*Muscle comes from the Latin musculus or “little mouse.”
*We get our word paper from the Greek papyros, the word given to a material used by the Egyptians for writing and wrapping. To make papyrus, the Egyptians flattened and crisscrossed strips of pith from the long stalks of a sedge, Cyperus papyrus, which grew tall in the Nile Delta. This wasn’t true paper, which requires a grinding and mashing process that turns fibers into a soupy mixture that is then spread across a screen to drain and dry. The latter process is said to have been invented by a Chinese eunuch in A.D. 105 and spread slowly to Europe, entering Spain around A.D. 1200.
*At that level of high-voltage emotion, there’s a thin line between sweet fanaticism and acute psychosis. Twist the love just a little, keeping the same intensity, and you are in a dangerous fixation that leads to violence.
GREECE
THE WORLD OF THE CITIZEN KING
Thinking about the late sixties, I remember the anxious thrill of trying to reinvent society. A generation defined by love-ins, hallucinogenic drugs, and the Vietnam War, we lived in a state of daily commotion. Cynicism and idealism went hand in hand in us. Inherited truths no longer fit; we felt it was both our privilege and our duty to reshape them. The roller coaster we rode sometimes took wild curves and left the tracks. Fun meant outlandish public pranks. Rock and roll besotted us with high-decibel slogans. “The War” loomed over everything and everyone. We championed integration. We protested. We were arrested. We enlisted. We were drafted. We evaded or fled. We staged sit-ins. We practiced free love. We sampled drugs and learned about extremes of consciousness. Like every generation, we lived with moral dilemmas. On campus, we discussed politics before, after, and even during classes, whose curricula we rewrote.
That atmosphere of upheaval, social change, and hope comes to mind when I picture the city of Athens in the fifth century B.C. War and politics led to the radical idea of a bustling democracy, in which citizens could air their views, however novel, and vote their minds in the state assembly. Any citizen over thirty was eligible for public office. The daily intrigues of this vigorous new self-government must have filled the law courts and fueled the gossip mills. Athens was a world of only about 30,000 people, not much larger than my hometown in upstate New York. And yet it produced a band of luminous thinkers and creators whose ideas were the source of western civilization. Most of them would have been friends, crossed paths regularly, or at least known one another on sight. It was a tight, competitive city—the Greeks adored staging contests of body and mind. To be a citizen of Athens meant status, prestige, economic opportunity (only citizens could own real estate), and a sense of nobility (you had to be the child of two Athenian parents—indeed, in the fourth century, it was illegal for Athenians even to marry non-Athenians). Athens revolved around its citizenry, and sanctified their rights. As Pericles proudly explained, in sentiments that would later be adopted almost word for word by colonial America:
Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands of the people, not a minority. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everybody is equal before the law: when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty…. This is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.
Among such ideals, in an intellectual free-for-all, politics must have fed Athens like a tonic. However, it was a stimulant enjoyed only by men. Women were not allowed to be citizens. Politics might be too invigorating for them; it was common knowledge that women were by nature irrational, hysterical, gluttonous, given to drunkenness, and sex-obsessed. They were not thought to be rational or strong-willed enough for so vital a responsibility as self-government. Or for spirited conversation. A wife didn’t dine with her husband, and if he brought home a male visitor, all the womenfolk were expected to retreat to the women’s quarters. Any woman seen at a male gathering—even if she engaged only in talk—was assumed to be a prostitute. It’s not that the men didn’t cherish their women. One often finds women referred to tenderly in Greek literature, and domestic scenes lovingly depicted on vases. Courtroom speeches frequently include a sentimental appeal on behalf of the litigant’s mother, sister, wife, or daughter. Men wouldn’t resort to such ploys if they didn’t think they would work. But a family could only be sure of its bloodline by keeping a strict watch over the wife, whose place was in the dim vault of the home with the other forms of wealth. A purebred Athenian girl had to marry young, be a virgin, and not even have mingled socially with men. Men married late (usually in their thirties), and weren’t required to be chaste. This meant that neither men nor women had equals of the opposite sex to fall in love with. In a typical scenario, a cultured, educated, sexually experienced, politically active middle-aged husband would return home to his sheltered, illiterate sixteen-year-old wife. Teenage girls were not visible on the streets for men to idealize or fantasize about. Beautiful teenage boys were, though, and they alone provided the erotic siren of youth. Friends often met at gymnasia, where they could watch the young men of Athens exercise naked (with the foreskin tied over the tip of the penis to protect it). Since Athenian women were off-limits, it was common for men to have young male lovers or female courtesans, to whom they turned for companionship, as well as sex, since respectable women were social exiles.
