Alcibiades and friend
Victorian view of interaction between a Greek adolescent and an adult male
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends (1868)

Greek love is a relatively modern coinage (almost universally placed within quotation marks) intended as a euphemistic reference to male-to-male sexual relations as practised in Ancient Greece, as well as to their more recent manifestations and treatments, particularly in a 19th-century Western context (See "Scholarly Examples of Its Use" below). The term is thus a synonym for pederasty, though it has also been loosely applied to homosexual behaviour in general. Image File history File links Alcibiades_and_friend_-_detail_from_Phidias_and_the_Parthenon_marbles_by_Alma_Tadema. ... Image File history File links Alcibiades_and_friend_-_detail_from_Phidias_and_the_Parthenon_marbles_by_Alma_Tadema. ... Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, OM, RA (January 8, 1836, Dronrijp, the Netherlands. ... Image File history File links Size of this preview: 800 × 531 pixel Image in higher resolution (2280 × 1513 pixel, file size: 330 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) +/- ↑ See Parthenon Frieze Slabs at [1] Last accessed 07-Apr-2007 ↑ he introduces us to Phidias showing the frieze of the Parthenon to... A euphemism is a word or phrase used in place of a term that originally could not be spoken aloud (see taboo) or, by extension, terms which they consider to be disagreeable or offensive. ... The Temple to Athena, the Parthenon Ancient Greece is a period in Greek history that lasted for around three thousand years. ... Synonyms (in ancient Greek syn συν = plus and onoma όνομα = name) are different words with similar or identical meanings and are interchangeable. ... The term pederasty or paederasty embraces a wide range of erotic practices between adult and adolescents, generally between males. ... Since its coinage, the word homosexuality has acquired multiple meanings. ...

Institutional Greek pederasty, which sought to formalize the erotic relationship of an adult male (erastes) with an adolescent boy (eromenos), appeared on the Greek mainland, possibly from Crete, as early as the 7th century B.C. Both in Sparta and Athens, the bonding of adult men and adolescent boys was an established cultural and social phenomenon, associated with educational practices and the instilling of high civic and philosophical ideals. Apart from literary evidence - the Socratic dialogues of Plato, for example - there is also evidence from Greek vases displaying that the intimate association of men with boys was represented in a range of emotive and expressive guises. These relationships, however, often transcended the physical or the erotic, the adult being invested with responsibility for the moral and spiritual welfare of the boy: abuse or exploitation of the younger partner was not tolerated. The spiritual and educational aspects were the focus of what came to be known as 'Platonic love'. John Addington Symonds encapsulates this relationship as: Greek pederasty, as idealized by the Ancient Greeks from Archaic times onward, was a relationship and bond between an adolescent boy and an adult man outside of his immediate family, and was constructed initially as an aristocracy moral and educational institution. ... In the pederastic tradition of Classical Athens, the eromenos (Greek ἐρόμενος, pl. ... In the pederastic tradition of Classical Athens, the eromenos (Greek ἐρόμενος, pl. ... Zeus and Ganymede The Cretans, a Dorian people described by Plutarch as renowned for their moderation and conservative ways, practiced an archaic form of pederasty [1] in which the man enacted a ritual kidnapping (known as the harpagmos, or seizing) of a boy of his choosing, with the consent of... The 7th century is the period from 601 - 700 in accordance with the Julian calendar in the Christian Era. ... Sparta (Doric: Spártā, Attic: Spártē) is a city in southern Greece. ... Athens (Greek: Αθήνα - Athína) is the largest city and capital of Greece, located in the Attica periphery of central Greece. ... PLATO was one of the first generalized Computer assisted instruction systems, originally built by the University of Illinois (U of I) and later taken over by Control Data Corporation (CDC), who provided the machines it ran on. ... Krater (mixing bowl), 6th century BC, National Archaeological Museum, Athens The pottery of ancient Greece is one of the most tangible and iconic elements of ancient Greek art. ... Platonic love in its modern popular sense is an affectionate relationship into which the sexual element does not enter, especially in cases where one might easily assume otherwise. ... John Addington Symonds was the name of a father and son, both English writers. ...

