1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "A Problem in Greek Ethics," John Addington Symonds explores the complexities of pederastic relationships in ancient Greece, scrutinizing the moral and social frameworks that governed them. Employing a rich, eloquent literary style characterized by historical rigor and philosophical inquiry, Symonds delves into the ethical nuances that challenge contemporary understandings of love and mentorship. The book situates itself within the broader context of 19th-century Victorian debates on sexuality, seeking to reassess the values imposed by modern morality upon ancient practices. Symonds, a noted figure of the late Victorian period and an ardent advocate for homosexuality, was profoundly influenced by his own experiences and intellectual milieu. His works not only championed the appreciation of classical literature and art but also sought to dismantle the rigid moral codes of his time, making "A Problem in Greek Ethics" a crucial text in the evolution of queer theory. His personal conflicts around sexuality and a cultural backdrop rife with repression motivated his inquiry into a world where alternative sexualities were more readily accepted. This book is highly recommended for scholars of classical studies, philosophy, and LGBTQ+ history, as well as for any reader interested in the intersections of ethics and sexuality. Symonds' insightful treatment encourages a respectful engagement with the past, inviting a reexamination of our own ethical frameworks. A captivating read that illuminates the richness and complexity of human desire across time. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Ähnliche
A Problem in Greek Ethics
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the heart of John Addington Symonds’s A Problem in Greek Ethics lies a searching inquiry into how classical Greece reconciled intense male–male attachments with its ideals of virtue, citizenship, and beauty, balancing desire and discipline, custom and law, poetry and philosophy, and pressing the reader to consider what follows when the living practices of a celebrated culture meet the moral expectations of later ages, and how the language, institutions, and ideals of that world shaped the meanings attached to love, honor, and education.
This work is a scholarly essay in cultural and intellectual history, focused on ancient Greek society and written by the English writer and critic John Addington Symonds. Composed in the 1870s and privately printed in the 1880s, it emerged in a Victorian context that made open publication difficult. Symonds approaches his subject as a classicist and humanist, framing the study as an examination of ethics rather than a sensational topic. The setting is not a single narrative locale but the broad terrain of Greek literature, philosophy, and custom, considered across periods and city-states to illuminate how a famous civilization theorized and regulated same-sex love.
Readers encounter a rigorously documented, reflective monograph that moves between analysis of texts and synthesis of cultural patterns. The voice is measured and lucid, informed by deep reading and an effort to keep historical empathy in view. Rather than offering anecdote or polemic, Symonds crafts a sustained argument through close attention to evidence, noting continuities and contrasts within Greek life. The mood is inquisitive and sober, inviting contemplation rather than controversy. The experience is that of a careful guided tour: a scholar points to the salient passages, clarifies terms, and asks the reader to notice how ideals and practices intersect without collapsing their differences.
Symonds surveys philosophers, historians, and poets, tracing how concepts of love, friendship, pedagogy, and civic duty are articulated and constrained in diverse sources. He reads canonical authors alongside social norms and legal frameworks, charting the tension between ethical aspiration and lived custom. Attentive to terminology and the evolution of ideas, he considers how forms of attachment were idealized, debated, or criticized within Greek discourse. The essay’s method is synthetic and comparative, organizing materials to show patterns rather than to reduce them to a single thesis. Through this apparatus, Symonds aims to describe a phenomenon as the Greeks themselves presented it, within their own categories.
Key themes include the interplay of eros and education, the responsibilities of citizenship, the boundaries of public reputation and private affection, and the ethical weight borne by beauty and self-mastery. Symonds treats these as historically specific problems, not timeless abstractions, foregrounding how institutions and ideals shape intimate life. He also highlights the dynamic between philosophical ideals and social practice, showing how norms could be both sustaining and restrictive. Throughout, the essay tests how ethics emerges from shared customs and competing values, prompting readers to consider what counts as virtue when love is entangled with mentorship, artistic aspiration, honor, and the demands of the polis.
