A Natural History of Love (6 page)

how to be modest, sitting so as not to expose his crotch, smoothing out the sand when he arose so that the impress of his buttocks would not be visible, and how to be strong…. The emphasis was on beauty…. A beautiful boy is a good boy. Education is bound up with male love, an idea that is part of the pro-Spartan ideology of Athens…. A youth who is inspired by his love of an older male will attempt to emulate him, the heart of the educational experience. The older male in his desire for the beauty of the youth will do whatever he can to improve it.

Anyway, that was the theory—pederasty as a refined stage in a boy’s education. But the system didn’t always proceed so chastely. Greek literature sizzles with scenes of love brazen or tawdry, tormented or betrayed, drunken or homicidal. In Aristophanes’
The Birds
, one older man says to another: “Well, this is a fine state of affairs, you damned desperado! You meet my son just as he comes out of the gymnasium, all fresh from the bath, and you don’t kiss him, you don’t say a word to him, you don’t hug him, you don’t feel his balls! And you’re supposed to be a friend of ours!” Plato has Socrates and his friends discussing randy matters casually as they dine. His
Symposium
(from the Greek word for drinking companion) offered a banquet of the senses as well as ideas. To this day, we find the dinner party, or the brown-bag lunch, a good place to hone ideas and swap tales of entanglement.
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My first teaching job, at the University of Pittsburgh, introduced me to the voracious minds of blue-collar students. A graduate poetry seminar ran late one evening. We all retired to the nearby Pitt Tavern, where my students liked to drink boilermakers of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey followed by Iron City Light beer. Hard-boiled eggs doused with Tabasco sauce passed as dinner, and there amid the ruckus of gritty dialect and workingman’s music they held their own impromptu symposium. No one described it as such, but when pensive young minds get together they’re often drawn to similar topics. Among those they discussed easily were nature versus nurture, aesthetic ideals, the purpose of love—without realizing it, they were talking Plato. “Which do you think is more important,” a young woman asked me that evening, “truth or beauty?” “No difference,” I answered glibly, offering her the ideal established in Greece millennia ago, and later used by John Keats in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” “ ‘Beauty is truth,’ ” Keats said, “ ‘truth beauty,’—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” In Athens, handsome people were assumed to be morally good. How could it be otherwise in a world of symmetry, balance, and harmony? We still subconsciously believe that faulty equation today, crediting attractive people with high motives, rare intelligence, good character. Study after study shows that pretty schoolchildren get better grades; attractive criminals get lighter sentences. But in Greece a handsome man was also morally sublime—innate goodness had to express itself as beauty. So it followed that homosexual love affairs could take on a religious zeal and cosmic rightness. It’s easy to imagine this leading to soul-drenching devotion, and the religion of two we call romantic love. When women expressed love, they were thought wanton and irrational. When men loved men, they adored flesh and virtue simultaneously, all wrapped up in the form of the beloved. Anything less was heresy.

Men must also have enjoyed sex with their wives, or a play such as Aristophanes’
Lysistrata
—in which the women stage a sex strike to force the men to stop the Peloponnesian War—wouldn’t have made sense. But the idea of the self-sufficient married couple, who met most of each other’s needs, was not in the air, nor was that of the private man, who kept amiably to himself. Our word
idiot
, for example, comes from the Greek disapproval of any man who wasn’t politically active.

THE FAMILY

Growing up in the women’s quarters, as if in a harem, children rarely saw their fathers; thus their exiled mothers must have been exceptionally strong forces in their lives. In all probability there was a lot of pent-up anger, rejection, envy, and frustration on display. What example of love did this set? For a little girl, it would be a particularly heart-torn existence. If she aspired to a life of the mind, or any brand of adventure, it would mean embracing immorality and repudiating the sanctity of motherhood. In agricultural Greece, a land obsessed with the harvest, the mother loomed as an earth goddess, a figure of honor and magic. A pregnant goddess contained the forces of nature, her breasts poured forth the stars. A pregnant woman going about her daily chores symbolized all that mysterious fertility.

