Ancient Sex: New Essays by Ruby Blondell and Kirk Ormand

Abstract

414 PHOENIX of athletes (71–72) and offers an instructive analysis of Plutarch’s two versions of how the bad news travelled from Sicily to Athens (75–78). She outlines how festivals for the same divinities or in memory of the same triumphs or featuring the same events helped fashion an interwoven network of the fractious communities of the Greek world (216–219). The race in armour is (rightly) said to appear on so many vases because of its artistic possibilities—this is not an index of its popularity or its prestige (165). The presentation is clear, with many sub-headings in each chapter and plenty of crossreferences ; there are indexes of names and of subjects (the latter explaining Greek terms, making the book accessible even to non-specialists); typos are few. Eleven illustrations buttress observations on art. Nonetheless, some questions remain. What are we to make of those who questioned or denied or ridiculed the connection of sport with war, not just intellectuals (Xenophanes) and characters invented by them (in Euripides’ Autolycus) but, so it is said, commanders themselves (Epaminondas, Philopoemen)? Why do festivals that honour them or their victories (Sparta’s Lysandreia, the Soteria at Delphi) often feature competitions in mousikē too? Why do sport and war so often seem out of step? Hoplite warfare did not bring team sports into the panhellenic festivals, nor did the increasing importance of naval warfare introduce boat races. The Homeric ethos and example may provide sufficient reason. But why, in that case, were some events that were good enough for Iliad’s warriors—archery, mock battle—also absent from major festivals and why did the two-horse chariot, used by them in battle and in sport, find a place in the Olympic program only at the end of the fifth century? Indeed, why does Homer have Epeius, one of the contestants in the boxing match at Patroclus’ games, admit that he is a poor soldier? As for that most military of Olympic events, the race in armour: it had been added over a century before the two-horse chariot race, but that too was relatively late, given the link of soldier and athlete on which Angeli Bernardini insists. Such questions do not invalidate her approach, focused as it is on ideology above all. But they perhaps remind us how poorly ideology may fit with practice. University of Winnipeg Mark Golden Ancient Sex: New Essays. Edited by Ruby Blondell and Kirk Ormand. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. 2015. Pp. xii, 342. With the publication of Kenneth Dover’s and Michel Foucault’s books on the history of sexuality, the subject became a central concern for classicists. Volumes such as Before Sexuality examined, developed, and refined Dover’s and Foucault’s arguments.1 Others were much more critical of the Dover/Foucault axis. Amy Richlin, for instance, questioned Foucault’s argument about ancient acts and ancient identities, and James Davidson argued that Dover and Foucault were much too phallocentric.2 The debates, sometimes fierce, other times humorous, found a context when AIDS was ravaging the gay community in the 1980s and early to mid ’90s. Whether ancient Greeks could be gay, or 1 K. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge, MA 1978); M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality (3 vols.; Harmondsworth 1978–1986); D. Halperin, J. Winkler, and F. Zeitlin (eds.), BeforeSexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (Princeton 1990). 2 A. Richlin, “Not Before Homosexuality: The Materiality of the Cinaedus and the Roman Law against Love between Men,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3 (1993) 523–573; J. Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece (London 2007). BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 415 not, simply mattered. What it meant to have a gay heritage was a concern of profound significance at a time when AIDS seemed genocidal: how to remember so many who were once part of our present and are now consigned to the past? As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick memorably put it, gay and queer people “have with difficulty and always belatedly to patch together from fragments a community, a usable heritage, a politics of survival or...