Spartans did it wearing cloaks

However loaded or coded, ‘Greek love’ is one of our more misleading cultural terms of convenience. It refers to an aspect of classical civilisation whose existence many people continue to find either embarrassing or reprehensible. Even now Hollywood chooses to present Achilles and Patroclus as best buddies US-Army style rather than as lovers unabashedly showing what Aeschylus, in a lost play about them both, calls ‘reverence for awesome thighs’ and is careful to excise all but the most oblique homosexual nuances from a screen portrayal of Alexander the Great. What vase-painting, sculpture, literature and mythology make exuberantly clear, that same-sex love formed an integral element in the accepted pattern of life for men, and sometimes women, in the ancient world, is still the ‘Problem in Greek Ethics’ it was for John Addington Symonds (himself very firmly closeted) when he sought to tackle it in 1873.

A century later Sir Kenneth Dover made frank discussion somewhat easier by publishing Greek Homosexuality, hailed by reviewers for its unflinching candour, an analysis conducted in the name of substituting ‘nasty truths’ for ‘silly lies’. Briskly and reductively dealing with the ticklish question of who did what to whom, Dover’s book was eagerly seized upon by Michel Foucault, whose much admired challenges to received wisdom on the history of human behaviour have since engendered their own festering orthodoxy. We were asked to believe that the term ‘Greek love’ itself was inherently oxymoronic, that true eros between one Hellenic male and another merely involved an act as opposed to an emotion and that sodomy rather than genuine homosexual desire, a virile obsession with penetrative sex, was what, pace Plato’s Symposium and the Theban Army of Lovers, made Greek men feel good about themselves.

James Davidson is, thank heavens, having none of this.