Odd customs of Greece

Mad about the boy | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books

Yet again, a historian has a go at trying to work out the exact nature of same-sex love in ancient Greece.

Peter Davidson has a whole book just out about this, and this article is written by him too, presumably summarising some of his main points.

His goal is amusingly stated as:

So how do we begin to make sense of this truly extraordinary historical phenomenon, an entire culture turning noisily and spectacularly gay for hundreds of years?

Part of the answer is to note that:

"Ancient Greece" was in fact a constellation of hundreds of rivalrous micro-states, with their own calendars, dialects and cults - and their own local versions of Greek homosexuality. These revealed very different attitudes and employed very different practices: "We Athenians consider these things utterly reprehensible, but for the Thebans and Eleans they are normal."

The Cretans seem to have made a big production of it:

The "peculiar custom" of the Cretans...involved an abduction and a tug-of-war over a boy, a two-month-long hunting expedition, lavish gifts, the sacrifice of an ox and a great sacrificial banquet, at which the boy formally announced his acceptance or not of "the relationship". Thereafter he got to wear a special costume that announced to the rest of the community his new status as "famed".

In a review of this book, it is noted that at one stage at least:

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.

Davidson writes:

In Athens these under-18s were vigorously protected, rather like the young women in a Jane Austen novel, although their younger sisters would have been expected to be married by the age of 15. These were the Boys who were escorted to the gymnasium by the slave paidagogoi and followed around at a distance by a pack of admirers. "A guard of his honour" is how one source describes it, trying to explain the contradictory custom.

It all makes Schoolies week seem pretty tame by comparison!

Davidson notes that the habits of the Greeks were well known:

The Romans certainly noticed what they called the "Greek custom", which they blamed on too much exercising with not enough clothes on.

I don't know what lesson anyone can take from reading about this: even those who have very liberal views today of same sex relationships would presumably have something of a problem with a society in which middle aged men more-or-less ritualistically pursue 18 year old boys who take their fancy. The fact is sexual customs in Athens and other Greek places were very idiosyncratic, even for other societies around them.

And my modern day question is this: why does England seem so gay now?