Peter Green writes:

Despite all his exaggerations, Davidson has got one crucial point absolutely right. When emphasising, with justice, the importance of starry-eyed infatuation, what he characteristically describes as ‘homobesottedness’, as opposed to the sexually reductive violence of ‘sodomania’, he remarks, of eros and related terms, that ‘they sound as if they are all about sex, sex, sex, and we have to make a real effort to remember that they are in fact all about love, love, love.’ If his book has a central thesis, this is surely it, and a very welcome one too. Dover’s work had a prurient (and typically straight) obsession with homosexual intercourse: what did these people do? Davidson, by contrast, wants to look at same-sex relationships in their full emotional context: love-struck dottiness, long-term affection, social integration, all the elements that get taken for granted in the courtship and varied passions of men and women.

(LRB 8 May 2008)

James Davidson, described by Andrew Roberts as ‘the best thing to happen to ancient history for decades’, conducts a radical reappraisal of the meaning of homosexuality in Greek culture. Drawing on literature, court records and recent archaeology, he concludes that much of what we know about Greek sexuality is simply wrong, a result of modern hang-ups rather than of sound scholarship. Davidson’s own scholarship is impressive, but worn lightly, and matched with an easy tone that makes The Greeks and Greek Love a lively, and often very funny, read.

Weidenfeld | hardback 634 pp. |ISBN: 9780297819974