Alexander

It's good to see I'm not the only one who's a little concerned about Oliver Stone's take on Alexander the Great.

As I've noted in some combox discussion about the movie, the prevalence of homosexuality in classical Greece is often overblown. Aristophanes made fun of it in his plays. Plato wrote that it should be illegal in his laws. Spartan law (as drawn up Lycurgus) actually banned the practice, as did Athenian law. Xenophon, a thoroughly pro-Spartan Athenian (as were most elite Athenians) did not have kind words for the practice. Of all the erotic art that is extant, pottery in particular, an overwhelming proportion (well over 95% even) depicts heterosexual acts.

At best, Hellenic homosexuality was a secretive and shameful practice that existed despite legal and cultural norms to the contrary. At worst, modern conceptions of the practice constitute historical revisionism. I tend to think that, in reality, it's a little of column A, and a little of column B.

My impression is that the modern reader and exegete is way too quick to read physicality into accounts of classical Greek male-male relationships. An analogy first occurred to me in thinking about members of sports teams. To be blunt, such men spend a lot of time around each other engaged in strenuous sport (like the Greeks) and, though they don't play football nude, they do share a locker room. Such men tend to have very close, physical relationships that are far from homosexual (though a lot of that contact is often used to poke fun at homosexuality). Regardless, some observers like to read homosexuality into the sports culture (at the line of scrimmage, where are the quarterback's hands?).

There are many Greek words we translate as "love" and "lover" and I think there is still some disagreement as to precisely what "eros" and "eromenos" and the like mean (as historians and philosophers point out), in part because we still don't fully understand the cultural context. That "beautiful" often comes up in association with "eros" does not necessarily mean that "eros" is necessarily or exclusively a physical concept, for instance.

Of course, to take another step back, homosexuality as we understand it today was thoroughly alien to the world pre-19th century (I suppose the trial of Oscar Wilde can be considered a turning point). It was not a lifestyle or means of self-identification so much as a practice. All I'm arguing here is that, though we can safely point to certain cultures and see fairly widespread homosexual practice (like during some periods in feudal Japan; at one point the government actually banned certain types of theater because men played the roles of women in such a stylized and hyper-feminized way that the samurai would actually fight over the actors in the theaters), I think mainstream attitudes about ancient Greece are mistaken.