John Addington Symonds opened his landmark 1883 book A Problem in Greek Ethics by warning his fellow Victorians, “To ignore paiderastia is to neglect one of the features by which Greek civilisation was most sharply distinguished.” Now, 124 years later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is still guilty of that neglect. Their astonishing new Greek and Roman Galleries reopened last Friday, and after four visits we’re left astonished that no where do they mention homosexuality. Although the cases are full of drawings depicting males together, often nude or half-clad, drinking wine side by side in bed, oiling each other up at the gym, the display cards never acknowledge the widespread same-sex relationships that other museums tell their visitors were considered “honorable.” Whenever Carlos Picón and his fellow curators have an opportunity with this topic to illuminate and educate, they look away and abandon their visitors to silence. In their descriptions of thousands of images on ancient pottery, they have whitewashed homosexuality out of history.
Even a romantic pair as legendary as Zeus and Ganymede (top, L.1999.10.14) are uncoupled with a chaste comment about Zeus taking the form of an eagle to bring Ganymede home to be his cupbearer, omitting the fact that they had sex on the flight up, thereby becoming the first two members of the Mile High Club. It’s like describing the Playboy Bunnies as the people who feed Hugh Heffner his Viagra: True but hopelessly off topic. Likewise, dozens of relationships that historically would have been heightened with an erotic aspect are obscured with vague terms, athlete and trainer or youth and mentor. Despite the presence of two women clinging together staring at her, even Sappho is de-sexed (23.160.80, right), which would certainly confuse the centuries of people who spoke of Sapphic love.
In contrast to the willful blindness toward homosexuality, when the drawings show males and females, some descriptions are appropriately explicit (“An aroused satyr runs from one side of the vase to the symplegma (sexual intercourse) on the other.” 22.139.83) and some seem to go out of their way to find sex. Even when the figures are drawn in isolation, as with the youth alone on the interior and a girl peering into a jar on the exterior (56.171.61), the display card reads, “The decoration of vases used in symposia (drinking parties) draws liberally on the erotic aspect of these events. The flute girl on the obverse investigates a pointed amphora; her flute case dangles rather provocatively from one leg.”
Yet when the scenes show only males, that “erotic aspect” so prominent at symposia suddenly vanishes. Faced with two shirtless men, drinking wine and reclining together on the same sofa, one’s elbow resting on the other’s thigh, and beside them a third youth whose foot angling in somehow makes a claim on the sofa (14.130.13), the curators have nothing to say about it. In total, their summary reads, “The iconography follows Attic antecedents quite closely. The vases used for drinking, however, probably reflect contemporary local practice.” A similar scene of a pair of half-nude older-younger males drinking together, reclining facing each other (96.18.143), inspires only this explanation: “The decoration of the exterior is carefully placed,” with more detail about the cup’s stand aligning with the edge of the sofa. Nor, apparently, did curators find anything remotely provocative in, say, (41.162.101) the death struggle between Theseus (whom many scholars believe had a physical relationship with Pirithous) and Skiron, both naked, the older man seated, spread wide, the virile younger man lifting one of Skiron's legs and thrusting toward him, their penises aimed at each other. Mr. Picón, may we introduce Eros and Thantos?
When displaying the image of a naked athlete bending forward while pinching the tip of his penis (14.105.7), the curators may not be answering the questions foremost on viewers' minds by merely listing what can be seen: “The youth shown here has all the gear of an athlete-shoes, a staff, a pick to loosen the ground when it becomes too packed, an aryballos (oil flask), and a himation (cloak) neatly folded over the goalpost.” And truly, in 2007, if they are going to refer to a drinking cup drawing as Youth Riding Cock (1981.11.10), showing a smiling teenager astride an enormous rooster, delicately stroking its huge neck sticking up between his legs, it feels disingenuous to say in the description, “The meaning is not evident, but the reference undoubtedly has to do with the cock as a gift of love.”
One card does state, “The interior shows a man propositioning a youth,” (52.11.4) yet the next sentence reverts to such clinical analysis (“The composition is admirable…”) that readers may not be sure of the nature of that proposition. The museum is not going to clarify. Certainly not in public. But in the endnotes of the massive catalog, the entry for that item explains, “Scenes like this are about social and educational as well as erotic relationships.” Most of the pottery items discussed here are excluded from the catalog, as of course are most of the 5,300 items in the collection.
Throughout the galleries, several poster-sized introductions give visitors a broader sense of life during this period, roughly 900BC-400AD. One such overview is called “Greek Culture During the Fifth Century BC,” which would be the ideal place to expound on the catalog’s note and discuss the prevalence of same-sex love in that era. (Even the digital description of 09.221.38 highlights that time, “The cup shows the persistence of the theme of men and youths in the last quarter of the fifth century BC.”) Yet once again the curators opt to ignore scholarship and erase homosexuality from public display. Elsewhere, special sideline exhibits explain subjects such as “The World of Dionysos,” “Roman Games and Pastimes,” “Children in Hellenistic Art,” and “Africans in the Hellenistic World.” Undoubtedly these are worthy are important topics. It is difficult to imagine any one of those subjects having the same enduring impact as did the giants of ancient times who enjoyed same-sex relations: Sappho, Sophocles, Socrates, Plato, Zeno, Alexander, Caesar, Virgil, Hadrian, and, if we do say so, the 150 male couples who formed the elite warrior corps the Sacred Band of Thebes.
Compare the Met’s timidity and evasiveness with the forthright history readily on view at the Getty and the British Museum. Last summer the British Museum devoted an entire exhibit to The Warren Cup, a masterpiece of ancient Roman silverwork depicting two scenes of Hellenistic male lovers fully engaged in the sexual act, which their display card discussed at length. Dyfri Williams, Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the museum, wrote a short book on the cup, and he discussed homosexuality throughout, from the flap copy to final page where he mentioned other cultures such as in Han Dynasty China or pre-Meiji Japan that celebrated sex between men. As for the Greeks, he wrote:
…Sparta, Crete, Boeotia and Elis, officially sanctioned a pederastic system; others prohibited it outright. At Athens, where the visual evidence is most abundant and where nudity and sexual scenes are quite commonplace as decoration on pottery, we see that the picture was particularly complex. Representations of homoerotic courtship in sixth- and fifth-century BC Athenian vase-painting show that it was ritualized as an 'honorable' versus 'shameful' process. p.54
Giving some indication of the importance the British Museum placed on being able to add same-sex experience to the story of human culture, they paid 1.8 million pounds for The Warren Cup in 1999. The museum shop sells postcards of the cup, as well as exact-size replicas in silverplate and sterling silver. That acquisition remains the most expensive single-item purchase in their history.
Surely now is the time for the Met to follow the lead of other great museums in recognizing same-sex love and giving their visitors a fuller, more accurate picture of our shared humanity.
Thank you for this piece. It really is most distressing to observe the continuing efforts of heterosexual society to erase homosexuality from the historical record. The situation is further confounded by the fact that the people at the forefront of this movement are often found to be homosexual themselves. I am referring of course to the academic fad known as "queer theory" that for the past 30 or so years has done its best to write homosexuality out of history simply by spinning every incidence of it as something else (such as "heterosexuality" minus the vagina). I wonder how much of the timidity of the Met curators was really attributable to the fact that they could hardly have mentioned homosexuality without instant retribution from the queer vigilantes always on guard for the "inappropriate" use of that word in the context of ancient Greece?
Posted by: Kalevi | April 12, 2010 at 04:53 PM
That's the kind of image that i really thing is super image like. If more images very real like this were out there we'd be super full of graet images in the world.
Posted by: my website | November 03, 2013 at 09:44 PM