A Natural History of Love by Diane Ackerman Read Free Book Online

Aristophanes’ Lysistrata —in which the women stage a sex strike to force the men to stop the Peloponnesian War—wouldn’t have made sense. But the idea of the self-sufficient married couple, who met most of each other’s needs, was not in the air, nor was that of the private man, who kept amiably to himself. Our word idiot , for example, comes from the Greek disapproval of any man who wasn’t politically active.
    THE FAMILY
    Growing up in the women’s quarters, as if in a harem, children rarely saw their fathers; thus their exiled mothers must have been exceptionally strong forces in their lives. In all probability there was a lot of pent-up anger, rejection, envy, and frustration on display. What example of love did this set? For a little girl, it would be a particularly heart-torn existence. If she aspired to a life of the mind, or any brand of adventure, it would mean embracing immorality and repudiating the sanctity of motherhood. In agricultural Greece, a land obsessed with the harvest, the mother loomed as an earth goddess, a figure of honor and magic. A pregnant goddess contained the forces of nature, her breasts poured forth the stars. A pregnant woman going about her daily chores symbolized all that mysterious fertility.
    In this highly charged world, fed on vivid myth, which most people took literally, the gods and goddesses were all related. In the pantheon, the family was everything. But the family was not one household in Athens; it was the city itself, whose affairs all men knew and played a role in. Once legitimate heirs were born to a man, things loosened up slightly for the wives, who could then divorce to get out of a particularly nasty marriage. It’s not that Athenian women didn’t sometimes have premarital or extramarital affairs, but those who did were thought shocking and immoral. And what chance had they to meet men? Plutarch reports in his Life of Solon that if a woman left the house in daylight she had to be chaperoned, and could take nothing with her but the equivalent of a shawl and a light snack. After sunset, she had to travel in a lighted carriage. Some women turned to lesbianism, or “tribadism,” * as it was known, following the example set by Sappho, one of the most adroit and sensual of lyric poets. Others no doubt found homelier solutions, such as the one described by historian Reay Tannahill:
Masturbation, to the Greeks, was not a vice but a safety valve, and there are numerous literary references to it….
Miletus, a wealthy commercial city on the coast of Asia Minor, was the manufacturing and exporting center of what the Greeks called the olisbos , and later generations, less euphoniously, the dildo…. This imitation penis appears in Greek times to have been made either of wood or padded leather and had to be liberally anointed with olive oil before use. Among the literary relics of the third century B.C ., there is a short play consisting of a dialogue between two young women, Metro and Coritto, which begins with Metro trying to borrow Coritto’s dildo. Coritto, unfortunately, has lent it to someone else, who has in turn lent it to another friend.
    I think it’s safe to assume that married life was less than bliss, and rarely became a focus of love for either party. Men were able to find romance openly, whereas women had to search in makeshifts and in shadows.
    And yet, unlike other ancient cultures, the Greeks worshiped two love gods—Aphrodite and Eros. The idea of love played an important role in their lives, and troubled them enough that they needed two full-time gods to beseech or blame. According to Homer, it was Aphrodite’s toying with Helen that led to the Trojan War. Love was a feeling so automatic and powerful that it had to have some otherworldly origin. In The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind , Julian Jaynes suggests that what we now call “conscience” or “reflection” prehistoric people heard as a sort of ventriloquial