We often take the publicity of ancient eros for granted, as if it were data “given” for our information. And we often blithely compare these noisy and showy materials with the quite different kinds of data that are available from other societies, such as early modern Italy, nineteenth-century Britain or Papua New Guinea in the 1960s: inquisitorial records, coded diaries, information about secret rites wheedled out of informants by ethnographers. But the very existence of intimate data, the effortful publication of privacies, is antiquity’s most peculiar characteristic, leaving us torn between excessive naiveness and excessive skepticism: “Leagros was so charming that many potters fell in love with him,” “Hadrian/Alexander must have been besotted with Antinous/Hephaistion to react like that after his death,” “Antony fell hopelessly in love with Cleopatra,” “Cleopatra put her political alliance with Antony under the sign of Eros, when she first came to meet him in Cilicia,” “Sappho’s woman-loving songs are just ritualistic,” “Latin love-poetry is formulaic, not sincere.”
The comments Plato ascribes to Pausanias in Symposium concerning Athenian homosexuality really apply to the whole field: “intricate. . . not easy to grasp” (182ad). There are, however, some principles: (a) It does not seem useful to think of different societies simply drawing the private-public boundary at different points along a universal sexual to non-sexual continuum, some cultures buttoned-up, others letting it all hang out. The ancients were not “more open” or “less embarrassed about sex.” They simply organized things differently. (b) Material, including images, needs to be read, meanings decoded, voices placed, registers distinguished, intensities gauged. Then a society’s cultural topography must be mapped, its closets and attics identified, its front rooms and facades. Finally we can try to put the data on the map: what is said/shown to whom about whom, using what voice in what style, how noisily, when and where. Immediately we will notice that contexts make a great deal of difference, i. e. love and sex manifest differently in different cities and at different periods. What’s appropriate in one place on one day of a festival might be quite inappropriate in another place on a different day. What’s appropriate for Archilochos or Martial may be inappropriate for Euripides or Statius. It might be quite scandalous for a woman or a boy to be seen unchaperoned with a man he or she is not related to, while to commission a portrait of yourself to be placed on a herm with a big erection is a very appropriate monument to your honor and dignity.