James Davidson (1) (1964–)

I find it difficult to read non-fiction in an area that is totally outside of my field of knowledge. In many ways this book is also outside my field of interest, as I’m not that into ancient history and I mostly read it as a way of getting some sort of handle on Ancient Greece for an upcoming visit (to modern Greece), so I was doubly disadvantaged. The problem is that I like to critically engage with a text - challenge the author, connect the ideas with others I've heard, consider the implications for my own life - and if I am too far from home base I can't do any of these things.

One of the things I most look out for when I'm adrift in this way is inconsistencies. If someone can't keep their story straight, that's often a sign they're making stuff up. It's not always such a sign, as there are many reasons a story might not be watertight (believe victims of sexual assault!), but in the case of a non-fiction book it's a red flag. There are a few such instances in this book. The most obvious to me is the notion that sex with underage boys and adultery were both punishable by instant death in Athens (at some point, idk, classical period?). Firstly, this seems pretty wild. Adultery is a very common crime and if you executed everyone who committed it your hemlock supplies might end up running low. In fact, at one point Davidson himself cites evidence against this really being a punishment for adultery, but he fails to connect this discrediting with the earlier claim about sex with underage boys. Then in later parts he again uses the whole formulation - sex with underage boys and adultery were both punishable by instant death - as if it were still believable.

One other weird inconsistency is a big part of Davidson's argument is that Athenians couldn't have sex with boys under 18, and implies that this was a good thing (which obviously it was). However he then goes into depth on the idea that boys matured later in ancient times, and argues as if this further demonstrates Athenian abhorrence of having sex with children, but surely the opposite is the case. If you're having sex with an 18 year old who is physically less mature than 18 year olds today, aren’t you closer to sexual exploitation of children than if they matured at the same age as today?

Anyway, I think he overstates the importance of the age question. In trying to get my head around the puberty argument in the previous paragraph, I looked up the age of consent where I live. It’s 16, which is younger than Davidson’s claimed Athenian age of consent by two years. But more to the point, this age of consent doesn’t make it morally acceptable for me, at age 40, to have sex with a 16 year old boy. Nor would it be socially acceptable. Similarly, there’s potentially nothing morally wrong with two 15 year olds having sex. All of which is to say that you need a lot of cultural context to understand the role of age in sex and there is so little surviving evidence from ancient times that it’s hard to argue we have this.

Which, funnily enough, is where this book is at its strongest, when it’s explaining just how much interpolation and extrapolation is required when talking about Ancient Greece and particularly about sexuality. After a patchy opening section about the language of gay love in Ancient Greece which is at times confusing and other times charming and illuminating, the book hits its straps in a section called Sodomania. This is three chapters which look at how Greek homosex relations have been used in history and why they are such a contentious field. In revealing just how scant the historical record is, and how much work is involved in trying to build some sort of sophisticated understanding around it, Davidson gives a fascinating glimpse into the practice of ancient history. Could it be that one reason Ancient Greece figures so prominently in “Western” culture is that we have just enough surviving artefacts to make just about any argument we want about it but not enough artefacts to conclusively disprove anything? Of course, to some extent this puts the obsession with age which I discussed above into context. The notion of “Greek Love” was used in attempts to justify the molestation of children and the sexual exploitation of the young from at least the nineteenth century up to the 1970s. Some in the gay community still struggle to come to grips with the fact that Oscar Wilde, for instance, had sex with poor boys as young as 15, and maybe even younger. This book highlights the work that has been done by the study of Ancient Greece in the past to justify or at least contextualise this.

I’m surprised that this review has turned out as sceptical and negative as it has. I quite enjoyed the book. The writing is fun and lively, the ideas are thought-provoking. I have a much better understanding of Ancient Greece than I did before reading this book, and particularly how little we really know about what went on. Especially when you get beyond Athens, the historical record is very thin. This will help me read interpretive signs on my Greek trip with a grain of salt, as there is every likelihood their authors are at least partially guessing.

I've marked this book as "Read" even though I didn't ingest every word of it. I got well past halfway and skimmed the rest as it does contain a lot of information and some whole sections could be excised while others could be shortened. Anyone wanting to get the guts of it without having to get through 600 pages and without doing what I did and spending more time on early sections than later, possibly more interesting, ones, would be well served by reading the first chapter of each section. If things are going especially well, consider reading the second chapter of the second section as well.… (lisätietoja)

"The Greeks imposed few rules from outside, but felt a civic responsibility to manage all appetites, to train themselves to deal with them, without trying to conquer them absolutely."
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"It is a long time since the Greeks were viewed as guiltless pagan pleasure-seekers and I would not like to propose their approach to appetite as an alternative to our own. It may have been less dogmatic, but it was also more totalitarian and at times much more intense."

Insightful and entertaining stuff bringing to life ancient Athenian texts. Fish was in the world of gourmandise as opposed to meat which was sacrificial and shared out absolutely equally. The author discounts Foucault's penetrator/penetree reading, this was a relief as what little I'd heard of that hadn't made any sense to me.… (lisätietoja)

Although I love ancient Greece, I am about sick of fish and floozies after this. Actually this is a well researched sociological take on Greek society viewed through the lens of food and women. To the Greeks, too much fish consumption was comparable to addiction and made one prone to do all sorts of unacceptable things. The number of ways women could be categorized, to keep them under control and in their place, boggles the mind. Sex was dissected into proper and improper sorts with rule, etiquette and consequences for violators.It would have been hard to keep up with. It makes one think the Greeks are the source of many of our modern woes.… (lisätietoja)