I found this book in a list of new book recommendations. The premise of this book is about a historic pattern where homophobia predictably follows certain economic and social conditions. By the time the book went through modern history it gave plenty of examples. It seemed to me a plausible theory.
I truly enjoyed the whirlwind tour of Greek history and philosophy in ancient times. It's the best i have read yet. I was surprised about the anti-intellectualism and homophobia in Greece that existed around the time of Socrates. Everything old is new again.
I also found the chapter on modern homophobia insightful.
In ancient Greece, queer love was celebrated. The most famous warrior in antiquity loved another man, the poet whose lyrics were memorised by philosophers and kings sang about her desire for women. What fragments survive all tell us one thing: it was not a sin to be queer.
In this illuminating and ground-breaking history filled with stories of love, sex, and resistance in the ancient world, Harry Tanner sets out on a journey to discover the origins of homophobia.
When I was a teenager, I believed I was going to hell. For centuries, it was almost universally acknowledged that all gay men would. It wasn't until years later that I asked myself where that idea came from, and /why/ it was that, thousands of years ago when the Bible was written, people decided that queer love was a sin?
It hadn't always been a sin to be queer. In many cities across the ancient world, same-sex love was celebrated. So how did homophobia take root? Why did so many societies start executing men and women for the same love once praised by their philosophers and rulers?
Though evangelical Christianity no longer holds the same power over me, I keep returning to that question: how and why did ancient societies turn against their queer citizens? With the world as it is, and with homophobia on the march and back in the pages of statue books, we need answers.
It is hard enough to rescue any queer life from the ancient world, especially given the purges and revisions of the source material conducted by Romans and Christians alike. But that is even more true for queer women and for trans people. Throughout antiquity, women were subjected to far more stringent controls on their lives than men, and even societies that celebrated love between men remained deeply misogynistic.
But it is exceptionally rare to find a solidly dependable fact from ancient history. We work with whispers and make what we can of them. For hundreds of years, writers claimed the lesbian poet Sappho had a /husband/ called Kerkylas of Andros. Never questioning this information, they handed it down from generation to generation, depending upon it completely as a fact. That was until the 1850s, when William Mure was clever enough to point out that the name Kerkylas of Andros literally means "Dick All-cock from [the isle of] MAN" and was almost certainly a joke.
Writers of queer histories, including Kenneth Dover, have often assumed that /any/ mention of queerness is proof of its tolerance. These academics have used comedians mocking queer people, laws opposing queer people, and speeches in political assemblies denouncing queer people as sources from which to extrapolate ideas about their lives. This is how conclusions have been drawn that lecherous, older gay men stalked gymnasia for young lovers in ancient Greece. I have taken the view that we are really looking at an early homophobic trope here, and not an accurate account of common practices.
... Or we assume that we have misunderstood the Greek and Latin words that we now translate as /boy/--we assume they did not literally mean to say a young lad. This seems overwhelmingly likely, since the words for /boy/ can, for instance, be used to describe slaves of any age and other kinds of subordinate. Given that marriage between a man and a woman in ancient societies was, as a consequence of patriarchal values, between a superior male and a socially inferior female, it seems probable to me that the Greeks and Romans may have talked about same-sex desire using the same hierarchy. To do so, they invoked a word--which we translate as /boy/--because there had to be a superior and inferior in a relationship. Once we allow for this cultural understanding of homosexuality, we put ourselves in a better position to understand its censorship and to track the political movements that came against it.
Finally, it seems necessary to address a very dark side to ancient culture. Historians have been quick to read accounts of the rape of male slaves by their male masters as a sign of social acceptance, or to interpret vases from ancient Greece which show Greek soldiers raping their enemies similarly as evidence of open queer desire. It is my view that there is compelling evidence to suggest that when slave-owners raped their slaves, they did so to assert power and dominance over them. This use of gay sex as a tool of repression doesn't necessarily make those slave-owners gay, but it does make them violent. To this day, rape is still perpetrated as a weapon of war by men against men. This does not make either party homosexual. Nor does it generally occur in societies that tolerate and accept same-sex desire--queer love between consenting adults is often banned in the same places where rape of men (and particularly of male slaves) is praised.
It can be hard to piece together the exact age and nature of these relationships. Imagine a historian 2,500 years in the future studying 21st-century Britain, working only with the tiniest handful of texts between lovers, trying to figure out why "girlfriend" or "boyfriend" contain the words "girl" and "boy", and why they call each other "babe" and "baby", and what this suggests about their ages.