In this highly charged world, fed on vivid myth, which most people took literally, the gods and goddesses were all related. In the pantheon, the family was everything. But the family was not one household in Athens; it was the city itself, whose affairs all men knew and played a role in. Once legitimate heirs were born to a man, things loosened up slightly for the wives, who could then divorce to get out of a particularly nasty marriage. It’s not that Athenian women didn’t sometimes have premarital or extramarital affairs, but those who did were thought shocking and immoral. And what chance had they to meet men? Plutarch reports in his
Life of Solon
that if a woman left the house in daylight she had to be chaperoned, and could take nothing with her but the equivalent of a shawl and a light snack. After sunset, she had to travel in a lighted carriage. Some women turned to lesbianism, or “tribadism,”
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as it was known, following the example set by Sappho, one of the most adroit and sensual of lyric poets. Others no doubt found homelier solutions, such as the one described by historian Reay Tannahill:

Masturbation, to the Greeks, was not a vice but a safety valve, and there are numerous literary references to it….

Miletus, a wealthy commercial city on the coast of Asia Minor, was the manufacturing and exporting center of what the Greeks called the
olisbos
, and later generations, less euphoniously, the dildo…. This imitation penis appears in Greek times to have been made either of wood or padded leather and had to be liberally anointed with olive oil before use. Among the literary relics of the third century
B.C
., there is a short play consisting of a dialogue between two young women, Metro and Coritto, which begins with Metro trying to borrow Coritto’s dildo. Coritto, unfortunately, has lent it to someone else, who has in turn lent it to another friend.

I think it’s safe to assume that married life was less than bliss, and rarely became a focus of love for either party. Men were able to find romance openly, whereas women had to search in makeshifts and in shadows.

And yet, unlike other ancient cultures, the Greeks worshiped two love gods—Aphrodite and Eros. The idea of love played an important role in their lives, and troubled them enough that they needed two full-time gods to beseech or blame. According to Homer, it was Aphrodite’s toying with Helen that led to the Trojan War. Love was a feeling so automatic and powerful that it had to have some otherworldly origin. In
The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
, Julian Jaynes suggests that what we now call “conscience” or “reflection” prehistoric people heard as a sort of ventriloquial command, which they perceived as the word of god telling them what to do. Love makes such mischief that the idea of mortals causing it by themselves seemed impossible. Homer doesn’t explore the psychology of love, as Greek lyric poets would later. Told from the outside, with the keen eye of an observer, Homer’s love stories conquer hardship and distance and end happily. We know that King Menelaus had a young wife named Helen, and that when she was kidnapped the king fought a war to get her back. But we don’t know much about the couple’s feelings for each other. It was Christopher Marlowe, in seventeenth-century England, who claimed that beautiful Helen had a “face that launched a thousand ships.” Was the Trojan War fought for the love of a woman, or because a king’s private property had been stolen?

ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE

The Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice better illustrates the depths of a man’s love for a woman. Orpheus was the son of Apollo and the muse Calliope (“she of the fair voice,” the muse of epic song), who gave birth to him alongside the river Hebrus in the land of Thrace. His father was mortal, a Thracian prince. The Thracians were known throughout Greece as masterful musicians, and Orpheus was regarded as the most gifted of the Thracians. When he played the lyre and sang, he became psychokinetic, and nothing could resist him, not people, not animals or plants, not inanimate objects. His music entered all forms of matter at the level of atom and cell, which he could rearrange, changing the course of rivers, moving rocks and trees, taming wild animals. His song could make the sun leap up as it vanished, and coat the hilltops with a mist of pearls. An Argonaut in his youth, he set the measure for the oars, and saved his comrades from the fatal music of the Sirens. When they sang their eerie, mesmerizing song, the oarsmen rowed to them and a rock-festooned coast. But Orpheus played an antidote to the narcotic call, a song of such piercing clarity that it shook the men alert, giving them a chance to regain their wits and row to safety.

