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I love it when my two career paths — ancient historian and BDSM writer — intersect. While “Lovers’ Legends” is not about BDSM, it is from a bookstore specializing in alternative sexuality, so I had high hopes for this collection of Greek stories. However, my expectations and criteria are equally high for anyone claiming to delve into the past, especially the classical Mediterranean world.
This is supposed to be a study of Greek myths or legends that show male-male affections. As a study, specific things need to be done. Sources need to be cited, materials need to be presented and analyzed, and a coherent argument needs to be made. These are things I look for in studies of any subject, historical or not. If the book is for the layperson, it also needs to be well-written so the reader stays interested in the argument and can follow the evidence.
Calimach presents us with nine stories of gods and men/boys and men with other men/boys. He very briefly explains why the dynamics function as they do in a few pages of introduction that collapse different city-states and time periods as well as oversimplifying the issues about same-sex relationships in the ancient world. The stories are OK, but if you don’t know the context, they can be difficult to understand.
The best presented text is his ongoing selections from the Roman writer Lucian throughout the book, which shows a discussion about whether male or female lovers are best. It is not the only such fictional discussion we have from the ancient world, and again Calimach does not provide the context for it. What was Lucian’s goal? Who was his audience? Does he have a clear “winner” in this dialogue? Honestly, I’m puzzled as to why this dialog is broken up into three sections and scattered around the book. I think it would have more naturally demonstrated the discussion in the ancient world if Calimach had placed it within the introduction or immediately after it.
Lack of context is a huge problem in this book. The texts are obviously translations — I’m assuming they are Calimach’s own, though he does not explicitly state this, and I can’t find information about his own academic training to be a classicist if any. What are they translations of? As presented, someone without a background in classics or ancient history might think this is one text, but no, the endnotes show that he has drawn from several sources for each story. I’m not a fan of endnotes; I think it risks giving the uneducated reader the impression that we don’t need to have evidence. There is some analysis in the endnotes, but very little, leaving the reader uninformed about the cultures and men who wrote these stories.
These ancient authors used the folktales involving male-male interactions in unique ways, keeping the core of the stories intact but changing the details with each generation as the needs of their society demanded or their own egos urged. You do not get this sense at all in Calimach’s book; instead, this is a very condensed view that portrays the stories unrealistically. It would be far more honest to show how the stories changed and suggest why they did.
I suspect that this lack of context, missingcitations, and collapsing of periods and authors reflects an agenda that is not to present the ancient world as it was but to present same-sex dynamics as normal. Calimach ignores the reality that the ancient view of homosexual activities varied from city-state to city-state, from period to period, and from author to author. It helps a modern cause not at all to misrepresent its own history, because all that does is make people disbelieve what you have to say when they can point out the flaws in your argument or evidence. I can sadly see a student using Calimach’s work as if it were the actual stories and myself having to tell them to do the paper over again or get an F. As a teacher that possibility really annoys and even angers me.
At the end I can’t say that I’m pleased with “Lovers’ Legends.” While the stories are fun and enticing, as an ancient historian I had too many questions about the layout, the translation, and the presentation of the material. I appreciate the thirst to find people like ourselves in the past, but that is never an excuse to create a misleading picture of our ancestors. |
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