For contemporary readers, the essay’s value lies in its historically grounded perspective and its early articulation of questions that continue to resonate in studies of sexuality, identity, and cultural reception. Without importing modern labels uncritically, Symonds demonstrates how categories are made, contested, and transformed over time. The work provides tools for navigating debates about anachronism, translation, and the uses of the past in present arguments. It also models a respectful attentiveness to sources under conditions of censorship and reticence, reminding us that careful scholarship can open space for compassion, complexity, and intellectual honesty even when public discourse is constrained.
Approached as a study in historical ethics, A Problem in Greek Ethics offers an illuminating, disciplined, and humane account of how a storied civilization wrestled with the relationship between love and virtue. Symonds neither romanticizes nor condemns; he documents, compares, and weighs, trusting readers to draw thoughtful conclusions. The result is a work that rewards close attention to its arguments and contexts, and that encourages dialogue between past and present without forcing equivalences. Read for its clarity of method, its sensitivity to language and evidence, and its steady tone, it remains a compelling invitation to think critically about desire, dignity, and the moral imagination.
Synopsis
A Problem in Greek Ethics is a historical study in which John Addington Symonds surveys the forms, vocabulary, and ethical valuations of male-male love in ancient Greece. Drawing on literary, legal, and philosophical sources, he describes how Greek societies recognized and regulated relationships between an older lover and a younger beloved, and how these relationships intersected with education, citizenship, and ideals of virtue. The essay aims to map the phenomenon across periods and regions rather than to judge it by modern standards. Symonds organizes his discussion chronologically and thematically, tracing continuities and distinctions from myth and epic to law courts and philosophical schools.
Symonds begins by examining mythic and early epic testimony to establish a baseline. Homeric poems provide little explicit endorsement of erotic relations between males, emphasizing comradeship instead, though later interpretations of Achilles and Patroclus influenced subsequent attitudes. Myths such as Zeus and Ganymede supply symbolic precedents that Greek authors later cited. From this starting point, Symonds distinguishes between heroic friendship and institutionalized practices that emerge more clearly in historical times. He highlights how the Greek language developed specific terms for roles within such bonds, preparing the ground for a detailed analysis of how custom, not merely sentiment, structured these relationships.
Turning to Dorian and especially Cretan and Spartan customs, Symonds outlines forms of mentorship that were embedded in education and civic discipline. In Crete, he notes an abduction rite that formalized the tie between an older guide and a youth, integrating it with initiation, gift exchange, and public oversight. Spartan practice linked such bonds to training in courage and self-control, subject to communal scrutiny. Across these Dorian contexts, Symonds stresses the distinction, present in ancient sources, between a noble, pedagogic ideal and purely sensual indulgence. Public regulation, he argues, aimed to protect minors, honor, and the collective interest of the city.
In Athens, Symonds describes a more urban and literary environment where gymnasia, symposia, and rhetoric shaped social expression of these bonds. He details the erastes-eromenos roles, the emphasis on age and status boundaries, and the codes of modesty, reciprocity, and eventual transition out of youth. Legal materials, especially speeches preserved from the law courts, reveal both acceptance and limits. Athenian statutes imposed disabilities on men who had sold sexual favors, distinguishing citizen dignity from commercial sex. Public inscriptions and court cases illustrate how consent, patronage, and reputation were debated, showing a civic ethic that balanced admiration of beauty with concerns for decorum and citizenship.
Literary evidence forms a major strand of Symonds’s account. He reviews lyric poets such as Theognis, Solon, Anacreon, and Ibycus, noting conventions of praise for youthful beauty, pledges of fidelity, and admonitions against transgression. Pindar and epigrams furnish additional examples of how athletic culture and festival contexts shaped ideals of desire and honor. Symonds analyzes vocabulary for love and friendship, differentiating philia, eros, and paideia to show how Greeks conceptualized affection, desire, and instruction. He observes that poetry often frames these relations as morally formative and aesthetically elevating, while comic poets, by contrast, lampoon excess, effeminacy, and hypocrisy, registering social anxieties and boundaries.
