BOOKS
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Now another classics scholar, Bruce Thornton, has come along with a
book that provides a proper examination of the meanings the ancient Greeks
gave to sex. Thornton's book is titled
Eros:The Myth
if
Ancient Greek Sexuality.
It
is at once a stunning work of scholarship-the most comprehensive and
impressive study of its subject yet undertaken---as well as a book that destroys
all the pretensions of the prevailing company of sexual radicals. Though an
academic, a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno,
Thornton has produced an eminently readable and accessible account of the
classic texts. Most importantly, he reminds our own romantic era of some–
thing the Greeks recognized far more clearly than we do: the dangerous and
destructive powers embodied by this force of nature.
Thornton advances his investigation by critically examining the literary
remains of ancient Greece to discern their atti tudes towards sex. He takes the
reader through a grand tour of dramatic tragedy and comedy, poetry, orato–
ry, legend, history and philosophy from the eighth to the first century Be.
His emphasis is on what these primary texts say themselves, and he has very
little recourse to secondary commentaries, partly because he wants his intend–
ed audience, the intelligent but non-specialist reader, to directly confront the
Greek mind, but also because so many of the dominant academic interpreta–
tions today are accompanied by what he calls "the whine of ideological axes
being ground." For those wishing to explore the latter, however, he offers a
pungent and incisive critical bibliography at the end of the book.
To the ancient Greeks, Thornton writes, Eros was one of the gods who
appears very early in the story of creation. He simply appears out of Chaos,
the mysterious chasm filled with darkness. This makes
him
a force of nature,
one of the fundanlental building blocks of the cosmos. Thornton shows Eros
has a double life in Greek literature: an anthropomorphic god but also the
inhuman force of sexual attraction inherent in every living creature. Euripides
calls
him
"this most unconquerable god;' this "tyrant of gods and men" since
all the gods, including Zeus the king of the gods, must obey him. Though
represented as a boy, Eros is by no means innocent or niive. He is more street
kid than cute cupid. His power, moreover, is not confined to the realm of sex–
uality. He is lust. He represents all desire that is destructively excessive. We still
retain some of this meaning today when we speak of the lust for power or
the lust for wealth.
In
the form of sexual desire, Eros is a representation of
how sex attacks the mind, something simultaneously out there in nature and
inside us.
The Greeks, Thornton shows, saw the destructive powers of sex and vio–
lence as two sides of the same irrational coin, "each interpenetrating and
intensifYing the other, creating a violent sex and sexual violence that explod–
ed into profound destruction and disorder, a double chaotic energy threaten–
ing the foundations of human culture and identity." The Greeks' most famous
