Maggie's Farm

Passion, lust, desire, romantic enchantment are obviously the most powerful human human qualities. Forms of natural intoxication, the older folks say. To paraphrase the apocryphal Washington quote, they can be a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Also, a source of joy and deep contentment.

From Love Sins: The Reality of Love Versus Modern Romanticism:

The classical scholar Bruce Thornton concludes that the ancient Greeks had an “overwhelmingly dark view of sexuality,” adding that “our own Romantic-inspired idealizations of sexuality as a force of personal liberation and self-fulfillment would strike most Greeks as a dangerous folly and delusion.” We can see an instance of their fears in the well-known story of Helen, a daughter of Aphrodite, in which the city of Troy was laid waste as the consequence of illicit sexual passion. Very sensibly, the pre-Christian Greeks believed that sex needed to be controlled in various social institutions. Rejecting such wisdom, we moderns “continue to cling to shopworn Romanticism that idealizes sexual passion and justifies abandoning the time-honored social controls -- marriage and chastity, guilt and shame -- that once helped to prevent sexual excesses from destroying American society,” in Thornton’s verdict.