormous penises and testicles, flopping down almost to their knees—an effect hardly more erotic than a clown’s red mouth [42]. For productions of Lysistrata, however, in which the sex-starved male choristers appear with enormous erections, the genitalia were no doubt well stuffed, as was the case for actors playing satyrs, who always appeared with erect phalloi attached to loin harnesses. Hopeless sexual passion (of a mature woman—Phaedra, wife of Theseus—for her handsome stepson) is the subject of Euripides’s Hippolytus, which of course ends tragically. But this is an exception in the oeuvre of an exceptional playwright. Almost all direct references to sex in Greek art are brutish, comic, or intended for private use—which only serve to underscore the public chastity of the kouroi, whose bold existence still presents us with a conundrum.

  Nakedness has signaled humiliation, not only to the neighbors of the Greeks, but throughout human history. We have only to think of the emaciated and naked victims being fed by the Nazis into the gas chambers of central Europe and thence into mass graves or the dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu to remind ourselves of the universal meaning of public nakedness. The Romans understood well that the shame of crucifixion lay not just in its hideous pain but in the fact that the victim died publicly naked, every corporeal quiver of his final agony a show for all to see.1 Nudity bespeaks defenselessness—and can, therefore, evoke pity and a sense of solidarity, not just with the naked victim but with all of defenseless humanity, as when Shakespeare’s Henry V, in the night before the battle of Agincourt, asks his troops to remember that “in his nakedness [the King] appears but a man.”

  How, then, did this universal sign of shame—and, perhaps at a deeper level, of piteous solidarity—come to serve the Greeks (and the subsequent Western tradition) as symbolic of heroism? The kouros is the Greek in his idealized state, eternally young, eternally about to bud, eternally strong, but fixed for all time—not in process, not on his way from boyhood to manhood, but eternally achieved, eternally One. As the ultimate ideal, he must be naked, for no costume but his own skin could serve his eternality. But he is eternally absolved from all becoming, whether further growth, further sexual blossoming, or further decay. Forever beyond all development (which would necessarily imply disintegration in a later stage), he belongs to the World of the Forms. He is the Form of Man, the perfection, of which all beautiful and heroic men partake as partial examples, the man that all men would wish to be. And it is this wish, this impossible wish, that lends the kouros the pathos we attribute to it.

  The kouros, then, is not merely the expression of a Greek idea but of a profoundly human longing that the Greeks were the first to uncover and that reverberates through art and literature ever after. It is the longing that breaks forth from John Keats, dying in his twenties, on beholding in the British Museum a “Grecian urn”2 on which a sylvan scene was shown:

  Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

  Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

  Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

  Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;

  She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

  Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

  Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

  Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;

  And, happy melodist, unwearièd,

  Forever piping songs forever new;

  More happy love! more happy, happy love!

  Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,

  Forever panting and forever young;

  All breathing human passion far

  above,

  That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and

  cloyed,

  A burning forehead, and a

  parching tongue.

  It is the sentiment expressed with shuddering resignation by W. B. Yeats, grown old, in “Sailing to Byzantium”:

  O sages standing in God’s holy fire

  As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

  Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

  And be the singing-masters of my soul.

  Consume my heart away; sick with desire

  And fastened to a dying animal

  It knows not what it is; and gather me

  Into the artifice of eternity.

  Once out of nature I shall never take

  My bodily form from any natural thing,

  But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

  Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

  To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

  Or set upon a golden bough to sing

  To lords and ladies of Byzantium

  Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

  The poet, now a golden bird, will sing from his golden bough—for, as in Keats’s poem, nature itself has been absolved from all becoming—and though the poet will take becoming as his theme (“what is past, or passing, or to come”), he himself will soar above all mortal change—far above, as Keats puts it, “all breathing human passion.”

  Though both these examples (not surprisingly) make reference to Greece, the feeling, the wish to be absolved from becoming—from the “change and decay in all around I see”—is deeply human. And its expression in notes high and low, in measures quick and slow—whether in Homer’s lost utopias of Troy and Ithaca or in Sappho’s plangently expressed desire for youth and regret over age, whether in Socrates’s earnest aspiration to “shuffle off this mortal coil” and ascend to the World of the Forms or in the molded pathos of the kouroi—is Greece’s most complex and valuable gift to the Western tradition.

