Greek Homosexuality (Second Revised Edition)

The publication of Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality in 1978 was a landmark in the study of ancient Greek culture. Written by one of the twentieth century’s greatest Hellenists at the peak of his career (he had been knighted for services to scholarship in 1977 and became President of the British Academy in 1978 itself), it was the first work to treat Greek representations of homoerotic psychology and practice with the full panoply of historical and philological methods of analysis, as well as in a manner which adroitly synthesised the various forms of evidence (literary, iconographic, philosophical, mythological, religious) for the social phenomena in question. Few classical monographs have been translated, like this one, into a dozen languages, including Hungarian and Japanese.
But the book’s originality, combined with the highly charged nature of its subject-matter, made it inevitably a source of controversy from the outset. So much investigation of ancient sexuality has followed in its wake, and so much has changed (on the surface at least) in general sexual mores and discourse in the intervening years, that one needs to remind oneself (if one’s memory goes back that far) just how momentous the publication of Greek Homosexuality seemed in the late 1970s. For some, it was an intellectually liberating event: Dover had shown that it was possible and productive to discuss all aspects of the topic, from the level of anatomical detail to that of philosophical theory, without inhibitions or reservations, indeed with a sometimes ‘clinical’ explicitness which Dover thought a necessary counterweight to euphemism (or worse), both ancient and modern. To others, however, the book was a cause of dismay – even somewhat threatening to the decorum of the status quo – precisely in virtue of its linguistic and imaginative candour, tokens of a conspicuous determination to treat its materials as raising legitimate, important, and fascinating questions…