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PARTISAN REVIEW
war, the expedition against Troy, originates in the seduction of Helen by
Paris. The disasters of Homer's
fliad
also begin with sexual conflict. The
quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon starts over two girls and rapidly
escalates to a contest over heroic honor. In Sophocles' drama
Electra,
Clytemnestra wants to murder her husband Agamemnon for sacrificing their
daughter Iphigeneia, but her revenge is also fuelled by her own illicit affair
with Agamemnon's cousin Aegisthus. The Chorus sees it that way, saying
"Eros was the killer" and his daughter Electra agrees, ascribing her motive to
her uncontrolled sexual appetite. Mter Clytemnestra kills the girl she boasts
that the murder "will give relish" to her sex with Aegis thus, a statement
Thornton says demonstrates the Greek understanding of how violence
becomes sexualized.
Another of the most revealing works of Greek literature is the
VcJyage
if
the Algo.
In search of the Golden Fleece, Jason and his Argonauts travel to
Colchis where they find it in the possession of Aetes the king. Eros makes
Medea, the daughter of Aetes, fall in love wi th Jason. She then helps her lover
overcome her father's obstacles and together they make their escape with the
fleece, returning to Greece as husband and wife. Unlike the romantic version
of the story in the twentieth century
film,
however, the tale told by
Apollonius ofRhodes in 250 BC is a bleak one. Medea is portrayed as blind–
ed and deluded by her passion for Jason. She is a traitor to her family who
steals its most precious possession and then helps her lover murder her broth–
er Apsyrtus. In one version of the story, Apsyrtus is an infant whom Medea
cuts up, throwing the pieces into the sea so that her pursuing father must slow
down to pick up the dismembered limbs for proper burial. "Wicked Eros,"
Apollonius wrote, "great plague, great curse to humans, from you come
destructive strife and mourning and groans, and countless pains are stirred up
by you."
Thornton punctuates his work throughout with contrasts between
Greek perceptions of sexuality and what he sees as the comforting but ulti–
mately self-deluding views of the late twentieth century. The ancient world
associated Eros not only with violence but with all the destructive natural
forces within ourselves that always threaten to overcome civilization: madness,
enchantment, disease, mental dissolution, agitation, and drunkenness. "This
loss of control frightened the Greeks," Thornton points out, "whereas to our
Romantic sensibilities it is what we seek." We want our erotic selves to find
fulfilment without hindrance or check.
Thornton is particularly scathing in his comparisons between Greek
thought and the sexual liberation theorists of the 1950s and 1960s such as
Norman
0.
Brown and Herbert Marcuse who condemned "civilized moral–
ity" and "repressive reason." They claimed the "life instinct" would be served
by "erotic exuberance" and that the "liberation of the instincts" would gen-
