The real life of the Greek gods. when antiquity comes to the rescue of love

Will 2024 sound the death knell for couples, love and lust? We can no longer count on articles, essays, and other podcasts to challenge (or try to save, it depends) the classic model of romantic relationships. According to a recent Ifop study, 43% of 15- to 24-year-olds have not had sex in 2022. In 2002, they were just 25%… Climate anxiety, asexuality, Netflix, and others are contributing to the obsolescence of union and union directives. a generation rejected by young people who no longer see sex as a relationship of power and constraint, most often at the expense of a female partner.

The ancients, and especially their divine pantheon, offer countless examples to fuel the arguments of the couple’s killers. In an episode of an excellent animated series 50 Shades of Greek By Designer Jules, doesn’t the goddess Hera tease herself “as the most precious in Greco-Latin mythology?” In the ancient era, the status of a woman was really not so enviable. From slaves to citizens, thus even goddesses and the most powerful of them all, they had to submit to a yoke that left them little freedom. But painting them as eternal victims would be a hasty task. What if their examples had something to say to disillusioned generations and our exhausted couples?

The perspective of women in mythology

The said Hera has shown more than once that she knows how to rebuke Zeus, this fickle husband, whose list of infidelities needs no longer to be compiled. We think of the extraordinary strategy of seduction described by Homer Iliad. Hera wants to help the Greeks against the Trojans, despite Zeus’s ban on his divine subjects intervening in the conflict. In a scene of searing sensuality where the poet invites us into the goddess’ bedroom, she uses her charms to seduce and distract her bitter husband. Objectification of women. Male veil – will say the sad censor, insisting that Homer, before being a poet, is first of all a man, while his identity remains a mystery. They forget that odyssey, Homer showed Ulysses naked and dirty, washing under the lustful eyes of Princess Nausicaa. After all, as professor and author Jennifer Tamas says, who refuses to see some of the heroines of classic literature as “submissive prey,” “great writers have always invited us to read texts from a female perspective.”

At a time when the emperor Augustus, in order to restore what was considered a deficient morality, enacted laws to condemn adultery and encourage fidelity and procreation, Ovid celebrated the games of seduction. In the art of loving Treated in the form of an erotic manual, this genius poet commands his readers, and his readers, who rarely meet for the time, to enjoy and “have fun”, to get rid of the shackles. But behind this praise of free love, he reminds that the goal of any meeting is to make it “lasting love”. It’s only in the art of loving As the anthropologist Julia Sissa notes, “the stability of the fixed couple, where seduction, wonder, and erotic variety nevertheless reign, remains compatible, even complementary, with a license for a certain freedom.” “The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books,” lamented Mallarmé. So let’s (re)read Homer, Sappho, Ovid and others and talk about it again, quick.