In qeer relationships, likewise, there had to be a dominant man and a subordinate--otherwise it could not fit into the hierarchical world in which the Greeks believed. The term /pais/ is often used to address /other adults/ who are of lower or inferior status; much as the term "sirrah" might be used in Shakespearean English. It is my belief that this is why ancient Greek writers--including Theognis--use the term. They are not saying their lovers are children.
The odd thing about these early signs of queer love in ancient Megara is how closely they are intertwined with the economic and political fortunes of the city-state. ... I don't want to misconstrue Megara as some sort of egalitarian paradise... but it is in Megara, one of the earliest periods of recorded Greek history, that a fragile association may emerge between equality and tolerance for queer love.
In this period, Athens did not yet have her beautiful theatres, her marble statues, or her glittering temple to Athena on the Acropolis. These would come later. They were the products of an expansive and greedy empire which Athens sucked dry for her own enrichment. Athens in this period was very much like other city-states: replete with a king, a few noble aristocrats, and a vast population of serfs and slaves.
It is particularly noteworthy that this florescence of same-sex desire coincided with a period when some inequalities were leveled in the Athenian economy.
In 480 BCE, the Persians captured Athens. ... As the Persians razed the city, they were careful to erase every aspect of Athenian culture.
Over a few decades, the Greeks successfully repelled Persian from their homeland.
But there is a darker side to this story of military triumph. [The Eurymedon vase depicts a Greek soldier raping a Persian soldier.]
Rape, especially male-male rape, is used throughout the ancient world as a symbol of total defeat and humiliation.
It is common, particularly in the study of ancient Rome, as we will see, to confused frequent mentions of same-sex rape with a tolerance of homoeroticism. But a man who rapes another man or who uses sex as a means to express aggression is not the same as a man who desires other men. It may even be possible that the more a society associates homoeroticism with rape, the less likely it is to tolerate queer love.
Indeed, the writer Xenophon opined on the antithesis between tyrants and gay love:
A tyrant is less well equipped to fall in love with boyfriends than he is to have children. Making love is by far the more pleasant if it is done with desire [rather than by necessity]. Desire always comes less naturally to a tyrant--Desire does not reach for attainable things, but the ones the Desirer hopes for.
Aeschylus--the gruff and shaggy-bearded veteran-turned-playwright--staged a play entitled The /Myrmidons/ centring on the death of Patroclus.
After his death, the ghost of Patroclus returns to speak to Achilles, furious at the great warrior for abandoning him and the army. The language he uses leaves very little to the imagination:
It seems, Achilles, that you never appreciated the sacredness of my thighs, You never were grateful for those countless kisses.
The extraordinary thing, from our perspective, is that this tale is played out on the Athenian stage in front of thousands of audience members. Aeschylus even stages a scene where Achilles has sex with the dead body of his lover, but the fact that the play was performed means that the subject matter was not considered obscene. There were severe consequences for producing a play that fell foul of public mores: one playwright, Phrynichus, was fined for a play depicting the capture of the city Miletus in the 490s BCE. Aeschylus apparently received no such fine or disgrace. Tolerance (even celebration) of same-sex love was secure for now. However, it's hard to provide a date for this play's performance. It's thought to have been staged sometime between the years 470 and 456 BCE (after the time of the Persian invasion).
The ancient world did not have magazines or the Internet. But it did have pots. Pottery might seem an unlikely medium for pornography, but Athens had a thriving export industry sending images across the sea to modern-day Italy, where the Etruscan people--in particular--collected their pots enthusiastically. Etruria and its people had an unorthodox relationship to sexuality: unlike in the rest of the ancient world, marital sex was celebrated and the Etruscans both produced and bought art which showed off passionate sex between married people.
The industry had begun in earnest in the 6th century BCE.
The porn pot industry tells us that this period in human history was remarkably tolerant of and very interested in same-sex desire. Combined with plays like the /Myrmidons/, a picture emerges of a culture in which queer imagery and storytelling was popular. But by the year 450 BCE, the gay porn pot industry had almost entirely stopped.
[The rich got richer and the poor got poorer.]
In the debate on Mytilene, Cleon got to his feet. Addressing his powerful faction of self-made men, he made a statement that is familiar to us today. "Men of Athens, a lack of learning, so long as it is accompanied with self-control is more useful than learned governance with /excess/. Those [of us] who are less well-born can manage the house of state far better than they can!" The elites--so Cleon says--may have their degrees, their intellectual ideas, but those of us who have made their own way in the world, without all that fancy learning, are the only ones who truly know how to run the state. Intelligence and academic advancement are unnecessary, useless and, even worse, a sign of excess.
