The Crucifixion of Hyacinth: Jews, Christians, and Homosexuals from Classical Greece to Late Antiquity

Rating:
Summary: Readable history--I loved it
Review: Don't be afraid to buy this book if your are not inclined towards scholarly works. While this book seems well researched, with all the necessary citations, it is highly readable and doesn't weight itself down in the minutea. It's a quick read, but comprehensive. The author makes a point of balancing the historical homophobic rhetoric with some wonderful surviving odes to male-male love. I felt informed and empowered. While I can't debate this book on scholarly terms, I can tell you how good it feels to know that some of the most homophobic of early Christian writers also thought rabbits pooped once a year and that hyenas changed sexes. They know not of what they speak! This book doesn't get into the why's of homophobia, but the context and history of it are well presented. I really recommend this book to people who normally wouldn't delve into this kind of writing because they feel it would be too dry. (By the way, great title, but Hyacinth is not addressed specifically at all.)

Rating:
Summary: The Triumph of Sexual Superstition.
Review: Geoff Puterbaugh focuses on a fateful era of transition -- from antiquity to the Middle Ages, from paganism to Christianity -- in which a form of love, highly esteemed in the ancient world, was brutally suppressed.

The Crucifixion of Hyacinth -- a wonderful title! -- presents much material not readily available, for example, generous quotations from the writings of such homophobes as Philo Judaeus and Clement of Alexandria.

Puterbaugh's generalizations are down-to-earth and show good common sense -- and yet one realizes that they are also original and quite unorthodox, as in a marvelous analogy he draws between Greek pederasty and American football.

He sums up the sexual morality of the ancient world up to the second or third century of the Christian Era:

"Around the basin of the Mediterranean sea, in ancient Greece as well as Rome, men loved men and men loved boys with no legal penalty whatever, other than the common-sense measures against rape and coercion. Jokes were directed against the adult male passive, but he was not jailed."

This changed drastically in the 4th century A.D., when theological intolerance from the Near East achieved hegemony in the West -- what the author calls "The Triumph of Fanaticism". Alas, Hyacinth was crucified.

This is a book which gay men, and gay scholars in particular, will want for their permanent library.

Rating:
Summary: Jews, Christians, and homosexuals...
Review: I read this book and could not put it down! Puterbaugh made it so easy to read and wrote an excellent summary of historical scholarship.

However, uninformed readers will be mislead by a comment Puterbaugh makes in his discussion of St. Paul:

"The word malakos, as every scholar of Greek knows, denotes effeminate or passive homosexuals, while arsenokoites (a rarer term) denotes the active counterpart." (pg. 110)

[He later on described the word "arsenokoitai" (not "arsenokoites") as "unambiguous", a comment that will boggle the minds of most scholars who read his work]

For someone with a Masters in Linguistics to make that statement is shocking. I know of several scholars of Greek who would disagree. Dale Martin is one example, and his work was published in 1996. Jeramy Townsley is another example.

It was at this point that it appeared as if Puterbaugh had a major axe to grind. As a researcher on this topic, this slip up disturbing to me.

So aside from Puterbaugh's St. Paul slip-up, his work is still nonetheless, indispensable.

Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: Excellent historical book
Review: I read this book and could not put it down! Puterbaugh made it so easy to read and wrote an excellent summary of historical scholarship.

However, uninformed readers will be mislead by a comment Puterbaugh makes in his discussion of St. Paul:

"The word malakos, as every scholar of Greek knows, denotes effeminate or passive homosexuals, while arsenokoites (a rarer term) denotes the active counterpart." (pg. 110)

[He later on described the word "arsenokoitai" (not "arsenokoites") as "unambiguous", a comment that will boggle the minds of most scholars who read his work]

I know of several scholars of Greek who would disagree (Martin [whose work was published 4 years before Puterbaugh's was, so it is not as if such literature was unavailable to him when he wrote his book] and Townsley being probably the most learned). Puterbaugh was seemingly unaware of Herodotus, Histories 7.153 and 13.51; Aristophanes Wasps 1455, Plutus 488; Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics 1150a:33; Plato, Republic 556c

It was at this point that it appeared as if Puterbaugh had a major axe to grind. As a researcher on this topic, these absences are disturbing to me.

The Afterword was absolutely brilliant!

So aside from Puterbaugh's St. Paul slip-up, his work is still nonetheless, indispensable.

Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: More than just a "homosexual Issue"
Review: Most of the books I have read on the subject of antique sexuality were written under the aspect of socioeconomic analysis. There is an undeniable connection between, say, dowry customs and liberality in the practice of sexual orientations, or between inheritable land and the required virginity of a bride. Matriarchal societies don't allow the male to inherit land, his wife is subject to visits from her husband on the premises of her own clan, but the couple never moves in together, and the bride's clan pays a recompense for the time of his absence from his own people. There is an incentive here, to look for more than one sexual outlet and it is generally accepted. Systems of this kind seem to have evolved from prehistoric agriculture and matrilinear bronze-age dynasties. Evidence for a "patriarchal revolution" that finally overturned the old establishment has left traces not only in classic literature and the Bible: the Amarna tablets testify to upheavals among pastoral Canaanites who are depicted more like social outcasts than a separate tribe or invading nation. The movement finally carried the day against their urban masters -- or rather mistresses -- and that may explain the fanaticism and retentive taboos of the early Hebraic religion, when grumpy old Yahweh still had many peers. The Bible can be read in many ways, it also is a warcry for male dominance (Gen. 2:21), and yes, in many places it is a testimony to homophobia. In Greece and Italy the situation was not very much different from Palestine. Patriarchs took the helm and remodelled the economy and their sex-life, but with a significant difference: in Palestine the Jews had always been a minority surrounded by matriarchs; in Italy and Greece only two matriarchal enclaves survived the early iron-age: the Etruscans and the Spartans. Both were feared by their neighbors for their warlike prowess and very little understood socially. In Palestine the pressure created a need for fanaticism and monotheistic unity. In Greece and Rome fanatic asceticism was confined to the mystery cults -- the official line was a laid back polytheism. Therefore I was surprised that the author had missed his most important link in his presentation of pagan asceticism: the Orphic cult, which at Europe's Mediterranean shores was the first to introduce the ideals of chastity, asceticism and taboos on homosexuality. It was a widespread undercurrent of classical culture, much more popular and influential than any single philosopher. Mr. Puterbaugh's assessment of Plato and Socrates, is, by and large, based on Popper, but I think Plato was too much of an aristocrat ever to leave the boys alone. Only after Viagra couldn't have done its thing anymore he wrote the "Laws" and turned completely into a fascist prig, who not only frowned on homosexuality, but recommended inquisitions, star chambers, secret trials, censorship and euthanasia. And this is a connection which should concern everyone of us: A sexually intolerant legislation ALWAYS comes with some sort of totalitarian agenda. How the historical Socrates fits into this picture is a matter of opinion. This smug enemy of Athens' democracy has never been my favorite saint, and on his trial the court jester and protege of the 30 tyrants had it coming. (Just imagine, with nothing on your mind but minding your own business, you suddenly find yourself cornered by Socrates and his aristocratic companions who jeer him on to humiliate you in a dialectical cat-and-mouse game of leading questions. Who would not be fed up and pay back?) On the whole Mr. Puterbaugh's exposition of pederasty and homosexuality as an accepted practise from Homer's time up to the closing of Roman male-brothels is accurate, very true -- and nothing new. Which is a shame: after two centuries of competent scholarship on the subject, the facts still need to reach a wider audience, and this is what the author had set out to do, before he could move on to his indictment of the one agent who has caused the modern homophobia in legislation and public perception. So Puterbaugh's attack on Philo and Clement struck me first as unfairly hostile. The reason is something, I should be ashamed of: I have read of Philo only "De Legatione" and of Clement only a few Gnostic bits and pieces of a more benign nature. So it is easy to be tolerant simply out of ignorance. Things look different if you speak for a mistreated minority.

But the last quarter of the book really wraps it up. The evidence from late Roman legislation and its enforcement is the darkest thing I have read for a long time. Of course it was part of my job description to know these things, but they use to come in a more diluted form, as dissipated details of a wider picture, easily lost in a flood of trivia. And after all, empires don't fall for simple causes, or do they? Laws and regulations tell us what people think and fear, and sometimes it is good to remember what "history" meant for a Roman: the "custom of nations." When bundled up in this concentrated form as presented here, I really wonder how anybody can propose that history would have taken a similar turn if there had been no Church and no Christian religion. This was more than an instrumental coincidence, this was the ecclesiastical impact on actual legislation, for crying out loud; it motivated perfectly decent people to commit atrocities on a colossal scale and then successfully anesthetized the conscience of the perpetrators. Times were different then, true enough, but what we see here is a deliberate effort to switch off the lights, and from the result, one must say, they succeeded. Ancient civilization may have ended anyway, but not like this. If you expected a quick review on ancient sexual practices and what changed it, prepare yourself for more than you had bargained for -- 177 pages brimming full of facts. Money well spent.

Rating:
Summary: Readable history--I loved it
Review: Mr. Puterbaugh seems more intent on maligning the true scholar in this area, Yale historian John Boswell, than on the proper pusuit of historical sources. He skims lightly over many quotes, approaches some true analysis, but always veers away at the last moment. While not quite as discursive as Clement of Alexandria, Puterbaugh is no "sober historian", the sobriquet he chooses for himself in the chapter on the deluded Clement. The publisher has seen fit to provide very generous interlineal space as well as a monstrous bottom margin, so don't be misled by the page count. This is a slim and worthless volume.

Rating:
Summary: Pseudo-scholarship of a very poor sort
Review: Mr. Puterbaugh seems more intent on maligning the true scholar in this area, Yale historian John Boswell, than on the proper pusuit of historical sources. He skims lightly over many quotes, approaches some true analysis, but always veers away at the last moment. While not quite as discursive as Clement of Alexandria, Puterbaugh is no "sober historian", the sobriquet he chooses for himself in the chapter on the deluded Clement. The publisher has seen fit to provide very generous interlineal space as well as a monstrous bottom margin, so don't be misled by the page count. This is a slim and worthless volume.

Rating:
Summary: from White Crane: A Journal of Gay Men's Spirituality
Review: Subtitled: "Jews, Christians, and Homosexuals from Classical Greece to Late Antiquity," this little book documents and explains what was likely really going on in the ancient world. In a way, of course, what the ancients thought is truly irrelvant today. Our world is so unlike theirs, one of them transported by time machine into the year 2001would hardly recognize he was still on earth and that these current day creatures were descendants of his. And yet interest in the ancients has survived, perhaps for that very reason. For one of the big differences is how sexuality and homosexuality are viewed. That the ancients had different ideas is a reminder that the notions conventional culture takes are time-bound and arbitrary. And that's good news for people dealing with the misunderstandings of modern, Christian-influenced society. Puterbaugh presents a wealth of quotes and references and does a creditable job of explaining them in context. That homosexuality isn't such a new thing is not surprising. But understanding what that means in context often remains elusive. Things were just so different back then.

Geoff Puterbaugh helps make it all make sense. The book is interesting, informative, and readable. And it's a nice addition to the library of books about the historical bases of gay consciousness.

This review originally appeared in White Crane Journal...