The lover taught, the hearer learned; and so from man to man was handed down the tradition of heroism, the peculiar tone and temper of the state to which, in particular among the Greeks, the Dorians clung with obstinate pertinacity. Xenophon distinctly states that love was maintained among the Spartans with a view to education; and when we consider the customs of the state, by which boys were separated early from their homes and the influences of the family were almost wholly wanting, it is not difficult to understand the importance of the paiderastic institution. The Lacedæmonian lover might represent his friend in the Assembly. He was answerable for his good conduct, and stood before him as a pattern of manliness, courage, and prudence. Of the nature of his teaching we may form some notion from the precepts addressed by the Megarian Theognis to the youth Kurnus. In battle the lovers fought side by side.^[1]

Intergenerational relationships of the kind portrayed by the "Greek love" ideal were increasingly disallowed within the Judaeo-Christian traditions of Western society, though there was more tolerance within Asian cultures until recent times. The Pashtun culture of modern-era Afghanistan is sometimes cited as a society where man-boy relationships - in many respects exhibiting similarities to the pattern of "Greek love" - were practised openly in the pre-Taliban days.[14] In Western Europe, ‘boy-love’ or boy-worship as an aesthetic ideal flourished within groups of artists and poets who drew inspiration from the Hellenic past, and who consciously identified with the art and mores of the ancients - for example, the Florentine Renaissance artists and the Oxford Hellenists in Victorian England. It is to the latter group of ‘Uranians’, as they were called, that we may look to identify a conscious awareness of pederasty as an essential ingredient of Hellenism, and the impulse to acknowledge and declare this aspect of life in Ancient Greece at a time when Victorian justice upheld the illegality of all male-male sexual relations. The Uranians embraced a number of distinguished men of letters, including William Johnson Cory, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and John Addington Symonds (see above). Judeo-Christian tradition (also spelled Judaeo-Christian) is the body of concepts and values held in common by Christianity and Judaism. ... The Pashtuns (also Pushtun, Pakhtun, ethnic Afghan, or Pathan) are an ethno-linguistic group consisting mainly of eastern Iranian stock living primarily in eastern and southern Afghanistan, and the North West Frontier Province, Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Baluchistan provinces of Pakistan. ... The Taliban (Pashto: , students or seekers of knowledge) are a fundamentalist Sunni Muslim and ethnic Pashtun movement that ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, when their leaders were removed from power by American aerial bombardment and Northern Alliance ground forces. ...

‘Greek love’ as an expression would have been readily understood by those acquainted with the mores of the Ancients even before the Oxford Hellenists defined the focus of their Romantic impulses. Almost a century before, Byron and his school-mates at Harrow would have read the Classics and understood the meaning of the term, as recent biographers (by Crompton & MacCarthy) have suggested. The poet, Shelley, a pupil at Eton, immersed himself in Greek literature, his Platonic studies leading to an eventual translation of the ‘Symposium’ (1818) and in the same year a ‘Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love’ which stands as the first published essay (after Bentham’s unpublished writings of 1785) on the subject of homosexuality. The significance of this document lies in its repudiation of the evasions of contemporary scholarship which had cast a veil over the reality of Greek love as a sexual practice. Shelley did however share the prejudices of his age regarding the physical expression of pederasty, but his essay can nevertheless be considered as ‘a pioneering work in a field not fully and freely explored by an English scholar until Kenneth Dover’s authoritative study of 1980’. (Crompton)

If Shelley could hardly be termed an apologist for ‘Greek love’, John Addington Symonds was unequivocal in his admiration for the institutional practice of pederasty as ‘a social phenomenon of one of the most brilliant periods of human culture, in one of the most highly organised and nobly active races’. He defines the term (Greek Ethics):

In treating of this unique product of their civilisation I shall use the terms Greek Love, understanding thereby a passionate and enthusiastic attachment subsisting between man and youth, recognised by society and protected by opinion, which, though it was not free from sensuality, did not degenerate into mere licentiousness.