Cleon argued for the total destruction of Mytilene and its people. He argued, in other words, for genocide.
But one ancient Greek scholiast did write a /scholion/ to this line. He said, "Of the many men who were calumnied for gay sex, one was Gryttus. A man who on account of his campness and being prone to pleasure used up all his time among male companions... Cleon the demagogue sentenced him to death as a punishment." So, sometime in the 420s BCE, Athens made an example of this man, Gryttus. He died for the crime of having sex with other men.
In the space of 100 years, Athens had gone from being a city known for its beautiful porn pots, a city where thousands enjoyed plays and stories about the power of gay love, to this--the forced execution of a man whose only crime seems to have been having sex with other men.
By this stage, a conspiracy of events precipitated by a rapid rise in wealth inequality had led to politics of self-control. Cleon argued the people were better than the elites with their fancy theories, their fancy wines, and their fancy parties. The trouble is that most of Cleon's audience probably also enjoyed spending their hard-earned cash on good wine imported from abroad. They would all have wanted a piece of the landed estates and the luxurious, extravagant houses of the super-rich. So Cleon found a different kind of extravagance to rail against.
Who better to attack than gay men? Gay sex was a symbol of stepping outside the boundaries of self-control, a symbol of extravagance and excess. Gay sex had the additional advantage of being an irreplaceable desire for only a very small fraction of the population. It became the perfect target. For the first time in the recorded history of Athens, men were put to death for the crime of gay sex.
As the century drew to a close, these three queer men at the centre of Athenian cultural life--Agathon, Pausanias, and Euripedes--packed their bags and left Athens. They went north, crossing the Attica border, into an emerging kingdom--the kingdom of Macedon. They did so at the invitation of King Archaelaus, who offered to pay them a considerable sum to live at his court and compose there. Archaelaus, a king of a thriving, prosperous nation, was considerably more relaxed about same-sex desire than the politicians of Athens. He welcomed queer artists and poets from numerous more repressive Greek states, and, as time went on, Macedon became the place of queer legend.
Even the great philosopher Socrates was invited to Macedon, but unfortunately he chose to remain in Athens--where he was subsequently put on trial and executed for "corrupting the youth".
At the height of its power, much of Athens' wealth came from Laurion, a rocky outcrop outside the city that contained a rich supply of silver ore. Slaves ordered into the mines faced brutal conditions. Cramped in tiny, dark, damp spaces, they hammered at rock for hours on end. The Athenian economy was built on an expansive population of enslaved human beings. They were expendable; if they died, you bought another. Or, you captured a nearby town and enslaved the entire population.
Surprisingly, though, the bones dug up of slaves from the 5th century BCE suggests they were relatively well fed. Isotopic analyses show traces of a high-protein diet, rich in fibrous cereals--a sign of excellent nutrition. They were not being fed luxurious foods, but nor were they starved. But as time goes on, this begins to change. From the beginning of the 4th century BCE, the quality of nutrition drops dramatically.
This pattern is echoed across nearly all the grave sites in ancient Athens. Food inequality emerges. The graves of the richest are untouched by these dietary shifts; they eat as they always have. But the diet of the poor begins to suffer.
In the 5th century BCE, just as in archaic Megara, most graves in Athens were identical in size and shape. A hundred years later, that picture had changed. In 409 BCE... The appearance of these extravagant burials and tombs points to a noticeable widening of inequalities. At the same time, as the grave analyses show, diets of the poor became more meagre and less nutritional.
A new ideology was being born in Athens. Same-sex desire was acknowledged as something that some people felt, but it was inadvisable to act upon it.
It is a friend of Socrates called Xenophon who inadvertently reveals the true meaning of the charge which brought Socrates to his death:
It is truly strange to me that some were persuaded that Socrates corrupted the young. Firstly, Socrates was the most self-continent, in matters of sex and the stomach, of all men...
The jury, however, was unconvinced.
Part of the difficulty of getting to the root of any problem in Greek philosophy is that serious work in parsing out the meanings of ancient Greek words is still underway. Much of our understanding is based on highly biased Victorian translations.
Xenophon even tells us separately that people used to visit Socrates for advice on how to cure their same-sex attractions.
But it is clear that the climate in Athens at the time was opposed to [gay sex]. As well as the role of growing inequalities and monetization in forming the household and promoting self-restraint as a desirable behavior, there was another problem stalking Athens in the 4th century BCE. That problem was debt.