Philosophical texts supply the ethical architecture Symonds investigates. In Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium, he highlights a hierarchy of loves, from base appetite to a disciplined ascent toward beauty and virtue, using relationships as vehicles for moral education. Xenophon offers a more practical, restrained view, and Aristotle’s analyses of friendship help classify bonds by utility, pleasure, and goodness. Symonds notes tensions within this tradition, including cautions in later dialogues and laws against corruption of youths. The philosophical record, he concludes, articulated an ideal that sought to sublimate desire through training and reason, while still acknowledging civic responsibilities and the risk of vice.
Symonds next situates the phenomenon in political and military life. He discusses the potential of intimate bonds to strengthen solidarity, citing, among other examples, the Sacred Band of Thebes as emblematic of disciplined companionship in arms. Civic institutions—gymnasia, festivals, and contests—served as arenas where ideals of beauty, courage, and mentorship were displayed and judged. Oratory illuminates public debate: texts such as Aeschines against Timarchus reveal how accusations surrounding past conduct affected political credibility and citizenship rights. These materials show a complex negotiation between private affection and public virtue, where honor, service, and the stability of the polis shaped ethical evaluation.
Addressing variation over time, Symonds outlines developments in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, including increased professionalization of sex and shifting norms satirized by comedians and moralists. He notes regional differences and the growing prominence of anxieties about luxury and effeminacy. Legal and social distinctions between citizen youths and slaves or professionals remained significant markers of status and morality. With the rise of new religious and philosophical currents, older practices were reinterpreted or condemned. Symonds treats these changes as part of a broader transformation in ethics, showing how the Greek framework of honor, education, and civic purpose encountered alternative moral systems.
Symonds concludes that Greek love was not a single practice but a spectrum governed by custom, law, and philosophical reflection. Its nobler formulations linked desire to education, courage, and civic responsibility; its abuses drew censure through satire and statute. By assembling evidence across genres and periods, he emphasizes historical specificity and cautions against projecting modern categories backward. The essay’s central message is descriptive: to clarify how Greek societies conceptualized and managed these bonds as an ethical problem. In doing so, it offers a reference map for understanding Hellenic ideals of beauty and virtue and their influence on later moral thought.
Historical Context
A Problem in Greek Ethics takes as its setting the civic world of archaic and classical Greece, roughly the seventh to fourth centuries BCE, with attention to Athens, Sparta, and Thebes. Public life unfolded in gymnasia, symposia, and assemblies where male education, citizenship, and military service intertwined. The polis framed sexuality through law and custom, especially around mentorship of youths (ephebes) and ideals of bodily beauty and virtue (kalokagathia). Symonds reconstructs this milieu from inscriptions, oratory, philosophy, and later testimonia. By situating desire within institutions of training, festival, and warfare, the essay analyzes how Greek ethical norms governed relationships, status, and honor rather than private psychology alone.
Solon’s reforms at Athens (traditionally dated c. 594 BCE) organized citizenship and set limits on sexual commerce, including restrictions on male prostitution and public office. Later Athenian practice examined candidates (dokimasia) for dishonorable conduct. The landmark trial Against Timarchus (346 BCE), in which Aeschines prosecuted a citizen for past prostitution, reveals penalities for those judged to have sold their bodies: loss of civic rights and public speech. Symonds mines these legal episodes to show how the Greeks differentiated acceptable pedagogic eros from mercenary sex, using statutory language and court rhetoric to map the ethical boundaries that defined honor, agency, and civic participation.
Military institutions shaped Greek attitudes to male bonds. The Sacred Band of Thebes, an elite corps of 300 paired lovers formed in the fourth century BCE (ascribed to Gorgidas or Pelopidas), won decisive victories at Tegyra (c. 375 BCE) and Leuctra (371 BCE) over Sparta, and perished at Chaeronea (338 BCE) facing Philip II and Alexander. Spartan agoge fostered mentorship and discipline, though sources dispute its erotic dimensions. Symonds connects these events to argue that civic valor and intimate companionship could be mutually reinforcing. He reads battlefield commemoration—such as the Lion of Chaeronea burial mound—as evidence of a public ethic honoring steadfast male attachments.
