by K J Dover
Also available from Bloomsbury
A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Classical World,
Mark Golden and Peter Toohey
Greek and Roman Sexualities: A Sourcebook, Jennifer Larson
Contents
Foreword: The Book and its Author
Foreword: The Book and its Influence
Preface
Abbreviations
IPROBLEMS, SOURCES AND METHODS
1Scale
2The Visual Arts
3Literature
4Vocabulary
IITHE PROSECUTION OF TIMARKHOS
AThe Law
1Male Prostitution
2Penalties
3Status
4Hubris
BManifestations of Eros
1Defences against a Charge of Prostitution
2Eros and Desire
3Eros and Love
4Following and Fighting
5Homosexual Poetry
CNature and Society
1Natural Impulse
2Male and Female Physique
3Masculine and Feminine Styles
4Pursuit and Flight
5Courtship and Copulation
6Dominant and Subordinate Roles
IIISPECIAL ASPECTS AND DEVELOPMENTS
APublicity
BPredilections and Fantasies
CComic Exploitation
DPhilosophical Exploitation
EWomen and Homosexuality
IVCHANGES
AThe Dorians
BMyth and History
Postscript, 1989
List of Vases
Bibliography
Index of Greek Texts and Documents
Index of Greek Words
General Index
Foreword: The Book and its Author
The publication of Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality in 1978 was a landmark in the study of ancient Greek culture. Written by one of the twentieth century’s greatest Hellenists at the peak of his career (he had been knighted for services to scholarship in 1977 and became President of the British Academy in 1978 itself), it was the first work to treat Greek representations of homoerotic psychology and practice with the full panoply of historical and philological methods of analysis, as well as in a manner which adroitly synthesised the various forms of evidence (literary, iconographic, philosophical, mythological, religious) for the social phenomena in question. Few classical monographs have been translated, like this one, into a dozen languages, including Hungarian and Japanese.
But the book’s originality, combined with the highly charged nature of its subject-matter, made it inevitably a source of controversy from the outset. So much investigation of ancient sexuality has followed in its wake, and so much has changed (on the surface at least) in general sexual mores and discourse in the intervening years, that one needs to remind oneself (if one’s memory goes back that far) just how momentous the publication of Greek Homosexuality seemed in the late 1970s. For some, it was an intellectually liberating event: Dover had shown that it was possible and productive to discuss all aspects of the topic, from the level of anatomical detail to that of philosophical theory, without inhibitions or reservations, indeed with a sometimes ‘clinical’ explicitness which Dover thought a necessary counterweight to euphemism (or worse), both ancient and modern. To others, however, the book was a cause of dismay – even somewhat threatening to the decorum of the status quo – precisely in virtue of its linguistic and imaginative candour, tokens of a conspicuous determination to treat its materials as raising legitimate, important, and fascinating questions about a remarkable human culture.1
Two particular motivations converged in Dover’s own conception of his book. The first was to remove the whole subject from the stifling and distorting influences of much modern prejudice against, not to mention outright condemnation of, homosexuality: the subject, he was convinced, merited the same academic impartiality as he attempted to achieve in his work on all other components of Greek society, from the workings of its language (always his deepest interest) to the nature of its religious and mythological mentalities. At the same time, Dover believed that ancient Greek culture was historically unique in having developed widespread practices of ‘overt’ homosexuality. He uses that adjective several times, and right from the start, in Greek Homosexuality (and elsewhere) to denote what he thought a near-pervasive Greek acceptance of homoerotic impulses as ‘natural, normal and universal among men and gods alike’,2 together with the translation of that acceptance into a distinctive nexus of social, artistic, and literary forms of expression. Little sign here, then, of anything like a will to uncover something hidden or repressed within the Greeks’ self-understanding in this domain of behaviour.
Dover’s first awareness of the need for a rigorous scholarly exploration of Greek homosexuality occurred around 1954 when, as a Fellow of Balliol College, he lectured for the Oxford Classics syllabus on the collection of elegiac poems attributed to the sixth-century B.C. poet Theognis.3 The final hundred and fifty lines of this collection (which is certainly an anthology of material by different poets and of different dates) consist of erotic poems in the voice of a male lover of ‘boys’ or young adolescents.4 Although Dover’s reflections on Theognis led to no concrete results at this stage (even in Greek Homosexuality these poems are only lightly touched on), his frustration with the coy and superficial character of existing treatments of the cultural matrix to which such poetry belonged had planted a seed in his mind. Questions of homoerotic psychology and practice continued, moreover, to impinge on his scholarly work, above all because of his sustained and overlapping interests in three areas of study – Aristophanic comedy, Athenian (forensic) oratory, and what he came to call Greek popular morality (i.e., the communal web of publicly espoused values) – in which the topic assumed some prominence.5 For example, as early as 1955, the year in which he left Oxford to become Professor of Greek at the University of St. Andrews, Dover was planning an edition of Aristophanes’ Clouds (it would eventually be published in 1968), a play which contains several passages involving humorous reference to homosexual desire, not least in relation to perceptions of the (partially) naked bodies of young males in educational and athletic contexts.