  Not that this is all there is to say about nudity. The shards of obscene pottery remain, visual equivalents of Archilochus’s dirty jokes. And the figures of the herms remain, plinths without bodies except for head and phallus, not retracted but exceedingly erect [33]. But the pottery was as private as is most pornography, created for momentary enjoyment far beyond the bustling agora. The herms had an opposite function: set at boundary lines and, therefore, markedly public, they were apotropaic guardians of the polis itself, meant (not unlike the monumental pharaohs and animal gods of Egypt) to ward off evil and keep all enemies at bay by their primitive display of masculine power. The kouros, neither joke nor charm, gathers up all the divergent, nonstop Greek talk and speaks with one authoritative voice: “Here is our ideal, the best we have to offer.”

  This is not unlike the message that NASA delivered to the kosmos when in 1972 it sent a probe into deep space in the hopes of greeting intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The spacecraft, now billions of miles into its journey, carries examples of Earth’s nature and culture (images, sounds, music, greetings in fifty-five languages) on a gold-plated copper disk. Bolted to the
craft’s main frame is an anodized plaque carrying graphic messages: a star map, locating Earth, and alongside it the figures of a human male and a human female, both nude [69]. (After all, we wouldn’t want those extraterrestrials to think that our bodies grew clothing the way a turtle grows its shell.) Neither the man nor the woman, however, could serve as a median representative of humanity, since both are members of a minority race—that is, white—nor do they resemble average Americans, being a good deal leaner than Pickup Pete and Supermarket Sally. The oddest detail is that, though both are clearly meant to be adults, they have no hint of hair except on their heads. What NASA chose to project into the universe by way of greeting is a couple of well-muscled humans who, despite their twenty-year-old faces, are prepubescent. So the ideal of the Greek kouroi, somewhat modified by American tastes (no skanky pubic hair, please), is perhaps at this moment being examined by faraway aliens who are trying to figure out how human reproduction takes place on that inhabited planet in the third concentric circle from a certain Milky Way star. Scratching their little green heads, they can’t quite make it out.

  If this American idealization is a somewhat debased version of its Greek predecessor and lacks the sheer dignity of the original, it nonetheless owes to the kouroi of the sixth century B.C. the idea of a transcendent visual ideal, absolved from time—surely a strange notion to send out, voyaging forever, through our space-time continuum. But then, we are what we have been, and the images we concoct do not float free like balloons but own deep historical roots—and, apparently, there’s nothing even NASA can do about the way human history has shaped human imagination.

  THE STIFF SYMMETRY of the kouroi of the seventh and sixth centuries began, in the fifth, to give way to a revolutionary relaxation of Athenian models that rapidly brought all of Greek sculpture to its acme. The “Kritian boy” [14] from the Acropolis is patently a kouros with the usual placid facial expression, his arms at his side, his left foot forward. But the sculptor’s eye and hand are no longer in thrall to tradition, and he—probably Kritios, because the work is so like others known to be his—is no longer merely making what has been made before. Instead of standing alert with weight equally distributed, as are all earlier kouroi, this boy stands as would any boy at leisure, his weight on his left leg, his looser right leg bent at the knee, which sends his whole body into a gentle curve, his hips and shoulders no longer placed in stark parallels but occupying subtly slanted rather than rigidly horizontal planes, the head no longer squarely set atop its neck but slightly, so very slightly, inclined forward and to his right. The tactile appreciation of human anatomy and the grace of the whole conception leave one amazed. Though the subject may remain as virginally chaste as its muscle-bound predecessors, there can be no doubt that the beholder is meant to respond erotically. Viewed against its predecessors, the “Kritian boy” is an astonishing work of genius, a genius of head and heart, for never before in the already long history of human artifacts had a human being so lovingly shaped a human body—the balance between straight and bent limbs, the tension between taut and slack muscles—that he seems to have penetrated to its soul. Here is an artisan who understands the body of a boy as if he were the creator not merely of a marble statue but of the boy himself. Henceforth, a Greek statue will be unified by the underlying structure of the human body, not by surface patterning [15].

  This innovative softening of the body of the kouros precipitates further diversity. The “Kritian boy” is so obviously a boy—much more so than his superbodied archaic predecessors—that he clearly embodies boyishness rather than a more generalized maleness; and this suggested additional variations to the sculptors. Other depictions of idealized maleness—rougher, more mature, in different poses—are now possible; and soon enough one encounters sculpted ideal males of different kinds: archers in battle, horsemen on campaign, athletes submitting their bodies to various physical disciplines, revolutionary heroes, gods of fearful beauty [16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22]. But the new variety hides an underlying sameness, for all these portrayals, however different each may be from the other, are of male perfection. Greek art of the high classical period serves as a mirror in which the Greek male admires himself—his perfectly proportioned, remarkably adept self.

