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erate a new kind of freedom. They created the ideological climate for the sex–
ual revolution of the 1960s and beyond. The Greeks knew better, Thornton
argues. They saw sex not as a liberating power but a force with the potential
to generate destruction and disorder, a chaotic energy threatening the foun–
dations of human culture and identity. Indeed, they recognized the central
problem of human identity as the weakness of our cultural and social orders
before the relentless power of the sensual, the instinctive and the irrational.
The Greeks saw sexuality as central to the basic duality of the human
condition-natural passions and drives and appetites that cultural order
attempts to control and subordinate. However, nature and civilization, he
notes, were not diametrically opposed to each other. While the nature of the
untamed forests and mountains threatened constantly to encroach on the cul–
tivated space that humans inhabit, there was also the concept of tamed nature,
nature domesticated, its life-giving energy subordinated to the human mind
and its technologies. The Greeks thought it was not possible to eliminate the
world of wild beasts but it could be tamed and domesticated in order to serve
civilization. Similarly, sexuality needs to be tamed so its potentially destruc–
tive powers, which will always exist, can be redirected to human purposes.
This was accomplished in the institution of marriage and by the sexual fideli–
ty of husband and wife. In Greek thought, the civilized human life is defined
by marriage and the household where legitimate children are born and
reared.
Women are particularly interesting to Greek literature, Thornton argues,
because in them this fundamental human problem, this conflict between
nature's chaos and culture's order, is magnified. The Greeks thought that
women, with their greater emotionalism, their unbridled sexual appetites,
their tendency to surrender to their passions, are closer than the male to the
chaotic forces of nature, to the earth and the world of beasts. They are more
in tune with the forces and cycles of the natural world. To dismiss these atti–
tudes as sexist or misogynist, Thornton writes, is "to purchase a cheap moral
authority at the expense of a deeper understanding of the Greek exploration
of human identity and its defining contradictions." Through the figure of the
goddess Aphrodite, Greek literature fully recognized that the allure of female
sexual beauty subjected men to the power of women. Aphrodite's powers
render absurd the modern feminist interpretation of Greek women as cow–
ering victims of a misogynistic patriarchy. "This tells us very little about
antiquity," Thornton writes, "yet quite a lot about the late twentieth--centu–
ry politics of victimhood and the liberal-democratic assumption that
all
power resides in political rights and institutions." Such a view, he says, ren–
ders meaningless the figures of Pandora, Helen, Clytemnestra, Medea,
Lysistrata--all women whose magnificence depends on a recognition that
men are vulnerable to, and hence fear, the sexual power of women.
