BOOKS
463
sexual passion for). The philosophical texts, as Foucault rightly
observes, concentrate on the men. He observes that in the sexual
act, according to the medical treatises, "it is in every case the
masculine act that determines, rules, excites, dominates.
It
is the
man who determines the beginning and the end of pleasure, and
who also assures that the female organs remain healthy by keeping
them in use." But did the ordinary men and women who could not
afford doctors understand sex in quite these terms?
Foucault may be justified in ignoring what ordinary people did
because he believed that modern attitudes derive primarily from the
works of the philosophers. But he should have looked more closely at
ordinary life, if only to explain why the philosophers and theorists
give such disproportionate emphasis to the importance of homosex–
ual relationships. Presumably these relationships were considered
intellectually and socially more satisfying than heterosexual relation–
ships because most women - especially in Athens - were poorly
educated and spent most of their time involved with child-bearing,
child-raising, and weaving, tasks with which the few men who had
the leisure to think about their actions were not concerned. Plato, in
the
Symposium
and the
Phaedrus,
and Isocrates, in his
Eroticus,
de–
scribe the possible ethical advantages of love affairs between older
and younger men. Their discussions concentrate so hard on the
educational and political advantages of such relationships that we
would never know how an older man managed to attract the
allegiance of a particularly delectable thirteen-year-old boy, were it
not for the illustrations on the vases that upper-class Athenians and
Greeks in the Western colonies bought in large quantities to deco–
rate their dining rooms.
The materials surveyed in Volume Three, "Caring for Oneself,"
are more diverse, but Foucault chooses to emphasize only those
developments that later were incorporated into Christianity: recip–
rocal chastity in marriage and the virtues of continence. These ideas
are to varying degrees latent in early pagan idealism, but they only
begin to be practiced by philosophers and their followers in the
Hellenistic Age and after. The book gets off to an interesting start
with a discussion of a second-century A.D. Greek manual, Artemi–
dorus's
The Interpretation oj Dreams
-
a work from which Peter Brown
has derived much interesting information about the hopes and fears
of ordinary men.
In
Artemidorus, sexual dreams in particular
display a new emphasis on continence: ejaculation, for example,
signifies a vain expenditure; face-to-face intercourse with the man