For Plato, debt is about living beyond one's means and therefore exhibits a lack of self-control.
It seems strange to us to lend money to a beggar, but in Athens it was perfectly routine. The reason for this has a very dark side. The /ptochos/ (singular of /ptochoi/) could be lent money, but in the absence of any property or possessions to secure his loan, he would be required to offer up his own body. He could be sold into slavery at any moment to repay his debt.
The complete text of Xenophon's /oeconomicus/, however, we do have, and it provides one of the most revealing pictures of Athens during this time.
...
This couple describe how self-restraint will lead to the accumulation of household wealth. Much as in archaic Sparta, where self-restrained was used to justify why some men had more money than others, there are signs it was becoming an object of fixation in ancient Athens.
The connection between self-restraint of bodily desires and shrewd accumulation of wealth is explicit. It should come as no surprise then to find the /Oeconomicus/ raging against another issue:
I do think that those who fall head-over-heels in love cannot give much attention to anything except the object of their desire. It is no easy thing to find a hope or preoccupation sweeter than queer love. Indeed, when things need to get done, there can be no harder price than prevention of being with those you love.
Isomanchus thinks that queer people cannot be trusted with money. The ancient logic here is that queer people experience excessive desire. Since excess desire reveals a lack of self-control, they could never be trusted with the running of the household. This quiet picture of suburban family life is easy to overlook and has often been assumed to be rather dull by classicists, but it provides important clues about how the zeal for economic management coincided with a rising homophobia.
The idea that there /was/ a design, a secret order to all the chaos, may have been especially seductive during a time in which war, slavery, debt, and economic insecurity all conspired to make the lives of Plato's contemporaries frightening. But the cost of this was to reduce sex to a single function. It was to deny that sex can perform many functions and that pleasure and love are reasons enough in themselves.
Nearly 500 years later, in the early 3rd century CE, a writer named Athenaeus wrote a book about a dinner party held for a group of highly eccentric scholars. At the party, the guests compete with one another to cite the most tangential and abstruse fragments of philosophical or poetic texts that they have stored in their memory. The work is called /Deipnosophistae/ [1], which most scholars translate as the /Dinner Sophists/, but could be translated as something like the /Clever Diners/. The /Clever Diners/ preserves thousands of fragments of ancient philosophy, aphorisms, and ideas that would otherwise be completely lost to us. It is from /Clever Diners/ Book 13 that a segment comes about Zeno the Stoic. We are told that a contemporary of his, Antigonus of carystus wrote a biography of Zeno in which he claims Zeno [the founder of Stoicism] was attracted /exclusively/ to men.
[The library of Alexandria] was not organized according to the sophisticated referencing systems we have become used to today. Instead, as you walked down the marbled aisles, past shelf after wooden shelf, you encountered miniature statues of various literary giants. If you turned right at the bust of a scowling Plato, you would find arranged alphabetically all his scrolls. Scholars today have speculated that this arrangement is the basis for the ancient and medieval "memory palace" techniques (whereby people remember details, by placing them in an imaginary building--a palace or a library).
The ideas forged in the world Alexander conquered, of Stoicism and self-control, are direct products of a high-tax, trade-focused economy where the individual and his family were the only insurance against poverty and slavery. These ideas would form the bedrock of Christianity and Western thinking, but it is only half of the story of how the West came to think about queer sex.
Roman ideas of queer sex were fraught with complexity. .... some sources paint a picture of a divided, homophobic Rome, while others suggest a lurid interest in documenting the most over-the-top stories about gay sex possible. [And at the same exact time period.] ... it is exceptionally rare to hear of a happy, cohabiting queer couple. Once noticed, this silence is deafening.
In many ways, queerness in ancient Rome was fraught with the same moral and ethical questions that cocaine is today. Actors and performers were closely associated with queer sex, which was regarded as morally inferior and dangerous by the political and legal elite. Having sex with a male slave in order to humiliate him into submission in a private household would not draw too much attention from polite society. But throughout much of the Roman Empire's history, if a politician went anywhere near it, or a lawyer, or a member of a public office was in any way associated with queerness, their career would be over. Like cocaine, queerness in Rome was indistinguishable from wealth and luxury, and it was talked by a guilt, an anxiety about decay, about status, about health, and--above all--about a loss of self-control.
As its empire expanded, Roman Italy was becoming a place of unprecedented disparities in wealth.
