King’s College Cambridge has lost (according to the papers) a ‘famous’ classicist, who resigned because he slobbered wet kisses all over an unimpressed woman. But everyone knows there is only one famous classicist, and she is not at King’s.
The classicist at issue surely cannot have been paying too much attention to the literature which one assumes he has studied, because Eros was seen as a sickness, a madness, a god who robs us of our wits, creating a strong and obsessive desire (‘desire doubled’ as an ancient puts it). Plato saw sexual incontinence as a ‘disease of the soul’. Sophocles thought of sex as a ‘mad and savage master’.
While close boy-girl relationships might have been easier to initiate between poor families in ancient Greece, the evidence suggests that for the elite it was rather trickier, since privileged males were all too keen to try their luck wherever they could, threatening the purity of the family line. Such behaviour was bad for one’s health, brought shame upon one’s family and bordered on the criminal. A man with such habits could be killed if caught red-handed in adultery, or held captive until compensation was paid, or prosecuted.
This attitude encouraged a depersonalisation of women. Democritus talked about the brevity of the pleasure to be derived from food, drink and sex. Antisthenes, a founder of the cynic school of philosophy, said that he found wealth and poverty in his soul, not in material things, and admitted that whenever he felt like sex with a woman it was just a matter of satisfying himself as easily and as quickly as he could, with whomever chance put his way. The result was that he did not feel that he had, as it were, sold his soul to the devil. Aphrodite, the goddess of sex, cheered on all sexual behaviour. One wonders what would have happened if the classicist had been found slobbering wet kisses all over a comely youth. Given King’s College’s reputation, it might have been a matter for drinks all round rather than resignation.
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