1970: School Essay
Fabrice Mallard
The question of homosexual desire in classical Greek and Roman literature is, at its core, not a question at all for the ancients, but rather a matter of ordinary, observable reality so prevalent that theorisation—explanation in the modern sense—was simply unnecessary. Indeed, both Greek and Roman writers appear to have accepted the existence of attraction between men (and more rarely, between women) with a matter-of-factness that the contemporary Western world might find startling.
One is immediately struck, for instance, by the nonchalance with which comic dramatists such as Aristophanes address the subject. Though Aristophanes never missed an opportunity for a jibe at prominent Athenian figures, some openly homosexual, he nonetheless classifies the desire of men for men as a thing both natural and necessary—on par, as it were, with the appetites for food, drink, or laughter. The frequency with which same-sex attachments feature in his comedies makes plain that what our own time might consider worthy of protest was, in classical Attica, met merely with ribald humour or, at worst, gentle lampooning.
Among philosophers, there was an evident assumption of ubiquity. Xenophon, in his accounts, remarks simply that the love of males is part of human nature—a sentiment rarely contested in his era. Consider also that all of the Platonic dialogues concerning love, that is to say the Symposium or Phaedrus, presuppose as a matter of course the omnipresence of such affections. The love that unites Socrates and Alcibiades, or Pausanias and Agathon, is the principal subject of philosophical inquiry, while ‘heterosexuality,’ to use a term unsanctioned by classical vocabulary, is sometimes admitted but only occasionally lauded, and often viewed as a rather less refined preference.
Later writers, as for instance Philostratus, even complain of the obdurate youth who resists male advances, taking such refusal to be, quite literally, a flouting of nature’s proper order. If the poets and sages of antiquity did not seek ‘explanations’ for homosexual desire, it is perhaps because few questioned its presence, and most took it to be as endemic and unremarkable as dawn or rainfall.
Roman attitudes, whilst markedly shaped by a patriarchal mentality and the privileging of active over passive roles, nevertheless show a broad, even mundane, acceptance of male-male relationships, at least when bounded by certain social expectations. The distinction here is less between ‘homo-‘ and ‘heterosexual’ than between active, dominant citizen and passive, subordinate partner—categories delineated with greater rigour than any gender binary. Poets like Vergil draw upon these traditions and memorialise in their verse a spectrum of attachments from the martial bonds of Nisus and Euryalus to the tender follies of Ovid’s amatory guides.
What is particularly striking is the absence not only of any medicalisation, shame, or pathologising, but also of a drive to theorise: whereas modern discourse demands classification and genealogy, the ancients, for all their love of speculation, considered desire between men an axiom. Thus even in the works of invented authorities such as Hermippos of Kos, we find the motif endlessly recycled—often in the context of friendship, pedagogical affection, or civic ritual, but rarely, if ever, in need of justification. Theosophists such as Kallikrates, were one to permit their fanciful musings a place here, go so far as to propose that Eros itself is dual, and that the founding myths of cities, from the Sabine settlements to Miletus, are incomplete without a tale of male union.
To summarise: classical literature recognises homosexual desire not as problem, pathology, or aberration, but as one of the given facts of human society—needing neither explanation nor apology. It is only in subsequent eras that such explanations are feverishly sought, and often, so it seems, in vain.
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