Oswyn Murray
HO PAIDOS KALOS ESTIN
The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece
By James Davidson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 632pp £30.00)

Love the unconquered warrior, Love who falls on the flocks, Love who keeps vigil in the soft cheeks of a girl, you roam over seas and in the halls of savages; no immortal nor any of the men whose life is a day can escape you: he who is touched by you goes mad. You twist the minds of just men to the ruin of injustice. It is you who has stirred up this present strife of kinsfolk; victorious is the bright desire from the eyes of the fair bride; it sits enthroned beside the eternal laws, for the goddess Aphrodite works her invincible will.

Sophocles' dark and ominous wedding song is performed as Antigone goes to her marriage-death with her beloved in the rock tomb that they will share. It introduces many of the themes of Greek love - love as a warrior, love as an economic force, love that lies dormant in the cheeks of the beloved, love that drives you mad. Eros or love is central to Greek society; but it is an emotion that exists outside and beyond the control of the lover in two respects. Eros the servant of Aphrodite fires his dart from outside, and the lover is wounded, poisoned, incapable of resisting, not responsible for his actions. If human responsibility is involved it inheres in the charis (grace), the himeros (longing), which belongs to the beauty of the beloved: the beloved therefore has a duty to respond favourably to the almost involuntary madness of the lover.

James Davidson starts from this erotic logic behind the bonding process between lover (erastes) and beloved (eromenos) that sustains Greek same-sex love. But, as the wedding song shows, he is wrong to claim that Eros is exclusively the god of same-sex love: Eros is rather the avatar of all forms of desire. This irresistible force holds together society by creating indissoluble bonds, until a whole city can be united by an eros stronger than any family bond, as Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, imagined it (though it must be admitted that his city was not composed of ordinary citizens, but only the wise).

Ever since the nineteenth century, two questions have been dominant: what is it that distinguishes the Greek attitude to same-sex love from that of many other societies; and can the Greeks be used, as so many fin de siècle aesthetes held, to construct a model for modern same-sex relations?

The difficulty of addressing this problem can be illustrated by an example. In 1980, around the time that it began to be safe to come out, Félix Buffière, one of the most senior and intelligent of French literary scholars and a teacher in a private Catholic institution, published a book entitled Eros adolescent: la pédérastie dans la Grèce antique. It was an elegant and attractive volume on the literature of boy-love in ancient Greece. Buffière began from the proposition that pederasty was a beautiful thing, an experience that ennobled the young mind and brought it to the understanding of the highest Good; but it had unfortunately been associated in the modern world with homosexuality, a loathsome perversion, denounced alike by the ancient Greeks, the Bible and the Catholic Church, and modern psychology. So fast has the language of sexuality changed that today the views of Buffière would be unprintable, doubly against the law: pederasty is a crime likely to lead to inscription on the Sex Offenders Register, while denunciation of homosexuality is now a criminal offence. Perhaps it is as well that, despite its great merits, Buffière's work, redolent of incense and altar boys, has been deleted from the collective memory so effectively that it appears to be unknown to James Davidson, whose conclusions nevertheless in the end turn out to be remarkably similar.

Undeterred by the difficulties, having discovered what desire is, Davidson sets out to discover the specific nature of desire between men in ancient Greece. The journey is long (over 600 pages) and not always easy, despite Davidson's relentlessly hip style; for those likely to get lost on the way, it may be best to read the last chapter first, and then dip into the earlier narrative as suits their interests. But the book is worth the prolonged study necessary to extract its message.

I am not convinced by much of Davidson's speculation about the same-sex strands in Greek mythology, which seems to me arbitrary; and I will pass over some of the most amusing parts of his book - for instance, the vitriolic denunciation of Sir Kenneth Dover for espousing a phallocratic view of 'Greek homosexuality', in which the issue is reduced to the question of whether the Greeks practised anal or 'intercrural' sex. (Dover was much puzzled by the fact that the Greeks faced each other for sex, rather than bending over like the Etruscans.)

