Marvelling at a Youth's Good Looks
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Marvelling at a youth’s good looks The gaze and Classical pederastic culture in ancient Greece MA thesis in Ancient History By: Nicky Schreuder (s1342460) Supervisor: Dr. K. Beerden Date: 26/07/2019 Cover: Drinking cup (kylix) with youth running, attributed to the Triptolemos Painter (c. 500 BC). Museum of Fine Arts Boston, inv. 13.81. 1 Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................3 Historiography and inquiry .............................................................................................4 Methodology and sources ...............................................................................................7 Chapter 1. Gaze theory ...................................................................................................... 10 1.1 The psychoanalytical approach ............................................................................... 10 1.2 The feminist take .................................................................................................... 12 1.3 Criticisms and reactions.......................................................................................... 14 1.4 Relativity and application to ancient Greece ........................................................... 15 Chapter 2. Catching the eye of Sokrates. Plato, Xenophon and the pederastic gaze ............ 19 2.1 Ancient theories of sight ......................................................................................... 20 2.2 Plato and the youths of Sokrates’ time .................................................................... 22 2.2.1 Charmides ...................................................................................................... 22 2.2.2. Lysis and Euthydemos .................................................................................... 27 2.3 Xenophon and dangerous beauty ............................................................................ 29 2.3.1 Symposion ...................................................................................................... 29 2.4 Conclusions ............................................................................................................ 31 Chapter 3. Gazing upon the youths on your cup. Pederastic scenes on Attic pottery .......... 33 3.1 The cloaked youth .................................................................................................. 34 3.2 The ‘pin-up’ youth ................................................................................................. 41 3.3 The affected erastḗs................................................................................................ 49 3.4. Conclusions ........................................................................................................... 52 Chapter 4. The eye is the passage for love’s wound. Hellenistic literature ......................... 53 4.1 Xenophon of Ephesos ............................................................................................. 54 4.2 Achilleus Tatios ..................................................................................................... 58 4.3. Longos .................................................................................................................. 61 4.4 Conclusions ............................................................................................................ 64 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 66 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 68 Sources ........................................................................................................................ 68 Literature ..................................................................................................................... 69 2 Introduction Lord Henry looked at him. Yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome, with his finely-curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair. There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candor of youth was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world. No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him. He was made to be worshipped.1 The young man described here is Oscar Wilde’s (1854–1900) eponymous protagonist in The picture of Dorian Gray, and this is the moment where the adolescent gets introduced in detail to the reader. What is happening in this passage quoted is clear – a man is observing the beautiful Dorian in an almost voyeuristic way. Henry Wotton and his friend Basil Hallward walk into the latter’s studio and find him sitting at the piano. They get acquainted and the laudative description ensues. Establishing the radiance of Dorian’s beauty functions within the story as a contrast with the young man’s later sins and ugly nature, but it is also a prime example of the ‘gaze’. Wilde’s novel is imbued with homoeroticism, which in turn is associated with aestheticism.2 Dorian is subject to the (literal) gaze of Henry, that of Basil, but likewise the reader is forced to ‘look’ upon the supposed ethereal beauty of the protagonist through these characters’ points of view; in this moment Gray is being objectified as a marvel of beauty. His appearance, moreover, coincides with Western beauty standards of the time that were seen as symbolising the good and divine. So inevitably the work contains Wilde’s own gaze as well, which is culturally determined in relation to his own predilections of the ideal male youth. In Victorian times Greek culture was of highly inspirational value, and the focus on Plato (c. 427–c. 348 BC) shines through in Wilde’s work. The ‘upper-class male homosocial desire’3 is reminiscent of the ancient custom of pederasty, which gets featured in the ancient philosopher’s Symposion, for instance.4 Exceptions and other types of male-male desire aside, pederasty is generally understood as the elite educational relationship between an adult erastḗs (‘lover’) and a youth; the erṓmenos (‘beloved’). A similar relationship (though never explicit) can be recognised in the interactions between Lord Henry and Dorian Gray, the latter of whom is continually objectified by the gaze as he cannot outgrow his desirable adolescence and the allure that accompanies it. Looking and erotics are interlinked. 1 O. Wilde and J. Bristow (ed.), The picture of Dorian Gray. The 1890 and 1891 texts. The complete works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 3 (Oxford 2005) 19. 2 J. Carroll, ‘Aestheticism, homoeroticism, and Christian guilt in The picture of Dorian Gray. A Darwinian critique’ Philosophy and Literature 29 (2005) 1-19, at 3. 3 E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between men. English literature and male homosocial desire (New York 1985) 176. 4 I. Hurst, ‘Victorian literature and the reception of Greece and Rome’ Literature Compass 7 (2010) 484-495, at 488. 3 Historiography and inquiry This thesis is concerned with the theoretical gaze and optic performance in relation to pederasty and therefore it will be an interdisciplinary analysis. The gaze, widely used within sociological studies, has rarely been applied systematically to homoerotic expressions of classical Greece in order to attempt to gain a further understanding of same-sex cultural patterns. Yet the study of the phenomenon of Greek pederasty itself does go a longer way back. Love between men had been recognized earlier by those such as Wilde, but it was in the beginning of the 20th century that it became a serious subject of scholarly interest and inquiry. Trailblazing, J. Beazley published multiple articles on Attic vases which also included those with (homo)erotic paintings and inscriptions, therefrom giving the first systematic analysis of pederasty in the visual arts.5 Notable scholars who advanced upon the study of male homosexuality in ancient Greece were M. Foucault and K.J. Dover, who wrote their highly influential works decades after Beazley did.6 Dover’s Greek homosexuality especially has achieved an iconic status within the study of sexuality in antiquity. Both Foucault and Dover characterised the institution of paiderastia on the basis of a dominant/active and submissive/passive dichotomy. In other words, domination was what defined the relationship between erastḗs, who took on the active and penetrative role, and erṓmenos, who took on the receptive role and was thus ever at risk of denigration. In a patriarchal society like the Athenian democracy, masculinity was valued. Taking on a passive role endangered this manly ideal in theory as passivity equaled emasculation. Hence it was the adult citizen male who actively pursued and loved, and the youth who was beloved; the boy was already socially inferior for he had not reached adulthood (i.e. manhood) nor acquired his citizenship yet. D. Halperin emphasises starkly the prominent role of domination within same-sex relationships. He sees sex in Classical Athenian society not only as …[a] deeply polarizing experience: it effectively divides, classifies, and distributes its participants into distinct and radically opposed categories. Sex possesses this valence, apparently, because it is conceived to center essentially on, and to define itself around, an asymmetrical gesture, that of the penetration of the body of one person by the body – and, specifically, by the phallus – of another. Sex is not only