Homosexuality in ancient greece

  • Hellenic Museum
  • Jun 3,
  • 5 min read

Updated: Jun 23,

Dr David M. Halperin is a classicist, theorist and W.H. Auden Distinguished Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality at the University of Michigan. His earlier publications focused on ancient Greek philosophy and Hellenistic poetics, while his current fields of study include the history of sexuality, critical theory, queer theory and gender studies. Dr Halperin also cofounded GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies and has authored several books, including Before Pastoral () and One Hundred Years of Homosexuality ().

You’re a trained classicist whose work has focused on both ancient Greece and sexuality, historical and up-to-date. What drew you to these fields?

I was initially drawn to the learn of ancient Greece by reading Thucydides in a course on Greek history taught by a lecturer who was active in the movement against the American war in Vietnam. In that context, Thucydides’ enlightened, tragic account of power politics, military atrocities, and the Fall of Athens was immediately compelling.

In our sexual histories series, authors search changing sexual mores from antiquity to today.

In recent years, we have seen significant advances won for LGBT rights through hard-fought legal cases and well-targeted political campaigns. Yet it is worth remembering that for decades, recourse to such methods was not available to LGBT people. The law-court and the parliament were deaf to their pleas. For many, it was only in their dreams that they could abscond oppression.

One should not underplay the importance of such fantasies. They provided succour and hope in a grim world. It was comforting to imagine a time before Christianity told you that the acts of love that you committed were a sin or the law pronounced that your public displays of affection were acts of “gross indecency”. The stubborn dream of a “gay utopia” is one of the constants in gay and lesbian historical imaginings over the last years.

One place in particular attracted the longings of gays and lesbians. This was the world of ancient Greece, a supposed gay paradise in which same-sex adoration flourished without dis

LGBT History Month - Homosexuality in Ancient Greece

This February in the department we have been reflecting about LGBT history, not least following the wonderful lecture by Prof Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones on Alexander the Great. In this post, Dr Ben Cartlidge dwells on a puzzling feature of the ancient Greek evidence for male homosexuality.

The inspiration for this came out of the paper I gave last term at our Classics and Ancient History seminar, entitled ‘Just friends? Sexuality and linguistics in Bronze Age Greece’. This post is not a recap of the paper, but an initial statement of a puzzle I came across in the verb for it. The paper was focussed on the figure of Achilles in the Iliad; this post is focussed on the figure of Achilles in art and literature of the fifth-century B.C.

The classic verb on Greek homosexuality, Kenneth Dover’s recently reprinted book of the same call, constructs a visual grammar of ancient Greek male homosexuality. Dover was proficient to point to a series of vases on which homosexual male courtship is conducted using a particular verb of gestures. Such

Greek Homosexuality

Homosexuality: sexual attraction to persons of the same sex. In ancient Greece, this was a normal practice.

Introduction

Violent debate, enthusiastic writings, shamefaced silence, flights of fantasy: few aspects of ancient society are so hotly contested as Greek pederasty, or - as we shall see below - homosexuality. Since the British classicist K.J. Dover published his influential book Greek Homosexuality in , an avalanche of new studies has appeared. We can discern two approaches:

  1. The historical approach: scholars are looking for the (hypothetical) roots of pederasty in very ancient initiation rites and experiment to reconstruct a development. Usually, a lot of fantasy is required, because our sources perform not often allude to these ancient rites.
  2. The synchronistic approach: scholars concentrate upon homosexuality in fifth and fourth-century Athens, where it was integral part of social life.

In the present article, we will use the second approach, although we won't avoid the first one. There are many sources of evidence: lyrical poetry, vases, s