Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality (review)

This book opens with a discussion of the concepts of custom and nature in Greek literature before 100 b.c.e. Thornton stresses that nature was a fickle and destructive power, entirely unlike its Romantic version; in Greek literature, a beautiful landscape is often the cue for a rape scene. In Part 1, he examines the literary imagery used for the power of sexual passion, discussing Aphrodite, Pandora, and the imagery of homosexuality; in Part 2 he then describes the “technologies” used to control this power, ranging from the individual’s use of reason to the institutions of agriculture, religion, marriage, and pederasty.

Thornton claims to be providing an account of ancient Greek sexuality superior to other versions because it is based on “what the Greeks actually say” (p. xiii), rather than on any “theory.” This is not only insulting, it is also misleading. His footnotes reference only primary sources; secondary materials are discussed in a “Critical Bibliography.” This gives the impression that the insights in the main body of the text are based solely on the interaction between Thornton and the literature of antiquity, whereas in fact many derive from the very body of scholarship he claims to reject.

He also has a very obvious agenda of his own: “The Greeks knew better” than “us moderns” (p. 23). In “our smug twentieth century” (p. 98), Thornton argues, “our obsession with the careerist couple, our religion of self-fulfillment, and our dependable birth control” (p. 164) have made us blind to the destructive side of sexuality, a side well understood by the Greeks as that “monster waiting to devour us” (p. 160). He rails against “date-rape hysteria” and “radical feminist cant” (p. 216), and bemoans the loss of “the time-honored social controls—marriage and chastity, guilt and shame—that once helped to prevent sexual excesses from destroying American society” (p. 138).

It is irritating that someone who, in his preface, makes such an effort to avoid the “average Greek” and appreciate the different perspectives of aristocrat and democrat, city-dweller and peasant, should seem to assume an average reader who has heard the same pop music and seen the same films as he. References to this shared reality abound. The Greeks feared sexual loss of control; “we” seek it (p. 23). “Remember the old pop-song refrain, ‘a double-shot of my baby’s love’?” (p. 22); actually, no. Yet Thornton also insists on the difficulty for this average reader in understanding the impact of Greek imagery for the power of sex if he or she has not cooked with fire, grown agricultural produce, been wounded by an arrow, had “daily experience of horses” (p. 39), and been hit by a storm at sea. Thornton tells us that he has himself experienced the last of these (p. 35), although he does not reveal whether his quest for the truth has led him any further. There are some very odd asides. For example, on the destructive power of eros, he writes: “Just ask the numerous wives and girlfriends stalked, hunted, and often butchered by their eros-mad mates” (p. 43). Precisely how is one supposed to “ask” someone who has been “butchered”? And, laying aside this practical objection, how is this sentence to be squared with Thornton’s main argument—namely, that “we” post-Romantics operate with a very different concept of eros?

As for medical sources, the statement that “of all the sexist crimes of the Greeks, ‘hysteria’ is one of the worst to feminists” (p. 255 n. 79) overlooks the point that the Greeks never used the term. The extent to which menstrual blood was seen as a destructive force is overstated: if “menstrual blood is particularly disturbing” (p. 78), how does this fit in with the Hippocratic view that the most fertile time for intercourse is while the period is ending? Thornton’s notion that, in “fairness” to ancient physicians, we should link the belief in the...