Homosexuality in Ancient Greece - Scholarship and Controversy

Scholarship and Controversy

After a long hiatus marked by censorship of homosexual themes, modern historians picked up the thread, starting with Erich Bethe in 1907 and continuing with K. J. Dover and many others. These scholars have shown that same-sex relations were openly practised, largely with official sanction, in many areas of life from the 7th century BC until the Roman era.

Although this perspective is the scholarly consensus in North America and Northern Europe, some scholars believe that homosexual relationships, especially pederasty, were common only among the aristocracy, and that such relationships were not widely practised by the common people (demos). One such scholar is Bruce Thornton, who argues that insults directed at passive homosexuals in the comedies of Aristophanes show the common people's dislike for male homosexuality. Other scholars, such as Victoria Wohl, emphasize that in Athens, same-sex desire was part of the "sexual ideology of the democracy," shared by the elite and the demos, as exemplified by the tyrant-slayers, Harmodius and Aristogeiton. Even those who argue that pederasty was limited to the upper classes generally concede that it was "part of the social structure of the polis."

The subject has caused controversy in most of modern Greece. In 2002, a conference on Alexander the Great was stormed as a paper about his homosexuality was about to be presented. When the film Alexander, which depicted Alexander as romantically involved with both men and women, was released in 2004, 25 Greek lawyers threatened to sue the film's makers, but relented after attending an advance screening of the film.