One Hundred Years of Homosexuality

Ancient Greece is often claimed to be the fountainhead of Western civilization. But would we really recognize ourselves in the ancient Greeks, if we could get a good look at them? Examining love, sex, and gender in the ancient Greek world, David Halperin assembles a fascinating array of evidence in [...]
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Ancient Greece is often claimed to be the fountainhead of Western civilization. But would we really recognize ourselves in the ancient Greeks, if we could get a good look at them? Examining love, sex, and gender in the ancient Greek world, David Halperin assembles a fascinating array of evidence in order to document the existence, in ancient Greece, of a radically unfamiliar set of attitudes and behaviours, institutions and social practices. Halperin provides detailed discussions of paederasty, male prostitution, heroic comradeship, and the use of woman' as a symbolic means of communication between men in classical Athens. Arguing that the modern concept of homosexuality' is an inadequate tool for the interpretation of these features of sexual life in antiquity, Halperin offers an alternative account that accords greater prominence to the indigenous terms in which sexual experiences were constituted in the ancient Mediterranean world.