Greek love is a term originally used by classicists to describe the primarily homoerotic customs, practices, and attitudes of the ancient Greeks. It was frequently used as a euphemism for both homosexuality and pederasty. The phrase is a product of the enormous impact of the reception of classical Greek culture on historical attitudes toward sexuality, and its influence on art and various intellectual movements.Blanshard, Alastair J. L. Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
Following the work of philosopher Michel Foucault, the validity of an ancient Greek model for modern gay culture has been questioned.Blanshard, Alastair J. L. "Greek Love," essay at p. 161 of Eriobon, Didier Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, transl. Lucey M. (Duke University Press, 2004 In his essay "Greek Love", Alastair Blanshard sees "Greek love" as "one of the defining and divisive issues in the homosexual rights movement."
Historic terms As a phrase in Modern English and other modern European languages, "Greek love" refers to various (mostly homoerotic) practices as part of the Hellenic heritage reinterpreted by adherents such as Lytton Strachey; quotation marks are often placed on either or both words ("Greek" love, Greek "love", or "Greek love") to indicate that usage of the phrase is determined by context. It often serves as a "coded phrase" for pederasty,Halperin, David M., Winkler, John J., and Zeitlin, Froma I., introduction to Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 19 or to "sanitize" homosexual desire in historical contexts where it was considered unacceptable.Pulham, Patricia, Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee's Supernatural Tales (Ashgate, 2008), p. 59.
The German term griechische Liebe ("Greek love") appears in German literature between 1750 and 1850, along with socratische Liebe ("Socratic love") and platonische Liebe ("Platonic love") in reference to male–male attractions. Ancient Greece became a positive reference point by which homosexual men of a certain class and education could engage in discourse that might otherwise be taboo. In the early Modern period, a disjuncture was carefully maintained between idealized male eros in the classical tradition, which was treated with reverence, and sodomy, which was a term of contempt.
Ancient Greek background
In his classic study Greek Homosexuality, Kenneth Dover states that the English nouns "a homosexual" and "a heterosexual" have no equivalent in the ancient Greek language. Dover claims that, there was no concept in ancient Greece equivalent to the modern conception of "sexual preference and that it was assumed that a person could have both hetero- and homosexual responses at different times.Dover, Kenneth J., Greek Homosexuality (Harvard University Press, 1978, 1989) However, Hubbard disagrees with this model, stating that "Close examination of a range of ancient texts suggests, however, that some forms of sexual preference were, in fact, considered a distinguishing characteristic of individuals. Many texts even see such preferences as inborn qualities and thus “essential” aspects of human identity". Evidence for same-sex attractions and behaviors is more abundant for men than for women. The most common male–male relationship was paiderasteia, a socially-acknowledged institution in which a mature male (erastēs, the active lover) bonded with or mentored a teen-aged youthSacks, David, A Dictionary of the Ancient Greek World (Oxford University Press, 1995) (eromenos, the passive lover, or pais, "boy" understood as an endearment and not necessarily a category of age Johnson, Marguerite and Ryan, Terry, Sexuality in Greek and Roman Society and Literature: A Sourcebook (Routledge, 2005), pp. 3–4; Anne L. Klinck, "'Sleeping in the Bosom of a Tender Companion': Homoerotic Attachments in Sappho," in Same-sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West (Haworth Press, 2005), p. 202; Jane McIntosh Snyder, The Woman and the Lyre (Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), p. 3.). Pederasty was both idealized and criticized in Ancient Greek literature and philosophy. Martin Litchfield West views Greek pederasty as "a substitute for heterosexual love, free contacts between the sexes being restricted by society".West, M. L.,Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus, Walter de Gruyter and Co. (1974), page 75
Greek art and literature portray these relationships as sometimes erotic or sexual, or sometimes idealized, educational, non-consummated, or non-sexual. A distinctive feature of Greek male–male eros was its occurrence within a military setting, as with the Theban Band, though the extent to which homosexual bonds played a military role has been questioned.Leitao, David, "The legend of the Theban Band", in M. Craven Nussbaum and J. Sihvola, The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome, Chicago University Press (2002), pp. 140–150
Some Greek myths have been interpreted as reflecting the custom of paiderasteia, most notably the myth of Zeus kidnapping Ganymede to become his cupbearer in the Olympian symposium. The death of Hyacinthus is also frequently referenced as a pederastic myth.
The main Greek literary sources for Greek homosexuality are lyric poetry, Athenian comedy, the works of Plato and Xenophon, and courtroom speeches from Athens. Vase paintings from the 500s and 400s BCE depict courtship and sex between males.