A decisive juncture occurred in 1962 when Dover started to teach Plato’s Symposium, a dialogue which had long possessed a special status within idealising accounts of ‘Greek love’ from Ficino to Oscar Wilde (and beyond). Dover’s work on the Symposium led him to reconsider its salient elements of homoeroticism and prompted his thinking to move in directions which would sharply diverge from those older tendencies towards idealisation. When he subsequently received an invitation to deliver a series of lectures at University College London in February 1964, he chose the Symposium as his theme and called one of the lectures ‘Eros and Nomos’: roughly speaking, sexual desire and social norms.6
That lecture, which initially focuses on one particular speech (Pausanias’s) from the Symposium, attempts to bring a new sophistication to bear on the interpretation of ancient sexuality, in part by taking account of modern sociological findings (it draws on the Kinsey reports – interestingly, not cited in Greek Homosexuality itself) about the unstable relationship between preconceptions and ‘reality’ in sexual behaviour. But Dover’s reading of Pausanias’s speech exhibits tensions which would recur in the book too. Despite his aversion to what he saw as Plato’s other-worldly values and remoteness from material reality, Dover thought he could sidestep Plato’s own idealistic distortions and extract nuggets of quasi-sociological information from Pausanias’s speech. He wanted specifically to place great weight on Pausanias’s depiction of the ‘double standard’ by which Athenian society supposedly encouraged male ‘lovers’ in thei
r pursuit of adolescent male ‘beloveds’, yet condemned the latter if they were believed to submit too readily, or too fully, to sexual seduction. This induced Dover, however, to underestimate the (Platonic) complexities of Pausanias’s artful self-presentation – all the speakers in the Symposium engage in stylised ‘poses’ for the party-game they are playing – and even some of his key ideas. For instance, Pausanias disparages men who feel erotic attraction both to women and to younger males (even though, according to Dover’s general thesis, this was a typical Greek proclivity) as opposed to those with exclusive, and purportedly pure-minded, attraction to late-adolescent males (Symposium 181b-c). Neither the article nor the book takes proper account of this passage. Something similar happens with Pausanias’s emphasis on an ideal of lifelong commitment between same-sex partners. Pausanias was in fact himself the long-term partner of Agathon, host of the party which forms the dramatic setting of Plato’s dialogue. Dover persuaded himself, with insufficient reason, that such partnerships were strongly disapproved of by Athenian society, and he virtually ignored this feature of the speech.7
Lively reactions to the publication of ‘Eros and Nomos’, later in 1964, triggered a decision on Dover’s part to devote a whole book to Greek homosexuality. Although other projects postponed implementation of that decision, it is striking that aspects of the subject made a significant appearance in several books on which Dover was working, more or less simultaneously, between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s: his edition of Clouds (1968), already mentioned above; a student edition of selected poems of Theocritus (1971), a poet whose bucolic world embeds homosexual motifs in scenes of various sorts, among them exchanges of risqué gossip and abuse between herdsmen; Aristophanic Comedy (1972), which reiterates some of the views advanced in the edition of Clouds; and Greek Popular Morality (1974), which provides much of the armature of Dover’s broader understanding of Greek values and mentalities (it is cited frequently in Greek Homosexuality) as well as supplying its own précis of Athenian attitudes to homosexuality. The extent to which Dover’s thoughts on the subject were coalescing during this period is demonstrated by an article on ‘Classical Greek Attitudes to Sexual Behaviour’ which he published in 1973 and which already contains most of his most important views in outline.8
The homosexuality project itself finally took centre stage for some five years from 1973 onwards, including the first part of Dover’s presidency of Corpus Christi College Oxford (1976-86). He now occupied himself intensively with the book, undertaking a systematic trawl of the evidence of vase-painting – partly through publications, partly by autopsy in museum collections – to supplement the literary and rhetorical texts on which he had long been an expert. At one point, in 1972, he had contemplated writing the book in collaboration with the Hungarian-French anthropologist and psychoanalyst George Devereux, whom he had known since 1964. Dover had a cast of mind which, despite an almost unwavering adherence to empiricist and rational standards of argument, had always accommodated some personal attraction to Freudian ideas; he was reading Freud seriously even as a teenager.9 He was briefly tempted to imagine that Devereux’s penchant for psychoanalytic theory might somehow complement his own historically painstaking scholarship. Mercifully, he came to see that such collaboration was not feasible, not least because Devereux had deplorable prejudices which would have seriously compromised the project. Several citations of Devereux’s publications can still be found in Dover’s footnotes, together with a passing (and vague) statement of belief in ‘some elements in Freud’s psychodynamics’.10 It is also apparent that Devereux had some influence on Dover’s regrettable use of the term ‘pseudosexual’ in his Preface.11 But that influence cannot be shown to have affected the substance of the work, which steers largely clear of the kind of speculative, a priori psychological theorising to which Devereux was addicted.
