Today’s religious folk may be gearing up for the pious festive season, but it seems the ancient world just keeps on getting filthier: alongside gay Graeco-Roman pornography and rude Roman graffiti, one Athens museum has decided to celebrate all things raunchy in Ancient Greece.
Starting today and ending on the 5th April next year, “Eros: From Hesiod’s Theogony to Late Antiquity” at the Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art will treat visitors to a cornucopia of ancient smut, from orgies and prostitution, to paedophilia and even beastiality. And while it may seem at loggerheads with today’s relatively constrained society, museum director Prof Nicholas Stampolidis argues most visitors will have seen it all before.
“In ancient Greece, one could see a sexual scene on a public or a private building’s crest… people were not prudes,” says Prof Stampolidis. “Today everything can be seen in magazines or on the internet, and despite this freedom there is a huge hypocrisy; an inexplicable puritanism.”
The exhibition’s 280 artefacts, drawn from all over Europe, include everyday goods like vases, statues and plates. There’s even a replica prostitute’s kiok, complete with raunchy advertising. The show details perceptions of Eros, god of beauty, love and sex – from his 8th century BC importance to his demise as a companion of Venus during the Roman era.
Sex was very much a part of religion in Ancient Greece, with cults based around the idea of divine prostitution. Another concept at odds with today’s values is pederastic love, when a young boy (the eromenos) aged 12-17 would be taught the sexual ropes, so to speak, by an older, more experienced male adult (the erastes). Homosexality was viewed with ambiguity in the empire: it has even been suggested Alexander the Great held a long-running love affair with friend and general Hephaestion.
Famous relationships that changed the world will also be explored by the exhibition, including the affair between Antony and Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt whose tomb is currently being searched for in northern Egypt (watch the video here). Also featured is the fatal attraction between Athenian tyrant Hipparchus and young boy Harmodius.
Kids under 16 will be offered a warning, but no-one will be barred from viewing the show’s controversial contents. And Stampolidis feels it can teach modern society a thing or two about its attitudes towards carnal desires. “People will draw their conclusions on humans and Eros and see how this concept was handled in ancient times and how it’s being commercialised today.
“I don’t see why children should learn about love only from magazines, from friends and not through art.”