Thesislog

I have praised JA Symonds before for his (I believe under-recognized) really quite modern outlook on questions of same-sex love and eroticism, and the observations he makes in Section XVII of his A Problem in Greek Ethics are no exception. Symonds is constructing a theory about why paiderastia was an accepted part of the social fabric in many parts of classical Greece, and places a heavy emphasis on the division of the sexes in Greek society, suggesting that when women effectively bore no relation on public life, and that men and women did not marry for love, it was only natural that erotic bonds should form between men, or between men and boys. Furthermore, cultural institutions such as the gymnasium and athletics competitions, and a martial culture which valued the male body for its patriotic contribution to national defense and conquest, made sure that eros stayed linked to the idealization of the male body, not just the mind/soul. This is an astonishingly modern observation for Symonds to be making; we might otherwise associate the link between homosociality (single-sex social groups and sex segregation) and homoeroticism with the 20th-century queer theory of Sedgwick, or the homophobia bred in the 20th- and 21st-century locker rooms and military barracks. But Symonds, in 1873, constructed a not-dissimilar theory out of his knowledge of ancient Greece, implying a direct correlation between homosociality and homoeroticism: “It was at Athens,” he wrote, “that the social disadvantages of women told with greatest force; and this perhaps may help to explain the philosophic idealisation of boy-love among the Athenians.” Wow, I say. A man ahead of his time.

But it’s not quite as simple as that. For unlike his successors, Symonds doesn’t seem able to relate the model he’s created out of classical studies to his own world. Perhaps, in a way, this is laudable, because it shows that he is not interested in suggesting that Greek social values, and a Greek construction of sexuality, can be imposed upon a modern world with a very different taxonomy of sexuality and very different set of moral values. Another way Symonds is modern, I believe, is that while he often makes the argument that, because the Greeks accepted sexual practices which are abhorrent to 19th-century Europe, 19th-century Europe should leave itself open to rethinking its legal strictures, and to accepting that moralities may change; he doesn’t ever suggest that Greek paiderastia is the same thing as what he calls “sexual inversion” (which, modern scholars of sexuality know, is not the same thing as 20th- and 21st-century “homosexuality”). And so in part, that’s what’s going on in his lack of modern context for the Greek pattern—Greek Ethics is a book about Greece, he is acknowledging, not a book about the modern western world.

However, Symonds uses a construction to introduce his conclusions to Section XVII which belies his lack of alignment with modern queer thought: writing that the Greeks themselves did not recognize the sex-segregation-and-boy-love pattern in their own time, he adds, “We, from the standpoint of a more fully organised society, detect their errors, and pronounce that paiderastia was a necessary consequence of this unequal social culture….” That he labels 19th-century Britain “a more fully organised society” suggests that he does not think it functions with the same kind of sex segregation for which he criticizes ancient Athens—but of course Symonds, who attended elite, all-male educational institutions, knew many men in the military, and certainly did not marry for love (having become engaged to his future wife two days after meeting her, according to Horatio Brown’s 1903 biography), was no stranger to the homosociality of Victorian Britain, and the sex and love between men which could flourish in institutions such as the boarding-school and the university, and between men fighting in a not un-Greek martial, imperial paradigm (see Linda Dowling on this point). It would take a 20th-century perspective to “detect [Symonds’] errors,” and to suggest that, despite differing sexual mores and taxonomies among different eras and peoples, sex and love between men tends to flourish in all-male environments.