A Natural History of Love (5 page)

One thing we know for sure is that in our distant past there were fewer people. A million years ago, the entire worldwide human population was about 500,000, smaller than the cities of Oslo or Nairobi. Incest was essential then for the species to survive. Infant mortality was high. But as tribes grew in number, so did the possibilities for genetic mixing. And for romance. Desirable women were swapped to form political alliances. As Reay Tannahill reminds us in
Sex in History
, “ ‘love at first sight’ is possible only between strangers.” The Bible often refers to (and condones) incestuous marriages; in the days of the Old Testament, relatives were encouraged to marry. By the time of the Egyptians, marrying out of the family was normal, but it was also common for brother and sister to marry if it seemed convenient. This doesn’t mean that they consummated the union, or were faithful to each other, bearing each other’s children. Among the Egyptians, incest was a practical way to keep real estate in the family, since women could inherit property. It was a custom based on economics, not familiarity. Even so, one hears of brother and sister marrying, not parent and child. A family is like a city-state in which everyone has an important role to play, depending on their relationship with one another. Here is the tangle of role reversals that would be produced by a father-daughter marriage:

A resulting son would be a half-brother of his mother, his grand-mother’s stepson, his mother’s brother’s half-brother, and not only his father’s child but his grandson as well! Note the problems of identity and exercise of authority: should he act toward his mother as a son or as a half-brother; should the uncle be treated as an uncle or as a half-brother? … if a brother and sister were to marry and then divorce, could they readily revert to their original relationship?

Not only would the integrity of the family be impossible to maintain, daily life would be plain confusing. In any case, marriage was useful for forging kinship bonds and establishing individuals’ roles in society. Incest kept love on a tight leash, but the family in control.

A LONG DESIRE

At first glance, the ancient Egyptians seem exotic, glaringly different from us, and in some ways they were. But not when it comes to loving. Our attitudes about love are as old as the pyramids. The Egyptians were sentimental and romantic about love. Their word for love meant something like “a long desire.” Relying on a rich array of metaphors, their love poems are, even if sometimes sappy, free of guilt, self-abasement, or that curious combination of love/hate we see so often today. We don’t have Egyptian writings about homosexual love per se, but
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
includes a passage in which the deceased swears that he hasn’t had sex with a boy. Homosexuality must have been commonplace, the seduction of boys a frequent temptation, or it wouldn’t have been forbidden. We do find fetishism, masochism, and other fringe elements, plus a practical concern with contraception, for which women used a pessary of elephant and crocodile dung. Love is sometimes thought of as a sweet trap, sometimes as a sickness one craves. But no god or goddess steers the course of lovers, foiling their efforts, tempting their faith. Though they feel swept away by love’s power, they blame no one. Poetry records the heartbeat of a people, and thanks to the Egyptian poets we know that love thrived in ancient days, a familiar, modern sort of love, which had little to do with the hard currency of marriage. They felt the same sweet calamities that lovers do today.

*
Muscle
comes from the Latin
musculus
or “little mouse.”

*
We get our word
paper
from the Greek
papyros
, the word given to a material used by the Egyptians for writing and wrapping. To make papyrus, the Egyptians flattened and crisscrossed strips of pith from the long stalks of a sedge,
Cyperus papyrus
, which grew tall in the Nile Delta. This wasn’t true paper, which requires a grinding and mashing process that turns fibers into a soupy mixture that is then spread across a screen to drain and dry. The latter process is said to have been invented by a Chinese eunuch in A.D. 105 and spread slowly to Europe, entering Spain around A.D. 1200.

*
At that level of high-voltage emotion, there’s a thin line between sweet fanaticism and acute psychosis. Twist the love just a little, keeping the same intensity, and you are in a dangerous fixation that leads to violence.

GREECE

THE WORLD OF THE CITIZEN KING

Thinking about the late sixties, I remember the anxious thrill of trying to reinvent society. A generation defined by love-ins, hallucinogenic drugs, and the Vietnam War, we lived in a state of daily commotion. Cynicism and idealism went hand in hand in us. Inherited truths no longer fit; we felt it was both our privilege and our duty to reshape them. The roller coaster we rode sometimes took wild curves and left the tracks. Fun meant outlandish public pranks. Rock and roll besotted us with high-decibel slogans. “The War” loomed over everything and everyone. We championed integration. We protested. We were arrested. We enlisted. We were drafted. We evaded or fled. We staged sit-ins. We practiced free love. We sampled drugs and learned about extremes of consciousness. Like every generation, we lived with moral dilemmas. On campus, we discussed politics before, after, and even during classes, whose curricula we rewrote.

That atmosphere of upheaval, social change, and hope comes to mind when I picture the city of Athens in the fifth century
B.C
. War and politics led to the radical idea of a bustling democracy, in which citizens could air their views, however novel, and vote their minds in the state assembly. Any citizen over thirty was eligible for public office. The daily intrigues of this vigorous new self-government must have filled the law courts and fueled the gossip mills. Athens was a world of only about 30,000 people, not much larger than my hometown in upstate New York. And yet it produced a band of luminous thinkers and creators whose ideas were the source of western civilization. Most of them would have been friends, crossed paths regularly, or at least known one another on sight. It was a tight, competitive city—the Greeks adored staging contests of body and mind. To be a citizen of Athens meant status, prestige, economic opportunity (only citizens could own real estate), and a sense of nobility (you had to be the child of two Athenian parents—indeed, in the fourth century, it was illegal for Athenians even to marry non-Athenians). Athens revolved around its citizenry, and sanctified their rights. As Pericles proudly explained, in sentiments that would later be adopted almost word for word by colonial America:

Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands of the people, not a minority. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everybody is equal before the law: when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty…. This is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.

