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At last, a wonderfully honest, open, open-hearted, and sound scholarly treatment of Greek homosexuality, a text that is likely to rewrite much of the scholarship that has shied away from this subject in the past. Congratulations.
Dover has one of the only full accounts on Greek Homosexuality to its full extent. Dover was able to write this in a time when homosexuality was swept under the rug and still able to write it unbiased and simply educational. Dover truly set a landmark.
Dover reopened in Greek Homosexuality (1978) the study by classicists of a subject disdained since 1933, when Hitler crushed the German Homosexual Emancipation Movement. It is an extended commentary, a specialized task at which Dover is a master. The longest and most original are about erotic vases and a seamy lawsuit involving a kidnapping.
He hypercritically refused to use sources dating from after the 4th century - even Plutarch's Lives, which, like the works of Lucian and Diodorus, notoriously cited and paraphrased lost classical sources, which themselves often relied on earlier oral and written accounts. He was led astray by his intended collaborator, the Canadian shrink Devereux, who taught him the distorted Freudian thesis that homosexuals are sexually retarded, i.e., that we don't fully mature from the oral and anal phases to the phallic. However, Sir Kenneth denigrated Greek pederasty by claiming that it was merely lustful.
How such a skimpy selection of sources could be expected to yield a valid thesis defies reason.Nicknamed "Bend-over Dover" by undergrads, Sir Kenneth, unlike so many other Oxfordians, seems never to have experienced a homosexual act, except once when, according to his autobiography, he was buggered while on military duty in Alexandria and complained that it hurt. This simplified the crotchety don's task and distorted his conclusions. His "book" is really a collection of four essays.
Sir Kenneth's homophobia was well documented a few years ago by James Davidson in the February 2001 issue of Past and Present."The Prosecution of Timarkhos" takes up 100 pages (19-109) - one half of the text. The best things about the book are the illustrations, the analyses of the vase paintings, and the 30 pages of appendices.
In Greek antiquity, the relationships were more oriented toward man-boy relations rather than man-man relations. His historian's viewpoint reports the facts and artefacts dispassionately as his discipline allows, but it might seem to many a bit too confining now that other histories have subsequently appeared. While Dover does not make this as explicit as he could, one cannot read the extensive material Dover covers without forming this conclusion. In Greek culture several centuries before Christ, homosexuality as we know it today did not exist, except in Sparta. When one considers that male-male relations had their dominant Western etiology in Greece antiquity, it's only natural to look back to the ancient records and artefacts to illustrate and examine how these relations existed in their antique form. It's only by a stretch of definition that man-boy sexual and social enculturation in Greek antiquity really reflects any "homosexuality." If this limited scope is your interest, then this is really the best book of its kind. The book's title might have been more appropriately been retitled "Athen's Paedophilia" rather than "Greek Homosexuality."Dover's account is both exhaustive and replete. The historian must go where the artefacts are, and the artefacts are not from Sparta, but from Athens, where the man-boy paradigm prevailed.
If one's purpose is a limited understanding of sexual mores as it was practice in Athen's antiquity, then this book certainly achieves that goal. Indeed, today we more likely to lock the older man up in prison for paedophilia, rather than extol him for his service of introducing younger boys to upper Greek society. What we see is probably different from what we expect.First, it's important to distinguish "homosexuality" from its practice in antiquity to what it is today. (For an excellent history of homosexuality over the ages, I heartily recommend Crompton's "Homosexuality & Civilization" by Harvard University Press). Identifying these man-boy relations as "homosexual" is certainly tendentious, at best.Second, the "mentoring" that older men functioned for their younger devotees in exchange for the devotee's sexual favors is in stark contrast to anything "homosexual" in our own age. The cultural context of Athens is anything but homosexual, but truly something else.Third, the ubiquity of the man-boy pattern (primarily around Athens) as opposed to the man-man pattern (primarily around Sparta) illustrates another distinguishing form of "homosexuality" in antiquity. However, this book really isn't a "gay" or true "homosexual" history at all. But if your interest is more broadly "homosexual," then Crompton's book is the one to turn to.
I have tried to read the whole book several times, but simply wasn't able to. Greek Homosexuality is a strange book. If you want to buy this book because you are anxious to know whether homosexuality was widespread in ancient Greece and whether it was really accepted as a normal form of sexual behavior, let me tell you that the author has no definite answer to these two crucial questions. But the trouble is that it is almost completely devoid of enlightening syntheses. This sounds incredible, yet it is true. I threw it several times in the garbage can and then went out again to retrieve it because I thought I should know more about Greek gays. I was never able to read an entire chapter of it.
But the fact is that the more I read the less I understood what Greek homosexuality was. My own take is that the writing of Greek Homosexuality is an extreme case of a rampant scholarly disease called "not seeing the forest because of the trees". Once again I have to disagree with every other reviewer. To be objective doesn't mean to just align dozens and dozens of pottery fragments and ancient author quotes and other scholarly references and then leave the reader to decide what this all means. As I have just said, Greek Homosexuality is replete with hundreds of details about homosexuality in art, in law, in philosophy, in language. Therefore every time I read a few pages in this book, I ended up knowing less about homosexuals in ancient Greece than when I took it up. Touto biblion ouk esti kalon. But I will gladly admit that the numerous black and white photographs of male nudes depicted in Greek art are gorgeous and give the reader a fleeting sense of understanding the whole mess of details in the rest of the book.
It is also infuriating. I keep getting lost in thickets of disconnected details while the myriad qualifications with which they are hedged about and the dry and technical language get the better of all my intellectual machettes. These are the kind of general questions he eludes or is honest enough to leave unanswered because the evidence is unconclusive. I spoke of honesty, but I sometimes put down the fuziness of all this to a wrong understanding of what it means to be objective. Therefore my conclusion is: Greek Homosexuality is un-rea-da-ble.
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