Alexander the Gay part II

More ancient greek differences and similarities



The Ancient Greeks

Were they like us at all?

Victor Davis Hanson

The New Criterion, Vol. 22, No. 9, May 2004

The classical Greeks were really nothing like us-at least that now seems the

prevailing dogma of classical scholars of the last half-century. Perhaps due

to the rise of cultural anthropology or, more recently, to a variety of

postmodern schools of social construction, it is now often accepted that the

lives of Socrates, Euripides, and Pericles were not similar to our own, but

so far different as to be almost unfathomable. Shelley's truism that "We are

all Greeks" has now become, as we say, "inoperative."

M. I. Finley, the great historian of the ancient economy, spent a lifetime

to prove his questionable thesis that the Greeks-who imported grain from

southern Russia, calibrated the cost of the Parthenon to the drachma, and

left us a plethora of mortgage stones, financial inventories, and

complicated estate exchanges-were to be understood as economically

unsophisticated and irrational, more as tribal barterers than calculating

capitalists without much abstract appreciation of interest, supply, demand,

or any of the other practices associated with the complex market. Historians

of gender more recently have sought to show that the Greeks were without

real sexual identity, their sexual mores not understandable through innate

natural proclivities, much less fathomable by analogy to common social

customs across time and space. With whom and how one had sex was instead

"constructed" and thus explicable only through understanding of Foucauldian

power relationships of submission and dominance.

By the same manner, ancient Hellenic childhood is supposedly equally

enigmatic to us. Art historians have pointed out that Greek kids were not

customarily sculpted and painted as real children, but most often portrayed

through convention (or is it due to artistic incapacity?) as veritable

shrunken adults-mature frowns and puzzled expressions slapped on tiny faces.

The proverbially rich Greek language, we are often reminded further, lacks

the variety of English's clearly defined and evolving hierarchy of childhood

nomenclature: "baby," "toddler," "kid," "teenager," "adolescent," "young

adult." The chronological inexactness of Greek's numerous generic terms for

youth-pais, kouros, neanias-is offered as further proof of the great divide

that separates attitudes toward coming of age in both ancient Greece and

modern America.

And yet the sophisticated maritime loans in the Attic orators, or the

scurrilous attacks on promiscuity, sodomy, and effeminate men in

Aristophanes' comedies, or the prevalence of love among married couples in

ancient Athens makes us wonder whether the Greeks really were all that

different from us in their likes, dislikes, prejudices, and habits.

Purportedly locked away in their northern European Victorian studies so far

from the dust and stones of Greece, so ignorant of the new Cambridge

anthropology, were our nineteenth-century classicists all that far off in

thinking that the founders of Western civilization were familiar and

approachable to us precisely because we as Westerners were their spiritual

and intellectual successors? This feeling of a shared and common human

experience is exactly what we receive from a wonderful new exhibition of

classical Greek art depicting children and adolescents through gravestones,

red- and black-figure vases, and terracotta miniature sculptures.

Ponder the title of this fascinating exhibition currently at the Cincinnati

Art Museum, organized by Jenifer Neils of Case Western Reserve University

and John Oakley of the College of William and Mary under the auspices of the

Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, the Hood Museum of Art at

Dartmouth College, and the National Endowment for the Humanities: "Coming of

Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past."[1] The

phraseology is derived from Margaret Mead's own famous (and flawed)

anthropological study of adolescent sexuality among Samoan teenagers that

sought to introduce Westerners to an unfathomable alternate universe of

young female ritual among third-world peoples, who were purportedly much

more relaxed about their sexual needs and desires. Thucydides may have

reminded us that human nature is unchanging across time and space, but

contemporary classical schol- ars have countered that ancient Athens would

seem a very bizarre place to us today-witness the current popularity by

classical scholars of quoting the poet Louis MacNeice's famous lines, "And

how one can imagine oneself among them/ I do not know;/ It was all so

unimaginably different/ And all so long ago."

The effect of viewing some 126 displays from American, Canadian, and

European museums is an almost eerier resonance between past and present not

discernible even through close reading of Greek literature. Greek children

in a variety of contexts in the current exhibition are shown playing with

familiar household pets like cats, small birds, and geese. Their toys seem

to have come right out of small-town America of the 1940s-spinning-tops,

hoops and sticks, jointed dolls, even seesaws. Greek moms, we learn, had

their potties and training chairs-and rooms full of assorted cluttered junk

such as mechanical toy rollers, pig-rattles, and wheeled horses. If we think

clay for plastic, the experience is not much different from strolling

through the aisles of Toys-R-Us. One terracotta spherical ink-well is

identical to a Voit soccer-ball-even down to the familiar pattern of

stitched ridges.

We are told that Greece was a male-dominated society where women were often

segregated and relegated to the kitchen and care of the children, while men

fought, conducted business, or ran the government. Perhaps-as, for example,

a group of terracotta sculptures from central Greece shows a young girl

learning to cook from an older woman. But from this exhibition there also

emerges a sense of female confidence and a familiarity between the sexes

unknown even today in much of the world. Carefree young girls play

knucklebones. They carry one another piggyback as punishment for not hitting

a target with stones or balls in the popular game of ephedrismos, and

bare-armed, bare-faced, and bare-ankled they are taught to dance.