At the time [2nd century CE], a poorer Roman citizen possessed 1/714 of the wealth of a median Roman citizen. These were still individuals with money who could vote in assemblies. Much of rural Italy and the empire was made up of tenant farmers who paid in cash to lease their farms from richer landlords. The richest Roman aristocrats had 10,476 times the wealth of the poorest. This was a gap that is estimated to have far exceeded even that of Victorian London. With debt crises spiraling and wealth inequality sky-high, the Romans responded--as had the Spartans before them--with a rigorous narrative of discipline.
In the law, in history, and in poetry during the Roman Republic, queerness was used as a trope to attack and ridicule another man.
As Augustus tightened his grip on power, he brought in a series of further morality laws. Perhaps not by coincidence, this was happening while wealth inequality was rising in Rome.
In modern-day Florida, queer books are [banned] from library shelves while gay men party at night in Miami. We should not expect the Romans to be free of the same contradictions.
Stoicism continued to curry favour in Roman intellectual circles as wealth inequality climbed in Rome.
The period also shows some evidence of lesbians. The dictionary writer Hesychius preserves the little-used word /dietaristriai/ (literally: "rubbing women"), which he defines as "women who turn to their female companions in sex, in the manner that men do". The precision of this vocabulary, as in classical Greece, contradicts the claim that the first time queer lives were explicitly labeled was when the term "homosexuality" was invented in the 1800s.
When Henry VIII kicked off the English Reformation, self-control and prudence became embedded more firmly than ever in the fabric of both secular and religious life.
The picture for the poor in late Tudor England was bleak. Starvation was routine in some parts of the country. People began to moralize the consumption of food; excesses of diet were seen as deep ethical failings, not just examples of greed.
The connection between economic and sexual crimes is as alarming as it is predictable. This was not just the case in England. In France in 1605, a novel was published called /The Isle of the Hermaphrodites/ [2] which painted queer bodies and queer desires as motivated by gluttony and excessive consumption of food.
Eighteenth-century Boston was hardly a utopia, but it has often been held up by historians as a rare example of economic equality.
What is remarkable about Boston is the openness with which queer men and women wrote and cohabited, and the lack of criminal consequences. There is also evidence in the 19th century of lesbian couples living together in "Boston Marriages".
Karl Popper theorized--in his book /Open Society and Its Enemies/--that the belief that we are all in inevitable decline from perfection helped lay the groundwork for Nazi ideology, and for this he put the blame squarely on Plato's door. Like Plato, the Nazis argued against democracy and had a strict doctrine of purity and "natural" law--and Plato proposes many different forms of eugenics in both his /Republic/ and his /Laws/.
As Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the US advanced neoliberal economics, a new age of self-reliance dawned. In an interview with /Woman's Own/ magazine, Thatcher pugnaciously declared, "there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families." This commitment to social atomization included a rollback of welfare and a renewed attack on gay people. At the Conservative Party Conference, October 1987, she lambasted schools for teaching children--in a fantasically naive turn of words--that "they have an inalienable right to be gay". What followed was Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which banned teachers and other government workers from discussing homosexuality in schools.
In recent academic literature, a correlation has been identified between GDP per capita (a measure of the wealth of the average person) and LGBTQ+ rights. One study even showed that for every $2,000 increase in the GDP per capita of a nation, a corresponding 8-point rise was seen on a scale of LGBTQ+ rights. The global decline in LGBTQ+ persecution is also thanks to greater social connection and community brought about by the Internet.
Today there are sustained efforts by forces hostile to queer love and identities to eradicate us. They claim free speech gives them a right to spread lies: that we are medically abnormal, that we are deviant and excessive, that we don't understand healthy, ordered boundaries.
The next stage--if history is any teacher--will be a return to values of self-restraint, personal independence, and hyper-masculinity. As in ancient Athens, we should expect to see queer people characterized as excessive aliens unable to contain themselves. A recent computational model has shown increasing narratives against LGBTQ+ people designed to dehumanize them and present them as disordered. The final stage, which in some sense is already widespread, would be to celebrate the ideal man and woman as heterosexual, sexually self-contained (only releasing the restraint as long as it takes to conceive children) and devoted to the duty of the family. Shame would be weaponized against those who fell short of this ideal.
If this does happen, then much of it will take place to mask the development of inequalities and unsustainable debt in society. We resist by reaching out across communities.
author: Tanner, Harry
title: The Queer Thing About Sin
[1] Deipnosophistae
Banquet of the Learned, Volume 1 (gutenberg)