Sexual interaction in Greek culture

Photo by Hoika Mikhail

One of the most remarkable elements in Greek culture, for so many people over the centuries, has been the picture of particularly 5th century BCE classical Athens, where the dynamics of sexual interaction between genders was simply radically other from what modern Western society and its deep roots in both Christianity and Judaism have come to expect. This concern, this surprise, is focused, in particular, on male desire for men. Consequently, Greece has become one of the ways in which Western society conceptualises its own relation to what we will now call homosexuality. I say “we will now call homosexuality” because that’s a word that’s only been around since the latter half of the 19th century and was only really in popular culture from the 1920s onwards.

It’s really important to remember that one of the fundamental distinctions that we learn by looking at other cultures is that the idea of having a sexuality – that is to say, a pathology, something that defines you according to your sexual object – is a very modern and quite culturally bound idea. One of the things we might learn from Greece is simply that. We could learn it from other places, too – and I’ll come back to why Greece is important – but we can learn from looking at other cultures that what we take to be natural or inevitable is profoundly cultural and therefore open to change.

Homosexuality in ancient Greece

The two greatest movements that have happened in my lifetime that have changed Western society have been the growth of gay rights and their enactment and the growth of feminism and its impact on society. While a lot of major feminist writers have focused on ancient Greece, let’s start with the homosexuality issue and the gay issue, if you want to call it that.

What makes it so interesting for us is not that it’s just male desire for men. It’s actually quite structured, quite ordered, and it always involves an older man’s interest in a younger man, not men of the same age. It usually involves younger people than we would take to be the normal sexual objects: youths, as it would be translated. It’s often called paederasty, which causes some problems in modern thinking because it gets associated with very young children, which is not true. The idea that there was a culture where men could desire men, older men for younger men – and it was institutionalised in a normal way, as much as marriage or heterosexuality is in our society – provided for everybody who felt that desire within themselves the only privileged model to which they could refer.

Famously, Oscar Wilde’s circle used to talk of “doing philosophy”; that is to say, that was the euphemism for the male desire, because they saw it as inherently Greek and inherently somehow philosophical. That was one particular appropriation, but it’s not only a question of imagining men and men, different sexual objects. Even more important is the way in which it allows us to see the body differently and, above all, what desire might be.

The sexual object in antiquity

In antiquity, it is extremely rare to discuss the sexual object as being a defining characteristic. If you sleep with boys or women, nobody’s particularly interested. The assumption is you would sleep with both. If you were particularly interested in one, you might get teased a bit, in the same way as a man today in some patriarchal circles would be teased for liking very tall women or very short women. There was that, where it was a personal deformation, not a psychology.

What we can learn from that is just how extraordinarily odd it is to say that the reason why you are as you are is because you sleep with a man or a woman, not for the way you do it. Take Artemidorus and the great dream book of dream analysis and antiquity that Freud read. When somebody comes in with a dream that he slept with his mother, the first question the analysts asked is, In what position? The fact that it’s his mother is less interesting or subordinate to the position in which the act took place. I don’t think any modern psychoanalyst would go straight to that. That doesn’t seem like a natural move; but, for the Greeks, it did, because how you sleep with someone was as important as who you sleep with.

What would that be like today? Instead of multiplying LGB etc. to however many letters of the alphabet we wish, what would it be like to say, it’s not the object but the way you sleep with somebody? Instead of saying I’m a heterosexual, why don’t you say, I’m a selfish narcissist who usually abuses women? Or, I am a passive, incapable lover who has no sensitivity? Isn’t that more of an insight into who you are than the person you happen to sleep with, the gender of that person?

What we learn from Greece

Photo by IrinaKorsakova

One of the things we can learn from looking at ancient Greece is that there are not just different objects of sexual desire but a whole different way of conceptualising that desire. That is one of the most interesting possibilities, one of the potentials of using Greece today for rethinking our sexuality.

The second thing is that Greece has been absolutely crucial to think about the way in which the body and its performance in society is viewed in modernity, and how classics helps us see that otherwise. The concealment of the body in our culture, as opposed to the open nakedness of first male bodies and then later female bodies, is a very striking difference. It is very striking that in our culture, to see a male erection is to watch pornography if it’s in public representation. In Britain, it is still the case that pornography is defined by the angle of the penis: if the penis is over 45 degrees, it counts as pornographic. Yet, in ancient Greece, statues with erections were all around. People had them outside their houses; you could hang your hat on them when you walked in. It was a perfectly normal part of the visual culture.

So, one of the questions would be, why is it that we are, as it were, ashamed, concealing, hiding the body? How deep-rooted is that, what I would say, religious rejection of physicality? And where does that lead us? It seems that there’s a lot of work we could do in thinking through the way in which we police our representations and think about our representations through looking at a culture which does it so differently.

Feminism and ancient Greece

Now, the third thing that is fascinating is why so many of the very greatest feminist thinkers of our culture have turned to ancient Greece to explore gender; most recently, and most famously, Judith Butler, but we could go back through to Kate Millett and to a much earlier generation of feminists, maybe in the 19th century as well. One of the things we learn from their writing, which has been profoundly influential, is the role of the myths by which we live, and how important those Greek myths have been in organising our conceptual apparatus.