For the main core of his argument Davidson selects three Greek societies in which male same-sex relations were central to coming-of-age ceremonies for the young adult - Crete, Sparta and Athens. These ceremonies focused on puberty, which was (as he shows) approximately two years later than in the modern world, around the age of eighteen. The evidence is not always as good as he would like it to be; nevertheless, in Crete there seems to have been a ritual of abduction and same-sex marriage, by which the 'beloved' entered the men's hut of the lover and the community of adult warriors. In Sparta there was a complex educational system of age-classes which was held together by love between the various levels (and Davidson postulates a form of same-sex marriage here too). In Athens, for which we have the widest range of evidence, both visual and literary, the ephebe - or young male aged eighteen to twenty - emerged from the naked sports of the gymnasium to find himself pursued by a lover; the ideal of chaste resistance and decorous pursuit was not always adhered to, but the resulting bonding often lasted a lifetime, through marriage and political careers. There were laws to prevent abuse of the system - no chatting up of underage boys, no hanging around the gymnasium for older men; boys who prostituted themselves for money were barred from political life, and permanent homoeroticism was frowned on. Needless to say, these rules existed only because they were habitually broken, and they gave rise to public lawsuits as lurid as the trial of Oscar Wilde. The result was a system that could be proclaimed as an ideal, at the same time as causing serious tensions.

As a master social historian, Davidson is at his best in describing this system and the resulting distortions of public life - the way that Spartan foreign policy was often based on obligations between lovers; how Athenian politicians tried to ruin each other with allegations of prostitution; or the extraordinary fashion in which the similar but more chaotic cult of the Royal Pages at the Macedonian court led to a series of murders and conspiracies that almost wrecked Alexander's conquest of the known world.

Less convincing is his attempt to grapple with the origins or basis of the widespread phenomenon of pederasty. Eventually he inclines to the view that it is not a late development spread by the Dorian (Spartan and Cretan) invasion - the notorious Spartan boy-love theory that inspired the Hitler Youth. Instead he sees it as a survival from an early Indo-European practice derived from nomadic warrior-bands. But he rather shoots himself in the foot by discovering that the closest parallels are to be found in the secret rituals of a tribe of homicidal banana-farmers in Papua New Guinea, who are certainly not Indo-European. The question is, of course, meaningless; as Foucault and others have argued, same-sex love (whether male or female) is part of the normal range of sexual activities: what needs explaining for both hetero- and homosexual activities is not their existence but their socialisation. Davidson has himself shown the answer in his connection of adolescent rites of transition with military organisation: this is simply a more systematic version of the 'buddy principle' that underpins all modern armies. Nevertheless, it provided as many links to wider political action through the principle of pistis (loyalty between companions, more important than family or patriotism) as does the modern homosexual mafia.

This is an excellent book on an important historical phenomenon. But I am puzzled by Davidson's refusal to relate it to the modern world. Plato seems to have been the first to internalise the experience of love, to insist that it belonged with the unruly desires that a true philosopher should seek to control. The erotic discourse of philosophy that he evolved was an attempt to persuade the soul to proceed from the love of the beautiful male form to the love of beauty itself, and the highest form of the Good. Socrates was the master of seduction, whose lack of physical beauty merely highlighted the beauty of his soul. The dialogue form adopted by Plato was a form of persuasion based on the discourse of Greek homoeroticism, designed to persuade the youth of Athens, not to be corrupted (as the prosecutors of Socrates thought), but to be spiritually ennobled through the pursuit of true knowledge.

The Platonic vision of the place of eros in the pursuit of knowledge, implausibly extracted from the practices of an Athenian elite of rugger buggers, has inspired the entire Western tradition of education: it is not possible to educate the adolescent young without engaging them in a pursuit based on love, as all great teachers have recognised. The basis of my forty years of teaching, like that of my pupil James Davidson, has always been the mutual love between teacher and disciple, created in the pursuit of knowledge. The modern attempt to suppress the role of love in education is merely a disguised expression of the homophobia that has been outlawed among adults; however we may seek to limit the physical expression of their sexual urges, the best teachers must always in some sense be paiderastai, lovers of the young, as George Steiner has recognised:

Eroticism, covert or declared, fantasized or enacted, is inwoven in teaching, in the phenomenology of mastery and discipleship. This elemental fact has been trivialized by a fixation on sexual harassment. But it remains central. How could it be otherwise?