an epic subject and because of his sexual 1500-1000), decline setting in about 1200 orientation. Employing a kind of musical B.C. owing to earthquakes, fires, and inva- structure as aunlfyingelement, The Bridge sions by sea peoples including Greeks. (1930)took the arc of the Brooklyn Bridge, Artistic depictions suggest that Minoan which the poet could see from his room in religion included the worship of snakes, Brooklyn Heights, as a symbol of the leaping bulls, and other sensual symbols dynamism of America. The successive and practices. Nudity was the exception in sections of the poem recount major ele- their art, and no unusual evidence of ped- ments of the American experience, in- erastic activity occurs in it. Because of the cluding Columbus, Pocahontas, Rip Van bare-breasted female figurines, including Winkle, Melville, Poe, Whitman, and even the so-called "snake goddesses," some the subway. feminists have hailed Minoan civilization Crane was granted only about as matriarchic, but this claim has no real eight years of full maturity as apoet. Troub- support. led by alcoholism and difficulty in achiev- Although the tablets written in ing self-esteem, he traveled restlessly. Minoan script [Linear A) remain undeci- Returningfrom Mexico, where he hadgone phered, in 1956 MichaelVentris published to write a poem on Montezuma, Crane his decipherment of those in Linear B (an threw himself overboard from a ship and early form of Greek], many of which were was drowned. also found on the mainland, particularly the Peloponnesus, to which their script Robert K. The had been imported by Achaean Greek Homosexual Tradition in American , Austin: University of Texas invaders from there who conquered the Press, 1979. island ca. 1400 B.C. Linear B tablets also Wayne R. Dynes show no evidence of pederasty, although they mention almost all the major Greek gods and goddesses, with the gods domi- nating thegoddesses, being mainly tribute Lying almost halfway between lists, inventories, and other financial Grc~ceand Egypt, Crete like Cyprus, the records. Mycenean art was less sensuous other large island in the Eastern Mediter- than Minoan, perhaps because unprotected ranean1 received writing urban culture, by the sea, Myceneans, having unlike and other elements of civilization from Minoans to wall their cities and stand on Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. the alert, could less enjoy leisure and Minoan and Mycenean Society. sensuality. Minoan civilization takes its name from The Question of Pederastic Ori- the legendary Minos, king of the city of gins. The absence of any indication of Cnossus, in whose labyrinth the Mino- pederasty in Minoan and Mycenean rec. taurl son of a bull and Minos' wife Pasi- ords and remains indicates that pederasty phae, lurked to devour human sacrificial had not yet been institutionalized in victims sent as tribute from Greece until it Greece, despite myths written later as- was killed by thelegendary Athenian hero signing pederasty to Minos and to Zeus. Theseus. On his return trip to Athens Beginning in the Archaic period (800-500 ''l%eseus d~andonedAriadne, Minos' B.c.), when the first evidence becomes daughter who had helped him find his way available (just before 6001 with the intro- through the labyrinfi to the Minotaur, duction of writing among Greeks, this and took a boy as his ermnenos. M~dem time in an adaptation of the Phoenician archeologists divide Minoan civilization script after a 400-year illiterate "dark age" into three stages: early (ca. XN0-2200 B. from 1200 to 800, during which barbarous c.~,-*ddle (W 2200-1500)1 late (ca- Dorian Greeks seized the island, most Greeks and Romans associated the insti- for Greek hoplites, the upper-class warri- tutionalization of pederasty with Crete. ors who fought in the phalanx, each to take Born in the cave of Harpagos in Crete, Zeus a twelve-year-old boy as a beloved to train supposedly stole Ganymede, son of Tros, until he could hunt and fight, i.e., until at king of Troy, to replace the lame girl Hebe about the age of eighteen he sprouted a as his cupbearer [andbedrnate) on Olyrnpus. beard. In Crete the relationship had a dis- Minos and his brother Rhadamanthus, tinctive feature: a ritual kidnapping (harp- heroes in 's Iliad, had had, accord- agmos) consecrated the pairing. After two ing tolatermythmakers, squireswho acted months of living together in the wild, the as their charioteers, to be described in later mentor returned his protCg6 to his famfiy times as their beloveds. By the end of the laden with rich gifts, symbolizing his classical period (500323B.c.) almost ev- coming of age: armor, a drinking cup, and ery god had his boy or boys, more a bull. than twenty. The overwhelming majority of Did these pederastic myths form later Greeks believed that the Cretans had an older core written down and depicted institutionalized pederasty in order to curb only after 600, or did the Greeks thereafter the population explosion which had begun project back relationships among the gods in the tenth century, leading to the coloni- in order to explain their institutionaliza- zation of southern Italy, Sicily, and other tionof them? Certainly inthe fifthcentury western outposts as far as the Iberian Pindar took great pride in ascribing ped- peninsula, and in the east of most of Ana- erasty to Zeus' brother Poseidon. tolia, the southern shores of the Aegean, Although other locales were and much of the Black Sea coast with sometimes said to be the birthplace of emporia in Syria and Egypt between the pederasty (Thebes, withLaius, andThrace, eighth and the sixth centuries. By 550 with Orpheus, being the commonest), most desirable colonial