This post covers perhaps the first half of Chapter 1. (Plus a tiny bit of the front matter that I overlooked previously.) I debated over how to break up the content of this book. There are only three chapters, so doing a whole chapter in each blog post would be far too much, given the level of detail I"m interested in. But within each chapter there are a number of much shorter titled sections, which are shorter than it makes sense to cover separately. So I figure I'll break the coverage in what feel like natural places (or when I need a break). I'm on vacation this week, so I may get a fair amount done simply because I have time and I want to immerse myself in this book.
I'm finding Boehringer's approach deightful in its depth of analysis and in cutting through the layers of more recent scholarship to ask, "what does the text/material actually say to us?" For example, even if you view Alcman's partheneia poems as conventional, ritual expressions of civic performance, it still remains that they present the idea of female voices expressing the experience of erotic desire for a female object in a context that sees this as a normal, accepted part of society. And that, perhaps, says more than a poem that was clearly a depiction of an individual, personal experience of desire could ever say about the place of female homosexual desire in Archaic Greece.
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