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Reviewed by:
  • Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West
  • Mark Masterson
Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West. Edited by Beert C. Verstraete, Vernon Provencal. Binghamton, N.Y.: Harrington Park Press, 2005. Pp. 505. $69.95 (cloth); $49.95 (paper).

This volume contains essays that address understandings of same-sex desire in the ancient world and the persistence and transformation of these understandings in the early modern and modern West. This wide-ranging collection also appeared as a double issue (vol. 49, nos. 3–4) of the Journal of Homosexuality in 2005.

After an introduction by the editors, the volume contains six papers on ancient Greece, three on Rome, and then, concluding spaciously, five papers on the various receptions of antiquity in later articulations of same-sex sexuality from Renaissance Italy to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. Each of the essays comes with its own notes, bibliography, and introductory summary. The back of the volume features a table of abbreviations, a list of names and terms, an index of ancient passages discussed, and a general index. Of the fourteen papers, men author twelve and women two, a fact the editors acknowledge (xvi).

On the whole, a general audience not expert in the ancient world is the target readership for this book. At times, too, the audience is presumed to be only queers/gays/lesbians (see, for example, 22). The essays relating to Greece and those concerned with the later reception of ancient ideas of same-sex behavior contain much basic information that will help the general reader understand what is at issue. The three essays that treat Rome are less successful in this regard. I find the lopsided representation and inferior contextualization given to Rome regrettable. While ancient Greece is important, there is every reason to regard a nuanced understanding of Roman attitudes to same-sex behavior as worthy of at least the same amount [End Page 489] of care. The Roman state in one form or another was a major geopolitical player in the Mediterranean for over a thousand years, and Rome most assuredly was a greater influence on the early modern states of Europe than was classical Greece. This privileging of Greece is not novel, however. It is a perennial feature of the discipline of classics. I also note here that in many (though not all) of these papers there is less care taken with terms such as heterosexuality and homosexuality than there ought to be.

After the introduction by the editors, an article entitled “Reconsiderations about Greek Homosexualities” by William Armstrong Percy leads off the volume. Percy covers in canny compression some of the same ground he covered in his 1996 book, Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece. As the title of this well-documented paper indicates, Percy wants to reevaluate evidence of same-sex eroticism from Greece. The same-sex behavior he mostly means is pederasty, a brief mention of Sappho excepted. In general and ideal terms, pederasty was a sexual relationship between a younger and older partner, the eromenos, who was about thirteen to about eighteen (that is to say, from puberty to arrival of the heavy beard), and the erastes, who was older (from eighteen to about thirty). The older partner was supposed to be the penetrator of the younger partner. It was also assumed that these relationships would not be merely sexual but that mentoring would take place, too. Percy asserts that the high prevalence of these sorts of connections between young males in ancient Greece started in Crete and Sparta in the seventh century BCE and spread from there. I am uncomfortable with his confident reading of scanty evidence. There is much we don’t know for sure. Also, the claims he makes for pederasty are grand, to say the least, seeing the Greek intellectual miracle as connected in a real way to the “erotic spark between man and boy” (48). While I do believe that the homosocial environment certainly helped to move things along intellectually in Athens, if we quite reasonably put even a little credence in the...

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