Speaking of homosexuality among the ancient Greeks, Cecil says “An example commonly held up in Athens’ heyday was Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, who were understood to be lovers.” On the other hand, as Jasper Griffin pointed out in a New York Review of Books article:
“Achilles sets in motion the action of the Iliad by his anger at being robbed of a beloved captive girl (“Are Agamemnon and Menelaus the only men who love their wives? Every good and sensible man loves his wife, as I loved her, though she was the captive of my spear”)”
Once Achilles gets Briseis back from Agamamnon, both men have girls in their tent, and there is no hint of physical sex with each other.
I suspect we are meant to understand that Achilles formerly stood to Patroclus in the relation described by Cecil, but that once Patroclus became a soldier and hence a ‘man’, there could be no question of sex between them without shame to the ‘eromenos’. Whatever love Achilles still held for Patroclus (quite a lot, judging by the way he acted after Patroclus was killed), it was not sexual love, or at any rate not sexually expressed.
What Cecil said in the article (or, at least, what I’m pretty sure he meant) was that the ATHENIANS argued about Patroclus and Achilles. The pederasty he discusses is an Athenian phenomenon, and it’s unclear as to whether “Homer”'s society would have endorsed such a relationship.
A few other things that might help explain:
As Cecil mentions, the Greeks didn’t really have a notion of gay or straight or bi, and it was certainly the case that men would simultaneously chase boys and have children with their wives.
The age of the eromenos was not exactly a child. If I recall correctly, it was usually something like 16-24.
Again, this all applied to Athenian homosexual practices. We know little about other city-states’ practices.
As a side note about incest, while boys didn’t sleep with their fathers, there was institutionalized incest (in the modern-day sense of the word). If a man died with only a female child, she would be married to her closest male relative in order to keep the fortune in the family. Therefore, marriages between niece and uncle and first cousins were very common.
It should be noted that a part of the whole ethos was rooted in misogyny; many Greeks felt that women were creatures of too low an order to be taken seriously, except for necessary purposes of reproduction. Something of the same attitude is seen today in small boys: “Johnny plays with girls, so he’s a sissy.”
Perhaps the person who posed the original question to Cecil confused Greek homosexual practices with ritual of certain New Guinea tribes. This especially seems to be the case in terms of “passing the family seed.”
I know Cecil’s column focuses on the greeks, but I remember seeing a documentary on the life of Leonardo Da Vinci that portrayed him as having a young male “associate” later in his life. The implication was that having a female mistress would have been below him.
In other news, Slug’s illustration for this article is the funniest I’ve seen in a long while! I haven’t laughed that hard at his artwork since riiiight about here.
*Achilles has promised Patroclus’s dad he’d bring the kid home safely from the war and is driven berserk by grief when his significant other gets killed.
A Swedish friend has told me that his forebears had a very specific background to that word. I went websearching today (what Cecil calls his Research Department) which confirms this. And that Achilles, though grief-stricken, could not have ‘gone berserk’ because it hadn’t been invented yet by the Vikings
http://www.cdli.ca/CITE/v_berserker.htm , Viking Warriors The Berserker
[…] Probably the most interesting Norse word that crept into the English language is berserk. It is derived from the name and behaviour of a unique Viking warrior- the berserker. …
The word berserker comes from two Norse words bjorn meaning bear or bare (naked) and serkr meaning shirt, a reference to the fact that a berserker warrior went into battle dressed in bear skins or without any armor at all. Another characteristic of this warrior- berserkergang- is a word meaning crazed behaviour. Before a battle, berserkers spent hours working themselves into a frenzy by painting their faces, howling like animals, banging helmets, consuming large quantities of alcohol, listening to AC-DC, […ed] or eating hallucinogenic mushrooms. Today, the word berserk means to act crazy.
The name “Bjorn”, for example, is Norse for bear and was often added to the end of Viking names as in Gerbjorn- an indication that he was a berserker.
You know – that crazy musician in Abba.
and
While Swedes go shopping for wine in Denmark, Norwegians go shopping in Sweden. The wine prices in Norway are probably the highest in Europe. A table wine (Viña Albali Reserva 1996) that costs $12.60 in Norway is only $7.20 in Sweden. No wonder there are traffic jams at the Norwegian-Swedish borders each weekend when Norwegian bargain hunters go berserk in the Swedish border towns.
Not very good pedantry though. Just as Achilles didn’t go berserk in the original literal meaning of the word, Norwegians in Strömstad don’t actually dress in bear skins or do battle.