Dover’s book does not in fact propose anything that might be called a general ‘theory’ of Greek homosexuality. Notwithstanding his readiness to be anatomically blunt in formulating hypotheses about modes of sexual courtship and copulation – hypotheses based chiefly on explicit images in vase-painting and on the blatantly vulgar humour of classical Athenian comedy – Dover is fundamentally cautious about many dimensions of the subject. For one thing, he did not believe any plausible explanation of the origins of Greek homosexuality was possible. Relying on a debatable argument from silence, he believed that ‘overt’ same-sex erôs had become a new phenomenon, even a sort of cultural fashion, in the mid-archaic period (around 600 B.C.), but he maintained that no anthropological appeal to ‘prehistoric initiation rituals’, nor to anything else, could explain why this had happened.12 For another, he thought homosexual desire in Greek society was rarely a matter of permanent psychological orientation (though he had to admit that there were some Greek traces of this way of thinking)13 but typically coexisted or alternated with heterosexual desire in the same individual as part of the overall operations of erôs, i.e. passionate and obsessive desire for a particular person – thus making the cultural contours of the subject very uneven and hard to map. And in any case, he realised that establishing the truth about the intimate ‘facts’ of any particular relationship was virtually out of the question: he distanced himself from those who smugly thought they could guess what must actually have happened between, for example, Socrates and Alcibiades.
But despite those caveats and gestures of caution, Dover deliberately organised most of his book around an attempt to build up a detailed picture of the attitudes and protocols which shaped one particularly important category of same-sex relationship, namely the socially ritualised association between an adult (though sometimes still young adult) male ‘lover’ (erastês) and a younger, normally late-adolescent, ‘beloved’ (erômenos).14 To do so, he wove an intricate fabric of argument from strands of evidence which he took from four main sources: Aeschines’ speech Against Timarchus (a sensational prosecution case which successfully had the politician Timarchus stripped of his citizen rights on the grounds that he had allegedly worked as a male prostitute when young);15 Pausanias’s speech in Plato’s Symposium (in which, as already mentioned, Dover highlighted the idea of a ‘double standard’ relating to judgements of the senior and junior partners in an erastês-erômenos relationship, while downplaying Pausanias’s indications of other conflicts and uncertainties within Greek attitudes to homosexual practices); the comedies of Aristophanes (which tend, for purposes of satire and bawdy entertainment, to adopt a cynically reductive angle on homosexual practices and motives); and the explicit depictions of homosexual courtship and intercourse in vase-painting of, preponderantly, the late sixth and early fifth centuries B.C.
Much of the vigorous debate instigated by Dover’s book (and surveyed by Mark Masterson and James Robson in the second foreword to this reprint) has revolved around the question whether his version of the erastês-erômenos model of relationship exaggerates the psychological and social dynamics of ‘pursuit, flight and capture’ (87): does Dover make too much of the idea of the lover as active and dominant, the beloved as passive and subordinate, and give unwarranted salience to ‘penetration’ as a crucial test of how far, and how honourably or otherwise, a beloved might be thought to have submitted to the power of his lover? The question is too complex to permit a definitive answer. All of Dover’s main terms of reference are undoubtedly anchored in one or more of his sources of evidence. But the abiding issue, which affects all students of the subject equally, is how to calculate the partialities and inbuilt limitations of those sources, and how to correlate the different items of evidence into a coherent framework for the understanding of what must often have been contingently variable and even idiosyncratic forms of behaviour. If Dover presses his case too hard in places, that is hardly surprising in the light of the academic context in which he wrote, including the entrenched tendencies to euphemism and evasion in earlier scholarship which he was determined to counteract. Furthermore, a close and careful reading of Greek Homosexuality w
ill find that Dover’s perspective is not as one-sided or uncompromising as sometimes claimed. His account leaves room, even in the midst of trying to make sense of the asymmetry between ‘lover’ and ‘beloved’, for the likelihood that a young erastês might be driven in part by an emotional need to be sexually ‘valued and welcomed for his own sake’, a satisfaction not easily obtainable in Greek society from premarital relationships with women.16 Relatedly, Dover accepts unequivocally that the lover paradigmatically aims to engender ‘love’ (though not sexual desire) in the beloved17 – hardly the exercise of sheer sexual dominance that many have taken the book to place at the centre of the picture.
Whatever view one may finally take of its specific emphases and interpretative strategies, Greek Homosexuality remains a great work of historical scholarship both for its technical mastery of the materials and for its imaginative broad-mindedness. It incisively succeeded in opening up an important area of the emotional, personal and social lives of ancient Greeks to more meticulous examination than had ever before been undertaken. Dover expected others to explore the field further (in that, he has been abundantly rewarded); and, as always, he was prepared to reconsider some of his own judgements.18 Everyone interested in ancient Greek culture still has much to learn from the book’s subtle and probing readings of the evidence.19
Stephen Halliwell
* * *
1. I recall an occasion in the early 1980s when I was praising the book in conversation with the head of a Cambridge college (and himself a classical scholar): he made his distaste clear and said, ‘Do we really need a book like this? Surely it’s sufficient to read Plato.’
2. This particular formulation is taken from Dover’s book The Greeks, revised edition (Oxford 1982) 53, which he wrote in conjunction with a series of BBC TV programmes in 1980.
3. See Dover’s memoir, Marginal Comment (London 1994) 111 (cf. 78), with 111-16 for further recollections of how he came to write Greek Homosexuality.