CLASSICAL GAS

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates offers a “convenient fiction” that might be passed off on a credulous citizenry as a pretext for supplying the city with guardians. The fiction is drawn from Hesiod, who wrote that the successive races of humanity are peopled by “men of gold, men of silver, men of brass and men of iron.” Socrates needs the fiction because he plans on breeding his guardians, like hunting dogs. His point is that unless one has the right material (gold as opposed to iron), no degree of training or exhortation will succeed.

In a worrisome way, the classical world itself has been reforged into other “convenient fictions” by scholars committed to changing the modern world. The Afrocentric tract Black Athena comes to mind, as does the Romer case – – a Colorado lawsuit arising out of a 1992 gay-rights ballot initiative. Romer pitted Chicago classicist Martha Nussbaum against Oxford philosopher John Finnis and Princeton political philosopher Robert George on the issue of homosexuality in ancient Greece.

Nussbaum’s thesis, in support of the plaintiffs in Romer, was that the condemnation of homosexuality is of Christian origin; that the practice was widely accepted in the classical period; that the law did not punish it; and that, therefore, the modern state’s hostility to it must be seen as a constitutionally suspect yielding to what are essentially religious scruples. The exchanges between Nussbaum, George, and Finnis reached a wide public. What the public was led to conclude, especially in light of Nussbaum’s assertions of her own expertise as a classicist, is that homosexuality was not subject to general moral condemnation in ancient Greece, nor was it the object of the law’s concern. Rather, the ancient world — less priggish than would be the moralistic and “up-tight” world of the Christian — accepted human nature as it found it, including that polymorphous aspect of it which is so vividly revealed in sexual practices.

The smoke has now cleared on the Nussbaum affair. But just in case the non- specialist is inclined to attach validity to Nussbaum’s teachings in this area, Bruce Thornton’s Eros is the thorough, decisive corrective. In this readable, scrupulously researched, and original treatise, he instructs the modern reader in the ancient Greek recognition that Eros is a powerful and destructive force against which there are no sure defenses, only the limited and fragile resources of culture itself.

The tension between physis (or nature) and paideia (or culture) cannot be relaxed or evaded. Nor is it lost in the thickets of the Freudian unconscious. The Hellene knew it to be part of daily struggle, ever present on the mind, broadcast in no uncertain terms by the dramatists, poets, and (even) philosophers. Diomedes, Homer tells us, overcome by lyssa (the ” wolf’s rage”), is so bold as to wound Aphrodite herself, but the ultimate revenge of the eros-goddess is “to have his wife take lovers and plot against him.” In the Hippolytus of Euripides, the tragic hero, puffed by his own sexual asceticism and thus insulting to Aphrodite, must discover that Phaedra, his stepmother, is so drained by her sexual longing for him that her very life is ebbing. He cannot escape simply by whipping his horses, for through cooperation with Poseidon, Aphrodite has him flung from his carriage, his brains smashed against the rocks.

The safety net, if there is to be one, would constrain the power of sexuality by locating it within institutions in which heterosexual sexuality and marriage are prized, and alternative forms of gratification condemned. Even in the fashionable practices of the pederast, the boy lover is not sexually used, but treated as an object of beauty by a person of standing. The promise is the promise of the teacher. The worst possible consequence of the relationship is one that finds the boy becoming a passive male prostitute (a kinaidos), that target of derision and contempt. Pederasty itself preserves the essentially reciprocal nature of marriage: “The heterosexual paradigm, then, is the key social order for controlling eros.”

Thornton documents beyond dispute that sexual excess in any form, and especially in its homosexual form, was taken to be an “outrage,” a mark of shame — not of “daring,” as Nussbaum defined it. In the instance of the kinaidos, who permits anal penetration, there is “the abandonment of the soul to appetite . . . a loss of control that shamed the victim because he did not uphold his society’s most important order — the control of the passions and appetites by the mind, and its social projections, law and custom.”

Properly understood, then, the Christian ideal of marital love is less a reformation than an absorption of classical values, now refined and reinterpreted through the canonical teachings of the church. By rendering the claims of the flesh answerable to that civic life by which our humanity is preserved and realized, law and custom do not defeat Eros but tame the beast otherwise in its thrall. The women of Greece are not the passive, sequestered loom-spinners featured in the feminist literature of what Waugh chose to call our “alleged twentieth century.” They are Medea, they are Amazons and Sirens, Theban women, goddess-like Helen. They embody utterly natural forces of extraordinary power that must be contained by the bonds of civilization; bonds all too easily broken, both by prisoner and guard.

Bruce Thornton gives us an accessible but still authoritative text; a page- turner, to be sure, punctuated with racy passages, graphic images, and selectively deployed profanities. It is somewhat distracting to find Camille Paglia, Homer, and Susan Smith all featured in a scholarly disquisition on classical themes. But then the theme here is that of Eros, and the characters chosen by Thornton effectively reveal its many-sided nature. It can lead us toward beauty, toward a passion for restraint, toward a respect born of proper fear and cognizance; or it can revel in our blind self-indulgence, awaiting the inevitable moment when our innocent outrages reduce us to madness.

Daniel N. Robinson is a professor of psychology and adjunct professor of philosophy at Georgetown University.