Roberto Calasso on Greek love

For various reasons, I suspect that most of my fellow BookMen don't plan to read the book we'll be discussing tomorrow night, Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. So I'm going to take the liberty of quoting one of the most interesting passages (Chapter III, pp. 70-71) from that work:

"With the heroes, man takes his first step beyond the necessary: into the realm of risk, defiance, shrewdness, deceit, art. And with the heroes a new love is disclosed. The woman helps the hero to slay monsters and capture talismans. A shining initiator into religious mystagogue, she has a splendor that ranges from the glimmering radiance of Ariadne to the dazzle of Medea. But the heroes also ushered in a new kind of love: that between man and man. (My emphasis.) Heracles and Iolaus, Theseus and Peirithous, Achilles and Patroclus, Orestes and Pylades--all enjoyed what Aeschylus calls 'the sacred communion of thighs', a communion Achilles chided Patroclus for having forgotten merely because he was dead.

"The love of one man for another appears with the heroes and immediately reaches its perfect expression. Only the heroes--and precisely because they were heroes--could have overcome what for the Greeks had been an insurmountable obstacle to such a love: the rigid distinction between separate roles, the obstinate asymmetry between erastes and eromenos, lover and beloved, which had condemned love relationships to being painfully short and stifled by the strictest rules. The cruelest of these rules was that, while the lover was granted his swift and predatory pleasure, the beloved was not to enjoy any sexual pleasure at all but was to submit himself to the other only reluctantly, in something the way nineteenth-century wives were encouraged to submit to their husbands. And the lover could not look into the eyes of his beloved as he ravished him, so as to avoid embarrassment.

"The heroes swept all these rules away. Their relationships were long-lasting--only death could end them--and their love didn't fade away merely because the beloved grew hairs on his legs or because his skin, hardened by a life of adventure, lost its youthful smoothness. Thus the heroes achieved the most yearned-for of states, in which the distinction between lover and beloved begins to blur. Between Orestes and Pylades, 'it would have been difficult to say which of the two was the lover, since the lover's tenderness found its reflection in the other's face as in a mirror.' In the same way, these words from the Pseudo-Lucian hold up a late mirror to what was the most constant erotic wish of Greek men, and the most vain."