 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | For nearly two thousand years, historians have treated the subject of homosexuality in ancient Greece with apology, embarrassment, or outright denial. Now classics scholar James Davidson offers a brilliant, unblushing exploration of the passion that permeated Greek civilization. Using homosexuality as a lens, Davidson sheds new light on every aspect of Greek culture, from politics and religion to art and war. With stunning erudition and irresistible wit–and without moral judgment–Davidson has written the first major examination of homosexuality in ancient Greece since the dawn of the modern gay rights movement.
What exactly did same-sex love mean in a culture that had no word or concept comparable to our term “homosexuality”? How sexual were these attachments? When Greeks spoke of love between men and boys, how young were the boys, how old were the men? Drawing on examples from philosophy, poetry, drama, history, and vase painting, Davidson provides fascinating answers to questions that have vexed scholars for generations. To begin, he defines the essential Greek words for romantic love–eros, pothos, philia–and explores the shades of emotion and passion embodied in each. Then, exploding the myth of Greek “boy love,” Davidson shows that Greek same-sex pairs were in fact often of the same generation, with boys under eighteen zealously separated from older boys and men.
Davidson argues that the essence of Greek homosexuality was “besottedness”–falling head over heels and “making a great big song and dance about it,” though sex was certainly not excluded. With refreshing candor, humor, and an astonishing command of Greek culture, Davidson examines how this passion played out in the myths of Ganymede and Cephalus, in the lives of archetypal Greek heroes such as Achilles, Heracles, and Alexander, in the politics of Athens and the army of lovers that defended Thebes. He considers the sexual peculiarities of Sparta and Crete, the legend and truth surrounding Sappho, and the relationship between Greek athletics and sexuality.
Writing with the energy, vitality, and irony that the subject deserves, Davidson has elucidated the ruling passion of classical antiquity. Ultimately The Greeks and Greek Love is about how desire–homosexual and heterosexual–is embodied in human civilization. At once scholarly and entertaining, this is a book that sheds as much light on our own world as on the world of Homer, Plato, and Alexander. |
Average Customer Rating:    A complete waste of time and money I found serious problems with this (much-anticipated) book in the very first pages.
The first problem was the author's explanation of "cutting the Gordian knot." Rather than supply a brief explanation for readers unfamiliar with this hackneyed phrase, the author chose to use an entire page reprinting an ancient description of Alexander actually cutting the Gordian knot! This set off serious alarms instantly, because it told me that the author was just going to write write write and write until he had created a Big Book.
For comparison: let's suppose that an author uses another hackneyed phrase, "a Pyrrhic victory." What do you, as a reader want? A small footnote explaining that a Pyrrhic victory is one where the victor suffers such enormous damage that he might as well have lost the battle, or the author using up an entire page to reprint a description of the actual battle, its formations, its armies, and its casualties?
The result of the second path is one of the disasters of modern non-fiction. Authors feel that, if they haven't written a book of 500 or 1,000 pages, they haven't done anything. Another point of view is that they were too lazy to write something shorter.
The second problem, on the second page, was the author referring to Greek love in terms which came straight from Hillary Clinton. This was only the beginning: the anachronisms in this book are ubiquitous and grotesque. You might reasonably state that the author took all of "our" modern gay issues and rudely transplanted them in Ancient Greece, including gay marriage, gays in the military and all the rest --- issues which, frankly, never occurred to the Ancient Greeks.
Before you rush out and buy this book, I strongly recommend that you seek out Thomas K. Hubbard's extremely learned and extensive review, which can be easily found on-line by dropping the title of the book and the last name "Hubbard" into any good search engine. I think you will be as shocked as I was.
I can summarize in two different ways: as Hubbard comments, "This is not a book that the non-specialist
reader can rely upon for accuracy." To translate this for non-academics: "This book is rubbish."
I actually bought this book, and am going to use it for a door-stop. The Passion that Was Greece Davidson, James. "The Greeks and Greek Love: A Bold New Exploration of the Ancient World", Random House, 2009.
The Passion that Was Greek
Amos Lassen
James Davidson gives us a massive work of research and information that may surprise some. This is an outstanding study of homosexuality in ancient Greece and the passion that was part of the country. Davidson uses homosexuality as a lens to the history of Greek civilization and he sheds light on every aspect of Greek culture. Davidson writes in exquisite prose with a wonderful wit and importantly passes no judgments.
The question of same-sex love has been one that has been an issue for nearly 2000 years. Historians have not known how to deal with it and in some cases denied it. Davidson manages to answer some of the questions that have proved problematic and begins his study by defining his terms and looks at the various shades of emotions and passions which are included with there terms. He shatters the myth of boy love by showing that the same-sex pairs in ancient Greece were between men of the same generation and furthermore, boys under 18 were separated from those older.
Certainly passion was part of Greece and Davidson shows how important it was. The male-male relationships of Greece were not just sexual by any means and this is one of the issues that have bothered historians. Because of the tremendous amount of research that he did, Davidson gives us a full picture of Greek sexuality. This is a book to be treasured and we all owe James Davidson a tremendous thank you for what he has done for us.
Not Just Platonic Ever since Kenneth Dover's pioneering work Greek Homosexuality: Updated and with a new Postscript, the homoerotic current in Classical studies has been removed from an embarassing footnote and placed front and center in many studies of Ancient Greek Civilization. Nonetheless, James Davidson feels historians still have it wrong, especially in reducing the concept of Greek Love to sexual acts and who does what to whom being of central importance.
In what promises to be the new landmark study, not only in its controversial theses but in the sheer volume of detail and example accumulated, Davidson has made the case that homoerotic relationships in Ancient Greece were far more complex than historians have previously been willing to explore.
Initially, by examining various words used to describe various shades of amorousness, desire, attraction, friendship, love and sex, and how meaning changes based on context, a complexity is exposed that goes far to impress the basic ambiguities inherent in reading the record and elucidating the questions being asked. Eventually, by further examining vast amounts of written and pictorial elements, a more complete picture of Ancient Greek sexuality is revealed, allowing the Greeks a foreigness that modern writers have frequently ignored, often in order to coopt them for modern political purposes.
It is by allowing the Greeks to be themselves, in all their strangeness, ambiguity and humanity, and by exploring in clear, frequently witty prose what can and cannot be known, that Mr. Davidson has made his indelible mark on the historic record. |  |
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