Ancient Rome
In Latin, mos Graeciae or mos Graecorum ("Greek custom" or "the way of the Greeks") refers to a variety of behaviors the ancient Romans regarded as Greek, including but not confined to sexual practice. Homosexual behaviors at Rome were acceptable only within an inherently unequal relationship; male Roman citizens retained their masculinity as long as they took the active, penetrating role, and the appropriate male sexual partner was a prostitute or slave, who would nearly always be non-Roman.King, Helen, "Sowing the Field: Greek and Roman Sexology", in Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 30. In Archaic and classical Greece, paiderasteia had been a formal social relationship between freeborn males; taken out of context and refashioned as the luxury product of a conquered people, pederasty came to express roles based on domination and exploitation.Pollini, John, "The Warren Cup: Homoerotic Love and Symposial Rhetoric in Silver", in Art Bulletin 81.1 (1999) Slaves often were given, and prostitutes sometimes assumed, Greek names regardless of their ethnic origin; the boys (pueri) or (amasius) to whom the poet Martial is attracted have Greek names.Joshel, Sandra R., Slavery in the Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 78 and 95Younger, John G. Sex in the Ancient World from A to Z (Routledge, 2005), p. 38. The use of slaves defined Roman pederasty; sexual practices were "somehow 'Greek when they were directed at "freeborn boys openly courted in accordance with the Hellenic tradition of pederasty".
Effeminacy or a lack of discipline in managing one's sexual attraction to another male threatened a man's "Roman-ness" and thus might be disparaged as "Eastern" or "Greek". Fears that Greek models might "corrupt" traditional Roman social codes (the mos maiorum) seem to have prompted a vaguely documented law (Lex Scantinia) that attempted to regulate aspects of homosexual relationships between freeborn males and to protect Roman youth from older men emulating Greek customs of pederasty. Bremmer, Jan, "An Enigmatic Indo-European Rite: Paederasty", in Arethusa 13.2 (1980), p. 288.
By the close of the 2nd century BCE, however, the elevation of Greek literature and art as models of expression caused homoeroticism to be regarded as urbane and sophisticated.MacMullen, Ramsay, "Roman Attitudes to Greek Love", in Historia 31.4 (1982), pp. 484–502. The consul Quintus Lutatius Catulus was among a circle of poets who made short, light Hellenistic poems fashionable in the late Republic. One of his few surviving fragments is a poem of desire addressed to a male with a Greek name, signaling the new aesthetic in Roman culture.Cantarella, Eva, Bisexuality in the Ancient World (Yale University Press, 1992, 2002, originally published 1988 in Italian), p. 120Courtney, Edward, The Fragmentary Latin Poets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 75. The Hellenization of elite culture influenced sexual attitudes among "avant-garde, philhellenic Romans", as distinguished from sexual orientation or behavior,Halperin, David M., "The First Homosexuality?" in The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece (University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 242 and 263. and came to fruition in the "new poetry" of the 50s BCE. The poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus, written in forms adapted from Greek meters, include several expressing desire for a freeborn youth explicitly named "Youth" (Iuventius). His Latin name and free-born status subvert pederastic tradition at Rome. Catullus's poems are more often addressed to a woman.
The literary ideal celebrated by Catullus stands in contrast to the practice of elite Romans who kept a puer delicatus ("exquisite boy") as a form of high-status sexual consumption, a practice that continued well into the Imperial era. The puer delicatus was a slave chosen from the pages who served in a high-ranking household. He was selected for his good looks and grace to serve at his master's side, where he is often depicted in art. Among his duties, at a convivium he would enact the Greek mythological role of Ganymede, the Trojan youth abducted by Zeus to serve as a divine cupbearer. Attacks on emperors such as Nero and Elagabalus, whose young male partners accompanied them in public for official ceremonies, criticized the perceived "Greekness" of male–male sexuality.Vout C., Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome, Cambridge University Press (2007) "Greek love", or the cultural model of Greek pederasty in ancient Rome, is a "topos or literary game" that "never stops being Greek in the Roman imagination", an erotic pose to be distinguished from the varieties of real-world sexuality among individuals. Vout sees the views of Williams and MacMullen as opposite extremes on the subject
Renaissance
Male same-sex relationships of the kind portrayed by the "Greek love" ideal were increasingly disallowed within the Christian traditions of western society.Crompton, Louis. Homosexuality and Civilization. Harvard University Press, 2006. In the postclassical period, love poetry addressed by males to other males has been in general taboo.Crompton, Louis. Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-century England. Faber & Faber, London 1985. According to Reeser's book "Setting Plato Straight", it was the Renaissance that shifted the idea of love in Plato's sense to what we now refer to as "Platonic love"—as asexual and heterosexual.