These are some of the more important sources mentioned in the text -- as this part of the site grows, so will the list.

In addition, I have a list on amazon.com which is somewhat longer.

These books are, on the whole, inexpensive, and you should be able to find them all in a public library.

Gilgamesh. A New Rendering in English by David Ferry

Lysis, Phaedrus, and Symposium / Plato on Homosexuality

This is a great book and it's very cheap. What the editor has done is take Jowett's standard 19th-century translation and correct the mistranslations and bowdlerized passages about homosex. Reading what Plato actually had to say about same sex love is eye-opening -- and very beautiful too.

Xenophon The Persian Expedition (tr by Rex Warner)

If you've never read Xenophon, this is your best introduction. The book's a real page-turner, and though the references to homosex are relatively few compared to the next book on our list, this book immerses you in the world of the ancient Greeks in a way that few others can. And like the Plato, it's inexpensive.

Xenophon A History of My Times

Though a little bit harder going than "The Persian Expedition," the reader's reward is reference after reference to same-sex love affairs among the Spartans and others. If you enjoyed "The Persian Expedition," try "A History of My Times" next.

Plutarch's Lives

An indispensable work. This is a series of biographies by a Greek-born author writing for a Roman audience ca. 100 AD, and references to male-male love affairs are scattered throughout. They're all good, but I recommend the entries on Lycurgus, Pelopidas, Epaminondas, Alexander -- just for a start.

On Sparta

Don't want to read all of Plutarch's lives?

This little volume, a Pelican classic edited by Richard J A Talbert, used to be called "Plutarch on Sparta."

That one is apparently out of print, but you can find it very cheaply on amazon.

Both "On Sparta" and "Plutarch on Sparta" include not only the standard Plutarch's Lives of Lycurgus, Agis, and Cleomenes, but also Xenophon's Spartan Society -- a brief essay which you won't want to miss.

In addition, there's Plutarch's Sayings of the Spartans -- also in both volumes.

The newer volume includes the Life of Agesilaus.

But the day I Iooked, "Plutarch on Sparta" was being offered used for $3.36.

You can't beat that.

Anyways, I discuss this book in the 300 message thread.

And I think it's a great book to own.

The Oxford Classical Dictionary

Please note: This book is expensive. Although the article on homosexuality is a little stiff, related articles on everything from the agoge to athletics are terrific. Also: this URL takes you to the 1996 (3rd) edition, which is the one I use. There's a 2001 edition which I haven't seen, and a CD ROM as well. Those are a lot more expensive -- so you need to find out if they've been revised.

The Spartans (Osprey Military Elite Series, 66)

Osprey Military, a UK publisher, has three different series ("Elite," "Men-at-Arms," and "Warrior") of short, illustrated books about ancient warriors with titles like The Spartan Army, Hoplite, Germanic Warriors, Rome's Enemies: Celts and Britons, etc. Once in awhile the text is slightly homophobic -- that's true of "The Ancient Greeks" -- but most of the time it's right on the money -- that's true of the Spartans, the Celts, and so forth.

The books usually have 12 original artist's illustrations in full color, as well as about 40 photos of museum pieces and archaelogical sites. The illustrations by Angus McBride are particularly good.

These books are meant for hard-core military history enthusiasts only -- don't buy them unless you're really into strategy and tactics. But though there may only be one or two references to homoeroticism in any given book, I think the series editors have on the whole done a good and honest job of trying to give an accurate picture of what warrior life was like.

The Nature of Alexander by Mary Renault.

A truly beautiful evocation of a great man by a great writer.

The Western Way of War by Victor Davis Hanson. Subtitled "Infantry Battle in Classical Greece," this modern classic by National Review contributor Hanson changed our understanding of hoplite tactics and their impact on subsequent Western history.

Combat Sports in the Ancient World: Competition, Violence, and Culture by Michael P. Poliakoff. Another classic. Poliakoff provides a remarkably thorough history of ancient combat sports -- wrestling, boxing, and pancration -- all of which were practiced nude, with a number of compelling accounts of hard-fought contests written by ancient writers.

Don't expect Poliakoff to talk about homosex however; like most jocks of his era, he acts as though it didn't and doesn't exist among men into sports.

Still, Poliakoff is the best source on the guilds and sacred athletes of the Greco-Roman world.

Same-sex Unions in Premodern Europe by John Boswell. An exceptionally erudite exploration of the first thousand years of Christianity in Europe, with a great and not-to-be-missed summary of Greco-Roman attitudes.

Boswell was the openly gay head of the history department at Yale, and a gay Catholic, who, sadly, died of AIDS shortly after publishing this book.

He had a depth of vision and humanity which is sorely missed.

Again, his book is Same-sex Unions in Premodern Europe

Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography, by John Ibson.

This is another work of great scholarship.

