The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens

Rating:
Summary: History corrupted by politics
Review: By now it should be abundantly obvious to everyone that a strongly biased political viewpoint is guaranteed not to produce reliable histories and historians. This book is one of many cases which prove the point.

One would especially expect intellectuals to understand this. They have spent their lives reading books and dealing with ideas, and so they should know about viewing the past with a pair of politically-colored spectacles perched on one's nose. It produces fantasy-history, such as Tacitus' descriptions of the barbarians in "Germania" (a place he never visited).

The most obvious stupidity on display in this book is that ancient Rome was much more about "the cult of the phallus" than ancient Greece. Check out Craig Williams' "Roman Homosexuality" for the details. The Romans admired large dicks, and even worshipped them. They were encouraged to have promiscuous insertive sex with all males and females -- as long as the selected partners were slaves & prostitutes.

The ironic point is that the Greeks did NOT admire the large penis! Au contraire! "Well-endowed" was not a Greek term of praise; it was reserved for satyrs and low-life clowns. The Greeks thought that a small member was best, and that sex in moderation was best. In contradistinction to the Romans, the Greeks only admired homosexual relations which were consenting and took place between free citizens, in the one-on-one educational role known as pederasty (paiderasteia).

The phallus was openly displayed on the Greek Herms, as a boundary-marker, but there was nothing like the public veneration of the phallus found among the Romans.

Rating:
Summary: History corrupted by politics
Review: By now it should be abundantly obvious to everyone that a strongly biased political viewpoint is guaranteed not to produce reliable histories and historians. This book is one of many cases which prove the point.

One would especially expect intellectuals to understand this. They have spent their lives reading books and dealing with ideas, and so they should know about viewing the past with a pair of politically-colored spectacles perched on one's nose. It produces fantasy-history, such as Tacitus' descriptions of the barbarians in "Germania" (a place he never visited).

The most obvious stupidity on display in this book is that ancient Rome was much more about "the cult of the phallus" than ancient Greece. Check out Craig Williams' "Roman Homosexuality" for the details. The Romans admired large dicks, and even worshipped them. They were encouraged to have promiscuous insertive sex with all males and females -- as long as the selected partners were slaves & prostitutes.

The ironic point is that the Greeks did NOT admire the large penis! Au contraire! "Well-endowed" was not a Greek term of praise; it was reserved for satyrs and low-life clowns. The Greeks thought that a small member was best, and that sex in moderation was best. In contradistinction to the Romans, the Greeks only admired homosexual relations which were consenting and took place between free citizens, in the one-on-one educational role known as pederasty (paiderasteia).

The phallus was openly displayed on the Greek Herms, as a boundary-marker, but there was nothing like the public veneration of the phallus found among the Romans.

Rating:
Summary: Worth reading for the vase paintings alone
Review: Keuls's controversial contention that she's solved the mystery of who smashed the herms of Athens has overshadowed the real strength of this book, which is the documentation. She has amassed a wealth of vase paintings, as well as references to women in Athenian legal documents, that paint a clear picture of the reality of women's lives in ancient Athens. By the end of the book, she's proved her case that women's lives in the world's first democracy weren't that much different from modern women's lives in Saudi Arabia - except the slaves in general, and the slave prostitutes in particular, certainly had it worse.
It's a must read for anyone who still believes all Athenian women were heroines like Antigone.

Rating:
Summary: Worth reading for the vase paintings alone
Review: Keuls's controversial contention that she's solved the mystery of who smashed the herms of Athens has overshadowed the real strength of this book, which is the documentation. She has amassed a wealth of vase paintings, as well as references to women in Athenian legal documents, that paint a clear picture of the reality of women's lives in ancient Athens. By the end of the book, she's proved her case that women's lives in the world's first democracy weren't that much different from modern women's lives in Saudi Arabia - except the slaves in general, and the slave prostitutes in particular, certainly had it worse.
It's a must read for anyone who still believes all Athenian women were heroines like Antigone.

Rating:
Summary: Illuminating, occasionally over-reaching
Review: Scholars of the social and private life of antiquity face the difficult task of constructing a coherent narrative out of bits and pieces of information widely scattered through classical art, litterature, and archeaology, and Keuls does an excellent job of this. Her analysis of pictorial art and its various representations of men, women, boys, prostitutes, and sex acts is particularly illuminating. On the down side the book is not always very well organized, and the discussions of group ritual, including tragedy, as an examination of and cathartic release from the pressures of sexual antagonism offer some very interesting insights but could have been better developed.

My biggest problem is with the book's tendency, already noted by some reviewers, to overreach, to read certain historical and mythological complexities purely according to its own thesis. Thus, Keuls takes the prevalence of the Amazonomachia, the story of an Amazon assault on prehistoric Athens, as a sign of Athenian preoccupation with aggressive women and the battle of the sexes. But the Greeks are of course known for their artistic tendency to approach history through myth, and the myth of the oriental Amazons' assault on Athens almost perfectly mirrors the assault of the Persians in 490 and 480. These struggles were central not only to Athenian pride but also to their moral justification for empire, and it would surprising if Athenians _didn't_ reproduce them as often as possible, sexual politics aside.

I also don't think much of the book's biggest claim, that the women of Athens were responsible for the mutilation of the Herms in 415. Keuls acknowledges that, if she's correct, the women's responsibility could not be kept for long, but vaguely explains this away by saying the truth was "too shocking to acknowledge." This does not really address the obvious problems of attributing responsibility for one of the greatest mysteries of Antiquity to a group that couldn't keep it a secret. More simply, while Keuls represents the mutilation as a protest, it was to the Athenians an act of sabotage, exposing the expedition and the city to the deadly wrath of the gods. Protest is one thing; sabotage, deliberately endangering their men, their city, and themselves is something else altogether. The simple fact is that only a really well disciplined, organized, and ruthless conspiracy (my money's on oligarchic revolutionaries) could have carried the mutilations out and gotten away with it.

But don't get the wrong idea. This is a good book on the fascinating subject of ancient social and sexual mores, though readers would do better to start with Dover's classic "Greek Homosexuality."