His Uranian colleagues were similarly persuaded, though it is necessary in evaluating their position as an historical group, to be aware not only of the different emphases and interpretations brought to bear on their ideal of pederastic love, but also of other contemporaneous theories and concepts of sexuality taking place elsewhere. This is crucial to an understanding of Greek love both in its original sense and its wider applications. While this clandestine group of neo-Hellenists were finding support and inspiration from an ancient culture, the voices of Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, Karl-Maria Kertbeny and Richard von Krafft-Ebing were being heard across Europe, articulating their theories of ‘homosexuality’ (coined by Kertbeny), sexual orientation and gender inversion which were to make an increasing impact in legal, medical and sociological circles. The Uranians, almost all classically-educated Oxonians, stood aside from such scientific controversies, secure in the knowledge of their spiritual, philosophical and emotional antecedents. Their Hellenic appellation derives from both Plato’s ‘heavenly’ love and the birth of Aphrodite as described in Hesiod (Theogony), but it should not be confused with ‘Urning’, a term coined by Ulrichs to denote ‘a female psyche in a male body’ ('Urning' also derives from Classical sources, particularly the Symposium). The Uranians did not see themselves in this light, and were also opposed to Ulrichs’s claims for androphilic, homoerotic liberation at the expense of the paederastic. (refer Uranian Poetry). The Uranians were a relatively obscure group of pederastic poets who flourished between 1870 and 1930, particularly among the graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. ...

Further, the Uranians did not identify with the concept of ‘homosexual’. In the introduction to his ‘Love in Earnest’ (1970), Timothy D’Arch Smith writes:

Adult homosexuality, indeed, has little to do with the themes of the poets here treated who loved only adolescent boys and it is for this reason that I have deliberately eschewed the word ‘homosexual’. It is unpleasantly hybrid and modern psychiatrists would give another term to the boy-lover

a position which thirty years on found ready agreement in Kaylor’s own acknowledgment that the concept of the ‘homosexual’ was inapplicable to the dynamics of ‘boy-love’.

One cannot overlook in this apparent irony how the Uranians themselves saw their championing of the Hellenic ideal. Their immediate Hellenist precursors were the Victorian ‘Greek Chorus’ of Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, and Benjamin Jowett who had already set out the Grecian values of philosophy and education which provided fertile ground for their passionate adherents:

The immense spiritual significance of the Greeks is due to their having been inspired with this central and happy idea of the essential character of human perfection […] [It is] this wonderful significance of the Greeks [that has] affected the very machinery of our education, and is in itself a kind of homage to it. (Arnold)

Of the Greek authors who at the Renaissance brought a new life into the world Plato has had the greatest influence. The Republic of Plato is also the first treatise upon education, of which the writings of Milton and Locke, Rousseau, Jean Paul, and Goethe are the legitimate descendents. [….] He is the father of idealism in philosophy, in politics, in literature.(Jowett)

Through such statements, the Victorian ‘Greek chorus’ (as Kaylor described it) — Arnold, Mill, and Jowett — “unwittingly facilitated a ‘suspect’ aspect of the ‘Hellenic element’ that assisted in the emergence of the Uranians as a group, a ‘suspect’ aspect that linked the ‘essential character’ and ‘wonderful significance’ of the ancient Greeks to their celebration of paederastic love and its attendant pedagogical practices.”

There are many examples of distinguished literary figures throughout history whose lives and writings provide a personal perspective on pederastic love as a phenomenon - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, George Gordon, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, André Gide, Thomas Mann, Stefan George, and Paul Goodman, to name but a few.
 , IPA: , (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German polymath. ... Lord Byron, English poet Lord Byron (1803), as painted by Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, (January 22, 1788 – April 19, 1824) was the most widely read English language poet of his day. ... Oscar Fingal OFlahertie Wills Wilde (October 16, 1854 – November 30, 1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, poet, and short story writer. ... André Gide in 1893 Gide redirects here, for other people named Gide, see Gide (disambiguation) André Paul Guillaume Gide (November 22, 1869 – February 19, 1951) was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. ... Paul Thomas Mann (June 6, 1875 – August 12, 1955) was a German novelist, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and often ironic epic novels and mid-length stories, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and intellectual. ... Stefan George (1910) Stefan George (Bingen, Hesse, July 12, 1868 – Locarno, December 4, 1933) was a German poet and translator. ... Paul Goodman (1911–1972) was a poet, writer, public intellectual. ...