  Of course, women are depicted too, though rarely, and always clothed [23, 24, 25]. The ideal woman, therefore, is the secluded virgin or the secluded matron. Unlike men, “Greek women have no prime,” writes the Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson, “only a season of unripe virginity followed by a season of overripe maturity, with the moment of defloration as the dividing line.” This describes only girls of good families, who begin as presexual beings, are tamed by conjugal penetration, and forthwith settle down to the work that is properly theirs—keeping the man’s house and raising his children. There is no true ideal for the Greek woman, no naked eternality, only the tasks of becoming: preparation, marriage, childbirth, childrearing, suffering society’s toleration if she survives past menopause, death. As the Berkeley art historian Andrew Stewart puts it, “whether parthenos [virgin], wife, or widow, since she is and always will be a creature of both excess and lack [that is, emotion rather than mind, receptacle rather than tool], her aretē is to recognize male supremacy and to do what her male guardian (father, brother, husband) thinks is right.” Stewart adds wryly, “Needless to say, this directive was no doubt often honored as much in the breach as in the observance.”

  We know almost by instinct that Stewart must be right even though our evidence of female resistance lies in fragments. We can point to Sappho’s magisterial confidence, to the women revolutionaries of Aristophanes, to the unyielding Medea of Euripides and be certain that far more heat bubbled beneath the cool surface of Greek ideality than can be read in its public message. The Irish-English critic Terry Eagleton is particularly illuminating:

  For a male-dominated society, man is the founding principle and woman the excluded opposite of this; and as long as such a distinction is held in place the system can function effectively.… Woman is the opposite, the “other” of man: She is non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly negative role in relation to the male first principle. But equally man is what he is only by virtue of ceaselessly shutting out this other or opposite, defining himself in antithesis to it, and his whole identity is therefore caught up and put at risk in the very gesture by which he seeks to assert his unique, autonomous existence.

  Woman is not just an other in the sense of something beyond his ken, but another intimately related to him as the image of what he is not, and therefore an essential reminder of what he is. Man therefore needs this other even as he spurns it, is constrained to give a positive identity to what he regards as no-thing. Not only is his own being parasitically dependent upon the woman, and upon the act of excluding and subordinating her, but one reason why such exclusion is necessary is because she may not be quite so other after all. Perhaps she stands as a sign of something in man that he needs to repress, expel beyond his own being, relegate to a securely alien region beyond his own definitive limits. Perhaps what is outside is also somehow inside, what is alien is also intimate—so that man needs to police the absolute frontier between the two realms as vigilantly as he does just because it may always be transgressed, has always been transgressed already, and is much less absolute than it appears.

  But does this female other ever succeed in leaving behind private transgression, domestic tugs of war, and the fictional tropes of poetry and drama [26, 27, 28, 29]? Does she ever break into temple or agora as a subversive public statement, even as a sculpted ideal? One way of answering such questions is to ask these further ones: Does the woman ever lose her clothes in Greek art—and, if so, what does she look like?

  She does—and she looks marvelous.

  In the late fourth century, about 150 years after the carving of the “Kritian boy,” the incomparable Praxiteles dared to push into twice forbidden territory. His subject was Aphrodite, goddess of love, whom one might think on the face o
f it the ideal subject for female nudity. But the myth of Aphrodite showed her to be zealously protective of her belles choses. Should any male to whom she had not chosen to proffer her gifts come upon her in her nakedness, the penalty was immediate death. By the late fourth century we must imagine a certain waning of such taboos about the gods, but it remains true that uncovering a female figure was boldness enough. To name her Aphrodite was heartstopping. Praxiteles’s Aphrodite [30], fresh from her bath, stands in an elegantly languid S-curve, her left hand grasping drapery that conceals nothing (and serves to make her even more naked), her right hand tending—but not quite managing—to shield her private parts. Her sensational, touchable body owes nothing to the ruling Greek convention of depicting women as narrow-hipped boys with breasts—second-class males who lack penises. She is, to employ the inevitable cliché, all woman, an image so unafraid, so devoid of coyness, so shocking as to reduce any Greek male to silence, no small task. Has she just been startled by an intruder? Of course she has, for the intruder is her sculptor, who loved every inch of her with his chisel, as well as every male who down the subsequent centuries has dared to look with longing on the nakedness of the love goddess. Does her haughty face deplore my intrusion or beckon me on? Will she wrap the drapery around herself or let it fall to the ground? Will she kill me or welcome me? Who can say. She is Woman, fickle, unknowable, ineffably mysterious, obsessively desirable.