between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Books 2011: 30-31


30. Plato, Phaedrus. OUP, Oxford, 2002. Translated with an introduction by Robin Waterfield.

A short dialogue concerning love, lovers, and beloved in Classical Athens. The famous analogy of the chariot with the charioteer and the two horses, one obedient, one unruly, occurs herein. It is diverting and occasionally thought-provoking.


31. Patricia Briggs, River Marked.

Fun, tense and well-constructed. Interesting monster. Interesting Native American mythological appearances.

---

I have a cold. Do not want.

Books 2010: 57-58


57. Aristophanes, The Birds and Other Plays, translated by David Barrett and Alan H. Sommerstein, Penguin Classics, 2003.

Consisting of Knights, Peace, Birds, The Assemblywomen and Wealth. Very Classical Athenian. Which is to say, misogynistic and concerned with court cases, poking fun at prominent gentlemen, and the state of the polis. But also whimsical, humourous, and frequently deft: the translation succeeds in large part in preserving both a lyric and a comic tone as appropriate.

Now I have to go read the rest of Aristophanes, Menander, and Roman Plautus as well, in the hope of getting some insight into ancient attitudes to health and disease. (Alas. Soon I will have to branch out from theatre to poetry and prose and papyrii.)


58. David Drake, The Legions of Fire: The Books of the Elements Vol. 1

I loved this book.

Drake's fictional Carce is Rome, c.30 CE, and his characters are very believable Romans. (Having a Rome called 'Carce' is a little jarring, but, you know, it's a pretty decent workaround to signify that this is Not Real History.) What happens when metaphysics and magic comes into play is interesting, internally coherent, and makes wonderful use of both Roman and Norse mythologies.

Caveat: I've noticed across a number of Drake's books that his characters tend to be very similar in type to characters he's written before. The cast of The Legions of Fire has recognisable similarities to that of Lord of the Isles et sequelae. Which, since I rather liked Isles, was good by me.

Books 2010: 54

nonfiction

54. James Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Honosexuality in Ancient Greece, London, 2007.


"After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they began to die from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them - being the sections of entire men or women - and clung to that...

"...Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the tally-half of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men. The women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and ...they have affection for men and embrace them, and these are the best of boys and youths." [from Aristophanes' "Love Speech" in Plato's Symposium]


"For Cupid is not consummation, the thwack of an arrow in a target, genital acts. He thrives on distances. He's the arrow's trajectory, the climber straining for the summit. He is forever swooping over the highest mountains, the lowest valleys, and rivers not quite wide enough. He's the force you can feel in a piece of elastic. He's essentially an intermediary, says Socrates. He's like an angel between loving heaven and beloved earth. He's the force that shrinks the distance in between." [Davidson, 2007: 31]


This book is, quite literally, a joy to read.

Davidson has a friendly, accessible style, a breathtakingly enthusiastic lightness that in no way conceals the depth and breadth of his scholarly chops. This is a book that dances from philology through historiography and archaeology to modern and postmodern work in the field of Greek loving and back again, not once, but many times.

The acccepted "dominance" and "submission" narrative regarding the older erastes and the younger eromenos, the focus on the question of penetration and sexual acts - what Davidson terms, with a humour characteristic of the book, "Sodomania" - is here first questioned, and then overturned. His discussion of the 'age-class' structure of Greek polis society and what this means for our understanding of relations between the classes is illuminating, and several times his imaginative reconstruction - his exercise of imaginative empathy - succeeded in cracking my head open and letting in new ways of viewing the evidence.

It is, as the subtitle implies, a radical reappraisal. Kenneth Dover's landmark work in the 1970s set the tone, and it is of course very easy to project one's own cultural, social, and personal prejudices and preferences back into the past, particularly onto such uneasily defined cultural constructs as homo(and gyno-)social and sexual relations. Four modern reviews reflect the reactions to it, one in the BMCR, and three here by Oswyn Murray (who appears to have read parts of it which seem to be strikingly different to the ones I was reading, and whose own aversion to 'hipness' is painfully obvious to every undergraduate who has ever read one of his works, but I have a grudge on the account of the Fontana edition of Early Greece), Peter Jones (who upholds the orthodoxy of Dover), and Duncan Followell.

Davidson's primary chronological focus is the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE, with some digressions both forward and back. It's more exploration than argument, more discussion than conclusion, and - more to the point - more concerned with upholding the potential for human pleasure and dignity in the past than it is with scoring points of "nasty, brutish, and short." The latter we already know: the former is frequently underemphasised, though anyone who has read Sappho or Plato has room to argue.

It need hardly be said I'm a priori far more sympathetic to Davidson's view of things than Dover's: the focus on penetrating acts and the equation of penetration with dominance is one of those modern assumptions that lead you into murky waters, I think, when you project them back onto the past. And I'm inclined to share his views of the episodes in Xenophon which he discusses in depth, Xenophon being the only of the ancient authors he uses I've actually read in any detail.

All that aside: it's an incredibly erudite, thought-provoking, and intelligible work. If you're going to read any book on the ancient Greeks this year?

Read this one.