sites had been Crete generally held pride of place, with occupied, and Persians and Carthaginians such figures as Zeus, Minos, and Rhad- began pushing the Greeks back from east amanthus. and west. Another means of controlling From thedestruction of Mycenean populationgrowth (forPlato theusual one] civilization on Crete and on the mainland was female infanticide, which caused an by catastrophes about 1200, a dark age imbalance in the sex ratio that effectively ensued until therebirth of writing in Greece denied wives or even women to slaves and with theimportation of anew alphabetical many lower-class free males. script from Phoenicia ca. 725. This inven- Crete was the first Greek area to tion came, along with other Semitic influ- stop sending out colonists. According to ences by way of Cyprus, a source which such late sources such as Plato, , may have led the Cretans first among the Herodotus, Thucydides, Strabo, Diogenes Greeks to seclude women. While the Laertius, and Athenaeus, the Cretan Homeric epics took shape, art remained "musicians" or statesmen Onomacritus primitive, often geometric, with the result and Thaletas, after about 650 developed a that it gives no clue to sexual practices. In system to limit the expansion of the upper such times of insecurity, warriors banded classes by postponing the marriage of males together in the closest bonds of intimacy, until thirty, giving the young warrior in and many hold that pederasty became his early twenties a boy of twelve to train institutionalized then, but the writings and love. The males after the age of seven and art of the period 800-600 B.C. do not lived and messed together, the boys roam- document pederasty. ing in "herds" until they entered the bar- Cretan Pederastyin Reality. After racks (andreia)at about 18. Men in this 600 B.c., however, it became customary society began to exercise nude, in sharp contrast to Homeric practice. High-born pederasty and introduced it, iron, crema- women were segregated. Thus the estates tion, and other institutions when they of the nobles would not be overly subdi- overran and settled the peninsula ca. 1UX), vided, resulting in their impoverishment. a theory now discredited, rests on the When entered a crisis, "Lycurgus" observation that most Greeks thought that visited Crete and imported along with the their ancestors borrowed the institution adviser Thaletas most of its institutions: a from Crete and Sparta, but proponents of concatenation of interlocking institu- the "Dorian" origin cannot show that it tiom-segregation of women, institutional also existed from the time of their first pederasty, athletic nudity, messes for settlements in other Dorian areas. Early males, late marriages, and herd member- Spartan poets such as [b. ca. 650 ship for boys. Thereafter the Spartans B.c.) show no trace of it; rather Tyrtaeus became invincible in battle and athletics. ridicules "an effeminate." In fact all the Soon other lawgivers imitated the system earliest pederastic writing that survives is in a less rigorous fashion. Solon imported non-Dorian. a modified versionof it to Athens with the After being under Rome, the aid of the Cretan Epirnenides. Then, it Byzantine Empire, Venice and Ottoman seems, poets and artists began to ascribe Turkey, Crete gained independence and pederasty to the gods and heroes. Perhaps joined Greece as a consequence of the First under Solon's beloved and successor Pei- Balkan War in 1912. The strong survival of sistratus and his pederastic sons the Iliad pederasty and other forms of homosexual- was emended to include its two brief refer- ity in modem Crete, subject of novels such ences to Ganymede, for those tyrants cer- as Nikos Kazantzakis', may perhaps best tainly had the text altered to stress the be traced to the long Turkish occupation. early importance of Athens, since they had William A. Percy Homer recited at the annual Panathenaic festival. Plato set his last major dialogue The Laws on Crete, where ironically an vf' CREVEL,RE& Athenian instructed a Cretan and a Spar- (1900-1 935) tan on how to make a good constitution French novelist and essayist. His which would bar pederasty as unnatural. mother encouraged him in his education The brief revival that Crete en- after his father's suicide in 1914. While joyed in the archaic period ended before writing a Sorbonne doctoral dissertation the beginning of the classical era, perhaps onDiderot, Crevelrejected theeighteenth- in part because the Persian Empire's sei- century Enlightenment and embracedparis zure of the eastern coast of the Mediterra- of the twenties. nean, cutting off Greek trade with Egypt In 1921, Crevelfounded theshort- and the Levant, which had made Crete lived literary review, L'Aventure [chance, central, rendered it instead peripheral. surprise, adventure, or love affair), which No Cretan works are extant be- was followed by Db (Dice]. In 1924 he fore the third century B.c., so that the joined the surrealists after they disrupted scholar must rely on mainlanders for in- aDada play in which he was acting. Crevel formation, but they are virtually unani- introduced automatic writing, interpreta- mous that pederasty was first institution- tion of dreams, hypnotism, and other alized in Crete, either in the Minoan pe- novelties into the surrealist circle. He riod by gods and legendary heroes, or in the pursued chance, spontaneity, luck, the archaic period as a device against over- unconscious, dreams, sex, revolution, love, population. Anineteenth-centuryGerman unintended consequences, and other ruses hypothesis that Dorian warriors .on the in order to transcend common sense and steppes of Central Asia institutionalized definition.