On an Attic red-figure cylix or stemmed drinking-cup there is a surprising

scene of two young women who appear to be headed for school. One

nonchalantly carries her writing stylus. Does the vase suggest that females

were more commonly educated than we think, or are the two meant to be a

weird parody by the painter of an everyday male ritual-or again are they

young courtesans who embrace book-learning because it is indispensable to

the seductive arts plied in the male-dominated symposia? In any case,

learning seems ubiquitous from these scenes of everyday life, as both boys

and girls are seen with writing materials. In addition, there are

fascinating examples of papyrus paper and wood tablets from Egypt on which

school children have left to us unfinished and error-plagued rote

assignments-including a particularly poignant example where the young

student confused his alphabet, transposing phi and chi.

There is subtlety in much of Greek ceramic art that strikes an immediate

chord with modern viewers. On a mid-sixth-century Attic black-figure

amphora, for example, four men seem to be watching a young girl on a swing.

But on closer examination something a bit strange seems to be going on. Most

likely we are witnessing the ritual of the Aiora ("swinging"), in which

youth reenacted the myth of Erione, the young teen who committed suicide by

hanging herself in sorrow over the murder of her father Ikarios. Was this

just an annual rite, or sometimes an impromptu expiation conducted to stop

teen-age suicides-a tragedy that may well have transpired in waves of

despair as we sometimes see today among high-school cliques? In any case,

swinging amid friends and mentors in the ancient Greek world seems as wise a

prophylactic to depression and angst as do Prozac and visits to the local

shrink in ours.

In the past two decades-given the understandable hysteria over sexual

predation by clergy and Michael Jackson and his coterie of pre-teen

sleep-overs-American society has turned its attention to a purported

epidemic of sexual molestation. Like Claude Rains in Casablanca we are

shocked to see improper behavior in an age of easily accessible pornography,

a crass popular culture of simulated sex and breast-grabbing on Super Bowl

Sunday, and pre-teen beauty pageants. We are even troubled over the proper

nomenclature of this apparent outbreak of physical relationships between

adults and those under eighteen-sometimes looking to ancient Greece to learn

whether our wayward mentors are pedophiles ("sexually interested in all

children") or pederasts ("dominant pursuers of passive male teens").

It is not that Greeks were prudes. Indeed, as we see from a number of a

variety of red-figure vases, the casualness of male nudity on the racecourse

and in the wrestling ring gives off a definite sexual air. But we also see

young boys with older tutors in both work and play-Hermes with the infant

Arkas, or a near naked youth sitting at the feet of an aged beer-bellied

tutor or paidagogos. The proximity of older relatives with young boys and

girls conveys a naturalness and non-sexual familiarity belied by the lurid

stories of Greek love. Why so? Perhaps it is the active participation of

vigilant parents -ubiquitous in the exhibition-who escorted their children

to school, who were physically proximate to their kids for most of the day,

and who felt that everything from cooking to playing were skills acquired

only through parental instruction in a society where latch-key kids and

day-care centers were unknown.

If we can learn anything from these examples of the grind of everyday life

as portrayed on vases and in stone, the danger of abuse lies not from the

close interaction per se of child and adult, but rather from the absence of

parental involvement, coupled with the abrogation of family responsibility

in favor of the school, church, or baby-sitter. Thus additional Boeotian

terracotta figurines capture a balding old man offering grapes to a young

solitary girl, in a touching scene that suggests love for a

grandchild-similar to a picture from a black-figure Attic vase that portrays

a young boy learning the craft of shoemaking surrounded by the company of

older adults.

Of course, we must avoid stereotypes. Not all parents and children are

either happy-or even alive. The exhibition presents grim examples of marble

grave steles where parents grieve over lost infants-a common occurrence in a

premodern society where perhaps half of all pregnancies were not successful,

and of those that were, one in three infants did not survive childhood.

There is also evidence that the Greeks had no illusions that they all were

always either good spouses or parents. In a particularly chilling red-figure

calyx-krater from Italy, Jason vents his fury at Medea, even as their two

murdered sons (her revenge for his infidelity) lie nearly neglected on a

nearby altar. The parents bicker, while only their nurse and male tutor seem

to mourn the two young bodies nearby.

There is a rich diversity in the show-and Professors Oakley and Neils are to

be congratulated for the selection of vases, metal jewelry, stone and

terracotta sculpture, and wood and paper artifacts that leave us with an

appreciation that Hellenic excellence in art spanned four or five centuries

and was found throughout the Greek-speaking Mediterranean.

A final surprise of the exhibition is that the most moving everyday scenes

and toys seem to be from Boeotia-the ancient equivalent of our own rural

heartland. If we naturally associate sophisticated Greek art only with

Athens and to a lesser extent with Corinth and Italy, we forget that

thousands of other Greeks in the shadows in places like the perennially

maligned Boeotia were just as artistically adept, and perhaps possessed an

eye for the everyday things that matter but are forgotten by their more

heralded urban counterparts. And that seems yet another lesson for us as

well-that there is plenty of art and culture beyond our own triangle of New

York, Washington, and Los Angeles that sees what is important in life in

pretty much the same way as did these rural Greeks.

Victor Davis Hanson is at work on War Like No Other, a military history of

the Peloponnesian War forthcoming from Random House.

Notes

	"Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the

Classical Past" opened at the Cincinnati Art Museum on May 1 and remains on

view through August 1. The exhibition was previously on view at the Onassis

Cultural Center, New York, from January 22 to April 15. It will next be seen

at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, from September 14 to December 5,

2004.

©2004 Victor Davis Hanson