Among such ideals, in an intellectual free-for-all, politics must have fed Athens like a tonic. However, it was a stimulant enjoyed only by men. Women were not allowed to be citizens. Politics might be too invigorating for them; it was common knowledge that women were by nature irrational, hysterical, gluttonous, given to drunkenness, and sex-obsessed. They were not thought to be rational or strong-willed enough for so vital a responsibility as self-government. Or for spirited conversation. A wife didn’t dine with her husband, and if he brought home a male visitor, all the womenfolk were expected to retreat to the women’s quarters. Any woman seen at a male gathering—even if she engaged only in talk—was assumed to be a prostitute. It’s not that the men didn’t cherish their women. One often finds women referred to tenderly in Greek literature, and domestic scenes lovingly depicted on vases. Courtroom speeches frequently include a sentimental appeal on behalf of the litigant’s mother, sister, wife, or daughter. Men wouldn’t resort to such ploys if they didn’t think they would work. But a family could only be sure of its bloodline by keeping a strict watch over the wife, whose place was in the dim vault of the home with the other forms of wealth. A purebred Athenian girl had to marry young, be a virgin, and not even have mingled socially with men. Men married late (usually in their thirties), and weren’t required to be chaste. This meant that neither men nor women had equals of the opposite sex to fall in love with. In a typical scenario, a cultured, educated, sexually experienced, politically active middle-aged husband would return home to his sheltered, illiterate sixteen-year-old wife. Teenage girls were not visible on the streets for men to idealize or fantasize about. Beautiful teenage boys were, though, and they alone provided the erotic siren of youth. Friends often met at gymnasia, where they could watch the young men of Athens exercise naked (with the foreskin tied over the tip of the penis to protect it). Since Athenian women were off-limits, it was common for men to have young male lovers or female courtesans, to whom they turned for companionship, as well as sex, since respectable women were social exiles.

Married couples sometimes fell in love; but love had nothing to do with marriage, which was intended to produce children. According to Menander, the marriage formula went like this: “I give you this woman (my daughter) for the ploughing of legitimate children.” Women were associated with agriculture, fields to be sown and reaped. Men stood for reason and culture; women for the wild forces of nature men were to tame.

THE WOMAN’S WORLD

Above the fireplace in my living room hangs a large etching entitled “Diana’s Chase.” Leaping and dodging, with all body parts swinging, the voluptuous goddess and her female followers race nearly naked through the forest, hunting a buck as if it were zest incarnate. Also known as Artemis, this “huntress chaste and fair” exuded sensuality and energy. She rejoiced in nature at its most savage and free. As “Mistress of the Beasts,” she was the official protectress of wild animals, and she moved among them with the delicate brawn of the wind and the ethereal dynamism of the sun. A high point of the Greek wedding ceremony came when the girl renounced her patron goddess, Artemis, and swore fealty to Demeter, goddess of agriculture and married women. Demeter (literally “earth mother”) somehow managed to be both nonerotic and fecund. The perfect wife was wilderness tamed. She was the fugitive land cleared and turned to production. All of a man’s social, intellectual, cultural, and romantic needs were to be filled elsewhere.

Women in ancient Greece celebrated two special holidays. Athenian matrons held a yearly Thesmophoria, whose exultations excluded both women of lower class and any men, and required a period of sexual abstinence. As a counterculture holy day, courtesans, prostitutes, and their lovers celebrated the openly licentious festival of Adonia, honoring Aphrodite’s lover Adonis. This was more of a flesh-and-blood carnival, which included the symbolic planting of grains in pots on the rooftops. Under the blinding Mediterranean sun, the plants would sprout fast, spurting color, and just as quickly wither. The seeding of this small thatch of earth was quick and exciting, but it was not expected to be fruitful. Perhaps they quoted these lines from Mimnermus’ poetry:

What is life, what is joy without golden Aphrodite?
May I die when these things no longer move me—
hidden love affairs, sweet nothings and bed.

If high-spirited women in Athens who were intellectual, cultured, fun-loving, and proud of it wished to speak in mixed company about things that mattered, they became courtesans. Although their lives were uncertain, and at times degrading, at least these women could enjoy the riches of Athenian culture. They were stylish and witty, versed in art and politics, and, in calling, somewhere between a geisha and a prostitute. Men admired precisely those talents in the courtesans they forbade in their wives. But Athens was full of paradoxes. While debating and championing democracy, citizens frequently owned slaves, with whom they sometimes found pleasure. At a cheaper rate, with less emotional ballyhoo, were streetwalkers, one of whose sandals has survived the millennia. On its sole, studded so that it would brand the dust with each step, is the invitation:
Follow me
.

MEN LOVING MEN

Loving relationships, not merely sexual liaisons, also evolved between older men and teenage boys, a combination of romance and tutelage that was blessed by society and praised in philosophy and art. “The aristocratic ideal,” as historian Charles Beye points out, “was a combination of athletic exercise to create a beautiful body and music and poetry to create a beautiful personality.” There is a section of Aristophanes’
Clouds
that instructs a boy