Athletic and festival culture provided sanctioned spaces for courtship and display. The Olympic Games, traditionally dated from 776 BCE, and local competitions centered on nude athletics in gymnasia and palaistrai, where citizens socialized, trained, and taught. Regulations guarded youth modesty while celebrating beauty as a civic ideal. Symonds treats these venues and their rituals as historical forces shaping codes of approach, gift exchange, and reputation. By mapping the social choreography of festivals and gymnasia, the book links eros to education and citizenship, highlighting how praise poetry, dedications, and crowns functioned as public recognitions of conduct within accepted boundaries.
Roman and imperial shifts recast earlier Greek practices. The debated Lex Scantinia (Republican Rome) targeted sexual offenses involving freeborn males; later imperial attitudes varied. Emperor Hadrian’s relationship with Antinous, drowned in the Nile in 130 CE, prompted the founding of Antinoopolis in Egypt and an empire-wide cult attested by coins and inscriptions. Late antique Christian legislation, including Justinian’s Novels (e.g., Novellae 77 and 141, sixth century), imposed harsher penalties and moralized same-sex acts. Symonds uses these episodes diachronically, contrasting classical civic frameworks with later punitive regimes to argue that ethical judgments arise from historical institutions rather than immutable doctrine.
Nineteenth-century Britain decisively shaped the essay’s production and purpose. The Obscene Publications Act (1857) enabled state suppression of sexual discourse; the Offences Against the Person Act (1861) retained life imprisonment for “buggery,” while the Labouchere Amendment (Section 11, Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885) criminalized all male same-sex acts as “gross indecency.” The Cleveland Street scandal (1889–1890), exposing a male brothel linked to Post Office telegraph boys and touching aristocratic circles, intensified surveillance and public panic. The 1895 prosecutions of Oscar Wilde under Labouchere’s clause, resulting in two years’ hard labor, signaled that classical allusions could not shield discussion of male love. In this climate, Symonds wrote A Problem in Greek Ethics in 1873 but circulated it only in a very small, privately printed edition at the Chiswick Press in 1883, with a limited reissue in 1891; wider publication occurred posthumously in the 1890s. He aligned his historical argument with emergent Continental sexology: Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s writings (1864–1879) on “Urnings,” Karl-Maria Kertbeny’s coinage “homosexual” (1869), Karl Westphal’s 1870 paper on “contrary sexual feeling,” and Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). By marshaling Greek legal cases, military commemorations, and civic institutions as empirical data, Symonds sought to historicize and decriminalize same-sex desire within a British society that conflated it with vice and crime. The essay thus became both a scholarly intervention and a strategic act of risk-managed advocacy, crafted under the shadow of censorship and prosecution.
Victorian Hellenism in education formed another decisive context. The Oxford University Act (1854) and later reforms expanded access while retaining a classical curriculum; the Public Schools Act (1868) regularized elite boarding schools where Greek and Latin dominated. Figures such as Benjamin Jowett at Balliol popularized Plato through teaching and translation in the 1860s–1870s. Athleticism and “muscular” moral training elevated the gymnasium as a modern civic ideal. Symonds, educated within this system, mobilized its prestige to reframe Greek love as ethical pedagogy rather than pathology. The book exploits the authority of classical scholarship to contest contemporary moral panics using the very canon the elite revered.
By reconstructing Greek civic, legal, and military contexts that honored regulated male attachment, the book implicitly indicts Victorian criminalization and censorship. It exposes how law polices bodies and speech, how education sanctifies some desires while stigmatizing others, and how public institutions manufacture moral categories. Symonds’s historicizing method challenges class-bound hypocrisy—public schools praised Hellenic virtue yet denounced modern counterparts—and critiques punitive legislation that severed desire from citizenship. The argument functions as political advocacy under scholarly cover: if Athens could integrate eros within mentorship, service, and honor, modern Britain’s blanket repression appears historically contingent, socially unjust, and ripe for reform.