We do not know how he came to meet Eurydice, or any of the details of their courtship, though he is bound to have wooed her with song. She was a “nymph,” one of the young maidens who lived in the forests and caves, free spirits in wildest nature, children of the earth. The nymphs hunted with Diana, feasted with Dionysus, and spent time with mortals, whom they sometimes wed. But Orpheus and Eurydice had little chance to enjoy their marriage. Soon after the wedding, Eurydice was walking across a meadow when she encountered the lecherous Aristaios (one of Apollo’s sons), who pounced on her. She managed to pull free and run away, but she was so addled by his attack that she didn’t see a snake sleeping in the sun in her path. Before she could stop herself, she stepped on the snake’s tail, and it spun around and bit her on the ankle, killing her. Hours later, Orpheus found her lying dead in the field. Bludgeoned by grief, he resolved to go down into the subterranean realm of death to find his bride and bring her back. He’d heard a rumor that a cave at Tainaron led down to the Underworld, and so he went there, carrying his lyre. This was a fearsome journey he planned, but he couldn’t bear the thought of losing his beloved, and he knew his music was a pacifying weapon of great power, which nothing on earth could resist. He reasoned

With my song

I will charm Demeter’s daughter,
I will charm the Lord of the Dead,
Moving their hearts with my melody.
I will bear her away from Hades.

As he journeyed deeper and deeper into the cave, he played the sweetest, saddest song, music forged on the anvil of his heart. The cave spirits took pity on him and left him unharmed. A tearful Charon ferried him readily across the River Styx. Cerberus, the ferocious three-headed dog with hair of snakes that guarded the gates of the Underworld, lay down and let him pass. With his song of grief, Orpheus charmed his way into the kingdom of Hades. There he sang until earth was saturated with his voice, sang so beautifully that the dead rejoiced, and those vexed by punishments were granted a day of freedom so they could listen to his serenade. The king and queen of the Underworld, stirred by his pitiful lament, grew infatuated by the music. His song reasoned with them in a new, unexpected way that bypassed thought and turned their hard hearts to quicksand. So the king granted Orpheus a favor never before allowed a mortal—he could take his bride back to the world of light. But there was a stipulation.

“One thing,” King Hades warned. “You must not look behind you. She may follow you into the upper air. If, however, you but once look back to see her ere you both have stepped fully into the light, she will be lost to you forever.” Orpheus agreed, Eurydice was summoned, and he led her back along the way he had come, singing songs of hope and deliverance as he once more gained safe passage past Cerberus, across the River Styx, and into the cave. There he began a steep ascent, clambering over the skiddy rocks, worrying that Eurydice might slip, trying to find the easiest path for her. As he climbed toward the entrance of the cave, just above, his song became wilder and more ecstatic. At last he reached the top and leapt into the blaze of daylight. Joyously turning to Eurydice, he saw to his horror that he had turned too soon; she was at the mouth of the cave, getting ready to step out. He lurched after her, but that fast she fell backward, into darkness, into death, crying “Farewell” as she disappeared down the throat of the cave. Wild with despair, Orpheus dived after her, found Charon again and begged to be taken once more across River Styx. There would be no need for a return passage, he explained; he would join his bride in death. But the boatman would not ferry him. Nothing would persuade Charon. For a week, Orpheus sat sobbing on the shore, starving away to nothing, covered in mud and slime. Finally, he brokenheartedly returned to Thrace, where he spent the next three years wandering alone, trying to erase even the thought of women. In time, he became a priest, performing simple duties in a small temple in the country. Celibate, solitary, he played his lyre for the plants and animals. As ever, his songs enchanted the woodlands and moved nature itself. That is, all but the maenads, wild-eyed, scruffy-haired, frenzied followers of Dionysus who hated him for every reason and no reason, but especially because he resisted their orgies and the favors of all womankind. They were punks with quick tempers and savage tastes, and easily annoyed. His music hit them like rock salt. It soured their mood, and it gave them the willies. So one morning this pack of bare-breasted assassins lay in wait for him outside the temple, and when they saw him they went murderous wild, attacking him with spears and rocks, then clawing him apart with their bare hands. They ripped off his arms and hurled them into the grass, yanked his legs loose, and when the ground was drenched with his blood, they ripped his head off and threw it into the river along with his lyre. That should have been the end of him. But, drifting downriver, his lyre began playing music all by itself. It played a low, mournful dirge, and then, miraculously, the tongue began to move in Orpheus’ severed head. Singing his own funeral song, he floated out to sea and sank beneath the waves, above which the sad song lingered.