By Louis Crompton
How have significant civilizations of the final millennia handled those who have been interested in their very own intercourse? In a story journey de strength, Louis Crompton chronicles the lives and achievements of gay women and men along a darker historical past of persecution, as he compares the Christian West with the cultures of historical Greece and Rome, Arab Spain, imperial China, and pre-Meiji Japan. historical Greek tradition celebrated same-sex love in historical past, literature, and artwork, making excessive claims for its ethical impact. against this, Jewish non secular leaders within the 6th century B.C.E. branded male homosexuality as a capital offense and, later, blamed it for the destruction of the biblical urban of Sodom. while those traditions collided in Christian Rome throughout the overdue empire, the tragic repercussions have been felt all through Europe and the recent international. Louis Crompton lines Church-inspired mutilation, torture, and burning of "sodomites" in sixth-century Byzantium, medieval France, Renaissance Italy, and in Spain less than the Inquisition. yet Protestant experts have been both dedicated to the execution of homosexuals within the Netherlands, Calvin's Geneva, and Georgian England. the foundation reason used to be non secular superstition, abetted via political ambition and sheer greed. but from this cauldron of fears and needs, homoerotic topics surfaced within the artwork of the Renaissance masters--Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Sodoma, Cellini, and Caravaggio--often intertwined with Christian motifs. Homosexuality additionally flourished within the courtroom intrigues of Henry III of France, Queen Christina of Sweden, James I and William III of britain, Queen Anne, and Frederick the good. Anti-homosexual atrocities dedicated within the West distinction starkly with the extra tolerant traditions of pre-modern China and Japan, as printed in poetry, fiction, and artwork and within the lives of emperors, shoguns, Buddhist clergymen, students, and actors. within the samurai culture of Japan, Crompton makes transparent, the occasion of same-sex love rivaled that of historic Greece. Sweeping in scope, elegantly crafted, and lavishly illustrated, Homosexuality and Civilization is a beautiful exploration of a wealthy and negative previous. (20031130)
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Extra resources for Homosexuality and Civilization
Example text
Attic red-figure vase, c. 500 BCE. ] e a r ly g r e e c e ✦ Theognis of Megara ✦ The most substantial writing on homosexual love to survive from the sixth century was not, however, of Athenian origin. These poems, of uncertain authorship, have been traditionally ascribed to Theognis, a citizen either of Megara in Boeotia or of its colony in Sicily. ) A Dorian settlement, Sicilian Megara, like so many Greek communities of this age, was wracked by class strife. The staunchly conservative Theognis sided with the nobility, who were overthrown in a revolution that made Theognis an embittered wanderer dependent on others.
78 If this story is true, it demonstrates tellingly how every level of Greek society was inspired by the ideal of paiderastia; if it is an invention, as the skeptical reader may suspect, it shows how the Greeks could imagine even a desperado harboring exalted sentiments and acting heroically under the influence of male love. What must strike the dispassionate observer is the extent to which the post-classical West moved in the opposite direction of vilification, associating homosexuality with sin, crime, and sickness and, in the political sphere, with weakness and treason.
Was a cousin of the mother of [the tyrant] Peisistratus. And the two men were at first great friends, largely because of their kinship and the youthful beauty of Peisistratus, with whom, as some say, Solon was passionately in love. And this may be the reason why, in later years, when they were at variance about matters of state, their enmity did not bring with it any harsh or savage feelings, but the former amenities lingered in their spirits . . And that Solon was not proof against beauty in a youth, and made not so bold with Love as “to confront him like a boxer, hand to hand,” may be inferred from his poems.