Ibson, who's chair of the Department of American Studies at Cal State, Fullerton, has, in this book, collected a series of photographs of American men in duos or larger groups from the period 1850 to 1950, and very thoughtfully analyzed the changes in male body language as American society went through the process which we call heterosexualization.

And while Ibson doesn't use that word, the process he describes and pictorially documents is exactly that:

a change from a way of life which was characterized by single-gender / homosocial spaces and environments, to one in which mixed gender -- heterosexualized -- environments are common and the culturally-enforced norm.

This change was accompanied by the medicalization of "homosexuality," a term which was coined in 1869.

Speaking of this change, and the nineteenth century, Ibson quotes the French philosopher Michel Focault:

...as long as friendship [between men] was something important, was socially accepted, nobody realized men had sex together. The disappearance of friendship [and the elevation of marriage] as a social relation and the declaration of homosexuality as a social/political/medical problem are the same process.

And that's a key statement, which I would slightly re-phrase and put thus: "The disappearance of male-male friendship and the elevation of heterosexual marriage as a social relation and the declaration of homosexuality as a social/political/medical problem are the same process."

This is a scholarly book, it's heavily footnoted, and it's not always easy going.

But it's an important book for any Man who Loves Men to read and understand.

Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, by Werner Jaeger.

This is a work of tremendous scholarship, and I highly recommend it.

Indeed, there are no superlatives I can use, which would be adequate to this book.

There are many books about aspects of Greek culture.

And there are many books which attempt to sum up Greek culture.

And then there's Werner Jaeger's Paideia -- which has no equal.

Paideia, by the way, is pronounced Pie-day-a -- short "a" -- and the word originally meant child-rearing;

but it eventually came to have the highest meaning of "Culture" the Greeks and the Greek language possessed.

For, as you'll see, the Greeks came to believe that Paideia -- the molding, or, we might say, making, of the Man through education in its broadest sense -- was the highest act of their civilization.

And Jaeger's exposition of Paideia -- is brilliant.

Volume I, which is easy to find used and relatively cheap, will take you from Homer through Plato.

And it's a wonderful journey.

Here's Jaeger in his own words from the Introduction:

The unique position of Hellenism in the history of education depends on the ... supreme instinct to regard every part as subordinate and relative to an ideal whole -- for the Greeks carried that point of view into life as well as art -- and also on their philosophical sense of the universal, their perception of the profoundest laws of human nature, and of the standards based on them which govern the spiritual life of the individual and the structure of society. For (as was realized by Heraclitus, with his keen insight into the nature of the mind) the universal, the logos, is that which is common to all minds, as law is to all citizens in the state. In approaching the problem of education, the Greeks relied wholly on this clear realization of the natural principles governing human life, and the immanent law by which man exercises his physical and intellectual powers.

To use that knowledge as a formative force in educatlon, and by it to shape the living man as the potter moulds clay and the sculptor carves stone into preconceived form -- that was a bold creative idea which could have been developed only by that nation of artists and philosophers. The greatest work of art they had to create was Man. They were the first to recognize that education means deliberately moulding human character in accordance with an ideal. 'In hand and foot and mind built foursquare without a flaw' -- these are the words in which a Greek poet of the age of Marathon and Salamis describes the essence of that true virtue which is so hard to acquire.

Only this type of education deserves the name of culture, the type for which Plato uses the physical metaphor of moulding character. The German word Bildung clearly indicates the essence of education in the Greek, the Platonic sense; for it covers the artist's act of plastic formation as well as the guiding pattern present to his imagination, the idea or typos.

Throughout history, whenever this conception reappears, it is always inherited from the Greeks; and it always reappears when man abandons the idea of training the young like animals to perform certain definite external duties, and recollects the true essence of education. But there was a special reason for the fact that the Greeks felt the task of education to be so great and so difficult, and were drawn to it by an impulse of unparalleled strength.

That was due neither to their aesthetic vision nor to their "theoretic" mentality. From our first glimpse of them, we find that Man is the centre of their thought. Their anthropomorphic gods; their concentration on the problem of depicting the human form in sculpture and even in painting; the logical sequence by which their philosophy moved from the problem of the cosmos to the problem of man, in which it culminated with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; their poetry, whose inexhaustible theme from Homer throughout all the succeeding centuries is man, his destiny, and his gods; and finally their state, which cannot be understood unless viewed as the force which shaped man and man's life -- all these are separate rays from one great light. They are the expressions of an anthropocentric attitude to life, which cannot be explained by or derived from anything else, and which pervades everything felt, made, or thought by the Greeks.

Other nations made gods, kings, spirits: the Greeks alone made Men.

~ Jaeger, xxii

The Ideals of Greek Culture -- indeed.

Werner Jaeger's Paideia.

Bill's List on amazon.com

bill