Trojan Horses by DuBois Page

Author:DuBois, Page.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2001-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

4

Sex

We have seen what “their Greeks” look like. I would argue for Sappho as a different beginning point for understanding the disparate and abundant histories of ancient Greek societies. And I want to look here at some examples of ancient Greek sex, politics, and religion, to locate signs of a greater density and ambiguity in ancient culture, to find the unfamiliar and the strange, those Greeks like the Asian and nomadic Herodotus, the wandering sophists, and poets like Sappho, often left out of work by the contemporary writers I’ve discussed.

Even in contemporary, allegedly secular, multicultural American society, we see the persistence of underlying religious assumptions about human sexuality, notions of shame, and the call both to police sexual behavior and to deny sexual education to the young. Reading the ancient Greeks provides a perspective on our own practices, and on our heritage, putting it into history. Our ideas about sexuality are not natural or inevitable; they are the legacy of a particular historical development, always in the process of change. Our ancestors the Greeks had very different ideas about bodies from ours, about what people should and did do with them, and about the relationship of their gods to sexuality.

“Sexuality” as a category, in the social scientific sense, as an object for Kinsey-like research, may not even be historically appropriate to the study of Greek society; rather, what we call sex was for the Greeks inseparable from worship of the gods, from ideas about origins and the relationship between human beings and their deities, from the duties of the citizen, and from ideas about philosophical knowledge.

The Greeks did have images of familial devotion, especially on funerary monuments, where husbands and wives left tender inscriptions remembering one another and their children. But they also had ideas about this part of human existence, the family, unlike our own, as well as different ideas about women’s desire, about homoeroticism, and about obscenity. For example, sex between married partners was to some extent understood as an obligation, performed in order to guarantee the future and survival of household, family, and city. Husbands were required by law to have sex with their wives a certain number of times per month. Herodotus tells a story about an Athenian tyrant who failed to fulfill his duties:

After the recovery of his tyranny … Peisistratos married Megacles’ daughter, as he had agreed to do; but because of a story that Megacles’ family, the Alkmaionidai, had a curse upon it, and because he already had grown-up sons of his own, he did not want children from his new wife, and to prevent her from having any he had sex with her in a way contrary to custom. For a time his wife concealed these things, but later—perhaps in answer to a question—she told her mother, and her mother told her husband, who was so angry at the slight upon himself and his daughter, that he made up his quarrel with his political enemies. Learning of these doings, Peisistratos decided to leave the country.

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