Preface

Summary

‘Male lions don't desire male lions, because lions don't do philosophy.’

If wonder is the beginning of intellectual enquiry, it is wonder and laughter that has prompted the essays in this book. My opening quotation comes from a late Greek text that sets up a debate on whether it is better to desire boys or to desire women; it's a claim from a wonderful and erotically charged demonstration that male desire for males is the only true choice for a philosopher. The three essays that make up this volume are all concerned with Greek writing from later antiquity about desire, eros. In particular, the erotic narratives of the novel tradition form the main body of the material to be discussed; and the development of a normative discourse about desire provides the questions on which I focus: what the proper nature of desire is, how it is to be written about, how it is to be controlled and patrolled. My overriding concern (thus) is with the interplays between desire's narratives and the normative.

While most of the texts I shall be considering show the wit, verve and outrageousness of the period known as the Second Sophistic, it must not be forgotten that at the same time there is taking place one of the most important transformations in Western cultural attitudes to sexuality and the body, a transformation inevitably associated primarily with the rise of Christianity.