Now, Freud is one of the chief exhibits here; why we have Oedipus at the centre of all our self-understandings of sexuality was because Freud could take up that myth, and he could understand himself through that myth, and he could understand the world through that myth. But there are a whole series of absolutely extraordinary stories that become part of the furniture of the imagination, whether it’s an Amazon, whether it’s a monster like a Cyclops, whether it’s Medea, the woman who kills her own children to get back at her husband, that great, tragic model.

What feminist thinking has allowed us to see in a critical way is the way in which ancient Greek stories, because of their power and their reach, have stretched right through – I was going to say the subconscious, but I don’t really know if I mean the subconscious because they’re very, very public. You see them all around you, but they’re ways of organising experience, ways of organising thought for us that we don’t even notice anymore. That’s what we need that feminist thinking to do, to show us the way in which certain sorts of gendered attitudes are being formed through that Greek inheritance.

Rethinking desire, the body and gender

The possibility of rethinking what we mean by desire, rethinking how we understand the body and rethinking the stories of gender that we live by are all things that Greece makes really possible for us, it makes necessary for us. I don’t know how you would talk about some of these things without Greek.

I had a fascinating encounter with the editors of the DSM, a diagnostic and statistical manual of the American Psychiatric Association, in which diseases of the mind are defined for the generation of doctors who will use it. They were discussing whether ephebophilia, the love of youths, was a sexual deformation or not. I had to point out that would mean including Socrates, Sophocles, Pericles, so many ancient Greeks who we think of as the great heroes of culture, all of whom loved youths, as sexually deformed people. The editors tried to say to me, no, that’s not what it was like; it can’t have been like that in ancient Greece.

It was an extraordinary way of denying historical evidence in order to maintain the naturalness of our own culture, which has various views. That’s a case where we could use Greek to go right to the heart of the medical profession and say, no, your idea of normality is being pre-formed through our culture, and we need to understand its roots and understand where it’s come from in order to see how arbitrary it is and how much can be changed for the better through a bit of reflective thought.

When we turn to Greece and sexuality, we have no choice: we have to go there to think through who we are. Just as we can’t unthink Freud – we can criticise Freud, we can argue with Freud, we can deny Freud, but we can’t uninvent Freud – in the same way, we can’t uninvent the influence of Greek thinking on sexuality.

How did sexuality change so much?

I’m tempted to give a single-word answer to this question, which is Christianity: that’s to say, the slow invention and enforcement of a religion that was committed to the thought that sexual pleasure was in itself a sign of the fall and had to be severely regulated.

Undoubtedly, sexuality is regulated in all societies we know, and it was regulated in ancient Greece; it wasn’t some fantasy of liberality out there, but it was the case that for most periods of Greek society that we know about, pleasure itself was not a problem. Excessive pleasure, perhaps, but the idea that you should have sex normally is absolutely endemic in Greek society. In the Iliad, that great martial epic, when Achilles is mourning the loss of his friend Patroclus, his mother, the goddess, comes down and says, ‘You can’t just sit here and cry all the time. Why don’t you have a glass of wine and have sex with someone?’

That sort of sentence is incomprehensible within a Christian community. The influence of that is really deeply seated in our culture. One of the fascinating distinctions that gets made in modern Western thinking between the acceptable vision of art and the unacceptable vision of erotica or pornography is the idea that the latter is bad because it’s sexually arousing. What’s very rarely asked, although Wendy Steiner wrote a beautiful book about this, is: Why do we take it as an assumption that sexual arousal is bad? It seems to me that that is also part of a deep inheritance that we need to discuss if we’re going to be critical about where we’re going with our own ideas.

Photo by IrinaKorsakova

Female desire in ancient Greece

Most of our literature from ancient Greece and most of our art is produced by men, so it tends to be dominated by male desire: male desire for men or male desire for women. Female desire is much harder to trace in ancient Greece except through those mirrors of male fantasy, but we do have Sappho, the first of a series of female poets, and we do have some sense of what’s going on. In some ways, it maps male desire. There’s a great worry that desire out of place needs to be controlled and that if women were left alone, they might be rampant, as men might be. There is a strong recognition of female pleasure, unlike in Victorian Britain, for example, and there’s a strong recognition that female pleasure is an integral part of female life.

Photo by Dima Moroz

At the same time, of course, it’s a fiercely patriarchal culture and it’s an abusive culture in many ways. The regular use of prostitution is absolutely integral to Greek society, as was the idea, fascinatingly, that husband and wife shouldn’t really sexually desire each other through a marriage. That was a rather vulgar thought; wives were there for children and for running a household, but not really for sexual pleasure, which goes against the thought that female sexual pleasure is extremely important. As so often in patriarchal cultures, ancient Greece had a deeply conflicted sense in its male writing and female sexuality, both denying it to wives and recognising its necessity in women. It’s not coherent, but it’s fascinating.

Discover more about

Sexuality and the Greeks

Goldhill, S. (2004). Love, Sex & Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives. University of Chicago Press.

Goldhill, S. (1995). Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality. Cambridge University Press.

Goldhill, S. (1984). Language, Sexuality, Narrative: the Oresteia. Cambridge University Press.

What the Ancient Greeks tell us about sexuality