Seán Hewitt, in his Prologue to 300,000 Kisses, talks of Oscar Wilde at his trial for gross indecency having invoked the “Golden Thread” that ran, often suppressed or unacknowledged, through queer history: “an enduring love that could produce some of the greatest works of art his audience knew”. This book, illustrated with bold, colourful drawings, by the artist Luke Edward Hall whose work has long been steeped in classical mythology, is just such an act of uncovering, or recovering, works that illustrate the “messy glory” of complicated, sometimes troublesome, representations of queer love in the ancient world.
Hewitt is good at picking out a number of subtle parallels from the extracts presented, in his own translations, with the aid of Hannah Abigail Clarke who “transcribed and glossed the originals”. One of the most revelatory crosscurrents is his analogy with the ACT UP protests during the Aids pandemic and a couple of emotive extracts from Plutarch, introducing the idea of The Sacred Band: an army of lovers and their beloveds, stronger than any other regiment owing to the notion that “Love is the only Invincible General”. The reader is left the room to draw their own conclusions and connections, too, not least in a passage from Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, where a discussion of the virtues of imperfection can’t but bring to mind Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem Pied Beauty.
Hewitt isn’t always such a hands-off guide; at times his introductions have the air of the schoolmaster — leading into some Suetonius he notes: “This is desire in its most feral form, and is not condoned at all” and, in his Prologue, is quick to alert the sensitive among us that “there is also material not so easily assimilated into modern progressive thinking”. To his credit, Hewitt isn’t just getting excuses in early, or using these caveats to water down potentially salacious, but worthwhile, writing: duly warned we are later given “obscene” epigrams from Martial with both barrels, dripping in the crudely ripe “king-dyke” and “pussy-lovers”; he also takes the time to argue against certain forms of prudishness: of a piece taken from Clement of Alexandria in which a branch growing over a tomb is fashioned into a phallus, with the noblest of intentions, Hewitt writes: “It is, admittedly, quite bizarre; but it doesn’t appear crude to me”.
Less relativism — properly — is shown towards the pervasive instances of misogyny encountered in certain of the passages, intended at the time to make a moral case for why the “Heavenly Love” directed towards clean-living, athletic, boys is of a higher kind than that directed towards lowlier women folk. Hewitt also decides against airbrushing portrayals of same-sex attraction which present it in less than glowing or idealised terms, not least the story of Iphis and Ianthe from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which a “sombre undercurrent” leads to a conflicted Iphis lamenting: “Cows do not love cows; mares do not love mares. Instead,/the ram lusts for the sheep, and the stag pursues the doe.”
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Hewitt’s translations are largely fluid, and their tendency towards a modern, easeful diction is to their benefit — barring the odd tonal misstep, such as the somewhat bathetic “your brother … is a pansy” in a piece of Aristotle, or the rather on-the-nose decision to have Philostratus the Elder accidentally wander into Timothée Chalamet territory: “He will build a city for Abderus, his love,/and call it by his name.” At its best, the book is full of well-judged, illuminating, surprising episodes, such as the story of Hyacinthus and Apollo, again from Ovid, or the rich simile-making that occurs in an extract from Theocritus, where Heracles’s beloved Hylas is lost, “As when a bleating fawn cries in the echoing hills,/and a lion sets out in search of it”.
At the heart of the book is a myth-making and drive towards endurance — a belief that love might persist beyond death, via symbols, memory and the natural world. Flowers and other metamorphosed elements stand in for the longing and desire that is the birthright for anyone who loves, or ever loved, but as Tibullus points out in his Elegies, maybe in the end it’s poetry itself that carries the ultimate, immortal force: “Without poetry,/there would have been no ivory of Pelops’ shoulders.”
