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{"id":18438,"date":"2016-10-14T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-10-14T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=186"},"modified":"2016-10-14T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-10-14T00:00:00","slug":"greek-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/10\/greek-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Greek Love"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

S<\/span>ummarizing<\/a> themes from his Love, Sex, and Tragedy<\/em><\/a>, Simon Goldhill highlights the difference between ancient Greek conceptions of eros<\/em> and Christian and post-Christian conceptions of romantic love. Even the most famous lovers of Greek antiquity, he writes, don\u2019t express themselves with the little nothings that are normal among moderns: \u201cOdysseus and Penelope, in Homer\u2019s Odyssey never say \u2018I love you,\u2019 or \u2018I want you,\u2019 or even \u2018I have missed you,\u2019 or any other of the doting expressions a modern audience would demand when a long-lost husband returns from the war. Socrates is exemplary for the Greek husband, when on his deathbed he sends his crying wife away so that he can spend his last hours in discussion with his (male) friends. Monstrous and murderous passions distort the bodies of Greek tragedy\u2019s heroines, but never beautiful and delicate love. There is no Romeo and Juliet for classical Greece.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not that Greeks were immune to passion. Far from it. They knew all about eros<\/em>, but everything they knew terrified them: \u201cIn a sexual context, it is most often described as a sickness, a burning and destructive fire, which is not wanted by die sufferer at all. As a social force, it can be highly destructive. According to modern song lyrics, \u2018love makes the world go round,\u2019 or \u2018love is a many-splendoured thing.\u2019 For Aeschylus, the tragic poet, \u2018Eros destroys and perverts all the yoked bonds of society,\u2019 and for Sophocles, \u2018Eros drags the minds of just men into injustice and destruction.\u2019 Tragedy loves to show the violence and misery caused by desire in society. That Eros destroys is a general truth which tragedy displays to the citizens of the city. You can cherish \u2018love,\u2019 but you should always beware eros.\u201d<\/p>\n

The differences are profound, even metaphysical. Ancient Greeks lacked \u201cideal of reciprocity. In modern society, to love and to be loved is a standard ideal of romantic yearning. A couple are meant to share equal feelings of passion, affection and respect. A Jane Austen novel requires the hero and the heroine to recognize that they love each other, at least by the last page. We want to walk down the street holding hands. \u2018Do you love me?\u2019 is the question in a relationship. There are plenty of lyrics of unfulfilled passion, but, from the knight with his damsel in courtly-love poetry to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, such lyrics are preludes to the anticipated bliss of mutual and shared love. It is only in the later decades of the twentieth century that equal and shared sexual desire is expected. Love in Victorian novels takes different routes which trace the moral hesitations about female sexual desire found in Victorian medical writing and social thought. But it is still the case that a person who rejects the ideal of reciprocity is stigmatized\u2014the \u2018seducer,\u2019 the \u2018womanizer,\u2019 the \u2018prostitute\u2019 and so on. Modern Western society privileges a mutual bonding over time\u2014from young lovers to the elderly couple by the rosy cottage door. Till death do us part.\u201d<\/p>\n

A<\/span>rriving at this mutuality required a revolution in the understanding of masculinity. Greek men were expected to be guided by reason, a masculine virtue; eros<\/em> threatened because it represented passive, womanly desire. To be captured by eros<\/em> was to become effeminate. For desire to become mutual, for passion to be valued (as in the courtly love tradition), men had to learn to welcome the \u201cemasculating\u201d power of passion. They had to be subjected to desire, and to delight<\/em> in that subjection. This wasn\u2019t an achievement of Christianity as such, but it is a cultural change that is unthinkable without the Christian validation of desire and the Christian deconstruction of ancient masculinity.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"