VIEW OF THE LOVE IN THE ANCIENT TIMES

The Pharaohs were well known to be inbred and marry from within their own immediate families. Egyptian records do not tell us a great deal about their sex lives - and when it is mentioned is just as often about homosexual as heterosexual relationships.

We often perceive Egyptian relationships through the prism of the Pharaohs and Gods. The Pharaohs, such as Ramesses, had hundreds of wives, some more important than others. If we take the examples of Nefertiti and Akhenaten; or Ramesses II and Nefertari, they are what we consider 'normal' marriages between the Pharaohs.

Both of these couples are represented in portraits together and the men and women are drawn at the same size- an indicator of shared importance in by those who commissioned the work and therefore of genuine affection. 

Although we find little record of sex in Egyptian art. The following poem was found on the site of a worker's village, and dates back to the New Kingdom (1539-1075), so it was likely written by, though not necessarily composed by, an ordinary Egyptian (an artisan or scribe).  

To hear your voice is pomegranate wine to me:
I draw life from hearing it.
Could I see you with every glance,
it would be better for me
than to eat or to drink.

Most likely this poem was part of an oral tradition passed down through generations and only recorded around this time.

So seize the day! Hold holiday!
Be unwearied, unceasing, alive
you and your own true love;
Let not the heart be troubled during your
sojourn on Earth,
but seize the day as it passes!
(Translated by J.L. Foster)

                                   

It is interesting that the above poem issue is contrary to the typical perception of Egypt as a society obsessed with the afterlife. As in Babylonia, marriage was more contract than crush. Unlike for the Pharaohs, monogamy was expected, though divorce was possible.

         Babylonia was the place where other important ancient civilization, Mesopotamia, developed.

In the old Mesopotamia, the family was a society based on a tolerant monogamy. It was allow for husband to have only one legal wife, but the law authorized him to take one or more concubines to assure him any offspring.

The marriage was formally writing in a tablet by the future husband, where there was writing the rights and duties of the wife, the money that she would won if she was repudiated and the punishment that she would have if he was unfaithful.

This document should be announced for observers to listen and it should be in agreement with the parents of the bride. The document was accompanied by a sum of money given by the groom to his future father-in-law by way of dowry.

The law allowed some juridical personality to unmarried women. They could act as witnesses in sale contracts.

         The husband had certain rights over women, like reducing her to servitude in the house of a creditor or a sell her as a punishment for an infidelity.

         The wife also could be repudiated by sterile and removed from the husband’s home, but she had to charge the sum established in the marriage contract for the event of divorce for that reason.

         The offenses against love and fidelity were punished with the death penalty. The woman who refused to obey the duty of marriage could be thrown into the river. The woman who was cat coughing in adultery was thrown into the river attached to the body of her lover. Only her husband could forgive his life.

Ancient Greece was time of heroic sacrifices for love, and it was also one of the most romantic places in the history.

The two great epic poems attributed to Homer, the Iliad and Odyssey, are both ancient love stories.

In the Iliad, two kingdoms fight for the love of a beautiful woman and, in the Odyssey, the hero is trying to get back from Troy to Ithaca to return to his wife and child - before another suitor can replace him. Odysseus' wife, Penelope, who waits for her husband for twenty years, comes across as the ideal Greek wife, as loyal as she is beautiful, waiting inside her house so as not to compromise her honour. In contrast, if we take Theseus as an example, men were not duty bound to this long lasting romantic loyalty. When he met the Amazons queen, Hippolyta, he fell in love with her and took her away with him sparking a war. Despite all that effort he had no scruples about leave her once he met Phaedra. Zeus, in the legend, was also faddish in admiration, and although he sometimes resorted to rape. He became visible for Europe like a bull, he seduced her and then he turned her into a cow for 11 years, until he was bewitched by Semele, who took the boy Ganymede to be his lover, tricked Callisto to take her chastity and impregnated Leto before his marriage with Hera.

Zeus' thuggish promiscuity could not be called romantic, he was cast in the mould of the ultimate alpha-male in the time he was the God's King, not like the romantic lover seen elsewhere in Greek myth. Actually, Zeus is an emblem of the Greek acceptance and celebration of sudden and passionate love- without paying heed to the consequences. 

This idealist love became into a realist love in Romans Ages.

The poet Catullus wrote very personal poems about his own life, attacking his enemies, criticising himself and praising the women he desired:

Give me a thousand kisses, a hundred more,
another thousand, and another hundred,
and, when we’ve counted up the many thousands,
confuse them so as not to know them all,
so that no enemy may cast an evil eye,
by knowing that there were so many kisses.

Catullus suffered for his love, and the pain inspired his poetry:

Goodbye girl, now Catullus is firm,
he doesn’t search for you, won’t ask unwillingly.
But you’ll grieve, when nobody asks.
Woe to you, wicked girl, what life’s left for you?

'Don't turn around now, you're not welcome any more', he might have written.  Catullus at times uses warfare descriptions in his poems, and we see the contrast between epic and love poetry:  The heroic epic is about love and war, Roman love poetry uses war as a device to describe love in passionate primitive words. 

The fascination with Rome and Greece during the Renaissance reconnected medieval chivalric love and the epic tales of romantic quests from antiquity, the amalgamation can be seen in the likes of Shakespeare and classical opera. This context became normal in the arts, drilled into us in fiction, in stories and nowadays in film and television. Interestingly, this has very much influenced our own concept of a relationship, and the fact that we should be with the ones we love.

In conclusion, it took thousands of years, but the circle has been completed and the kind of love seen in pre-historic societies, love for loves sake, not due to arranged marriage or financially motivated marriage, has become the western ideal and norm over the last hundred or so years, and across all the classes of society, for the first time since our Neolithic days.