Married couples sometimes fell in love; but love had nothing to do with marriage, which was intended to produce children. According to Menander, the marriage formula went like this: “I give you this woman (my daughter) for the ploughing of legitimate children.” Women were associated with agriculture, fields to be sown and reaped. Men stood for reason and culture; women for the wild forces of nature men were to tame.
THE WOMAN’S WORLD
Above the fireplace in my living room hangs a large etching entitled “Diana’s Chase.” Leaping and dodging, with all body parts swinging, the voluptuous goddess and her female followers race nearly naked through the forest, hunting a buck as if it were zest incarnate. Also known as Artemis, this “huntress chaste and fair” exuded sensuality and energy. She rejoiced in nature at its most savage and free. As “Mistress of the Beasts,” she was the official protectress of wild animals, and she moved among them with the delicate brawn of the wind and the ethereal dynamism of the sun. A high point of the Greek wedding ceremony came when the girl renounced her patron goddess, Artemis, and swore fealty to Demeter, goddess of agriculture and married women. Demeter (literally “earth mother”) somehow managed to be both nonerotic and fecund. The perfect wife was wilderness tamed. She was the fugitive land cleared and turned to production. All of a man’s social, intellectual, cultural, and romantic needs were to be filled elsewhere.
Women in ancient Greece celebrated two special holidays. Athenian matrons held a yearly Thesmophoria, whose exultations excluded both women of lower class and any men, and required a period of sexual abstinence. As a counterculture holy day, courtesans, prostitutes, and their lovers celebrated the openly licentious festival of Adonia, honoring Aphrodite’s lover Adonis. This was more of a flesh-and-blood carnival, which included the symbolic planting of grains in pots on the rooftops. Under the blinding Mediterranean sun, the plants would sprout fast, spurting color, and just as quickly wither. The seeding of this small thatch of earth was quick and exciting, but it was not expected to be fruitful. Perhaps they quoted these lines from Mimnermus’ poetry:
What is life, what is joy without golden Aphrodite?
May I die when these things no longer move me—
hidden love affairs, sweet nothings and bed.
If high-spirited women in Athens who were intellectual, cultured, fun-loving, and proud of it wished to speak in mixed company about
things that mattered, they became courtesans. Although their lives were uncertain, and at times degrading, at least these women could enjoy the riches of Athenian culture. They were stylish and witty, versed in art and politics, and, in calling, somewhere between a geisha and a prostitute. Men admired precisely those talents in the courtesans they forbade in their wives. But Athens was full of paradoxes. While debating and championing democracy, citizens frequently owned slaves, with whom they sometimes found pleasure. At a cheaper rate, with less emotional ballyhoo, were streetwalkers, one of whose sandals has survived the millennia. On its sole, studded so that it would brand the dust with each step, is the invitation: Follow me.
MEN LOVING MEN
Loving relationships, not merely sexual liaisons, also evolved between older men and teenage boys, a combination of romance and tutelage that was blessed by society and praised in philosophy and art. “The aristocratic ideal,” as historian Charles Beye points out, “was a combination of athletic exercise to create a beautiful body and music and poetry to create a beautiful personality.” There is a section of Aristophanes’ Clouds that instructs a boy
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.*
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,”* 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” preh
istoric 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.