Since the publication in 1964 of Greek Love by J. Z. Eglinton (the pseudonym of Walter Breen),^[2] the term "Greek love" has been prominently solidified in Humanities scholarship, as is displayed by the fact that it is employed in the titles of books by major cultural critics, as, for example, Louis Crompton's Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England (1985),^[3] David Halperin's One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: and Other Essays on Greek Love (1990),^[4] and James Davidson's soon to be released The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece (expected in November 2007).^[5]

Scholarly Examples of Its Use

Part of a series on Love
Historically
Courtly love
Greek love
Religious love
Types of Emotion
Erotic love
Platonic love
Familial love
Puppy love
Romantic love
See Also
Unrequited love
Problem of love
Sexuality
Sexual intercourse
Valentine's Day

To display various contexts in which the term "Greek love" and its attendant concepts have been applied, consider the following chronological examples: Love is any of a number of emotions and experiences related to a sense of strong affection or profound oneness. ... Image File history File links Emblem-favorites. ... Court of Love in Provence in the 14th Century (after a manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris). ... This page contains religious views on topic oflove. ... Eroticism is an aesthetic focus on sexual desire, especially the feelings of anticipation of sexual activity. ... Platonic love in its modern popular sense is an affectionate relationship into which the sexual element does not enter, especially in cases where one might easily assume otherwise. ... In sociology, familial love is a type affinity or natural affection felt between members of a group bound by common ancestry or blood ties. ... For other uses, see Puppy love (disambiguation). ... Romantic love is a form of sexual love that, ideally, transcends mere needs driven by sexual desire, or material and social gain, though these things play a role both in its arousal and its justification. ... Unrequited love is love that is not reciprocated, even though reciprocation is usually deeply desired. ... In philosophy, the problem of love questions whether the desire to do good for another is based solely on the outward ability to love another person because the lover sees something (or someone) worth loving, or if a little self-interest is always present in the desire to do good... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... It has been suggested that Duration of sexual intercourse be merged into this article or section. ... Saint Valentines Day or Valentines Day is on February 14. ...

[As regards E. M. Forster's novel Maurice:] The first [half] is dominated by Plato and, indirectly, by John Addington Symonds and the apologists for "Greek love"; the second is dominated by Edward Carpenter and his translation of the ideas of Walt Whitman.^[6]

"Greek love" did not hold the central place in the history of lesbians as it did in the history of homosexual men.^[7]

One of the most impressionable students of the classics the English public schools have ever formed, Byron invested sexual desire only in Greek boys. For Byron "Greek love" means love of Greeks.^[8]

In this context such late-Victorian writers as Pater, Symonds, and Wilde, urged by Victorian liberalism to save the English polity by taking Greek history and philosophy seriously, will begin to glimpse in Plato's defense of transcendental, "Uranian" love a vocabulary adequate to their own inmost hopes, and to see in "Greek love" itself the promise of a Hellenic individuality and diversity with the most positive implications for Victorian civilization.^[9]

Gide was right. Those who did speak of "Greek love" tended to downplay its social and cultural significance. ^[10]

Winckelmann's, Goethe's, and Moritz's languages of self-fashioning do not, of course, operate in isolation. [...] They were languages evolving within the contours of an emerging and formative discourse of German Classical aesthetics – an aesthetics deeply indebted to notions of "Greek love".^[11]

In the 1980s, however, and especially after Foucault, this view of "Greek love" was turned upside down and a new consensus was established.^[12]

Percy Bysshe Shelley considered the dynamics surrounding "Greek love" (or paederasty) in his Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love (written in 1818). William Beckford and George Gordon, Lord Byron, were both practitioners of "Greek love" – and had to flee to the Continent as a result.^[13]

Notes

See also

• Greek pederasty
• Pederasty
• Uranian