438 EURAMERICA probably still too new for Whitman’s homopolitical agenda, at least in contrast to the age-old model of same-sex intimacy readily available to him and his contemporaries, namely the ancient Greek one, which not only saw no split between eros and politics at all but actually entwined the two thoroughly. As Paul W. Ludwig explains: [One major strand of Greek political discourse] viewed eros as conducive to homonoia or “likemindedness,” and to civic friendship (philia), . . . in which love relationships between pairs of free citizens were thought to foster concord and solidarity, first and foremost in heterosexual marriages, but later among males as a political or military good, for example, in accounts of the Sacred Band of Thebes. At their most idealistic, apologists for this view envisioned a city composed entirely of males. The city itself might then become an erotic association like marriage, that is, an association in which eros was (or contributed to) the cement binding its members together. (2002: 19) Could the model which Whitman have in mind for his homopolitics possibly be the ancient Greek one of the legendary Theban Army of Lovers? After all, this is a model in which not only the divide between the public and the private did not yet appear but couples, when bonded together as a body, would also make the army/state stronger.43 Indeed, among the “Calamus” poems, besides glorifying the “city of orgies” (1867: 133, C18),44 which is taken to be the epitome of strangers cruising, Whitman also intriguingly dreams of “the new City of Friends” (my emphasis), i.e., “a city invincible to 43 Speaking of the US interest in the classical tradition turning from Rome to Greece around this time, Caroline Winterer explains its motivation in perfect accordance with some of Whitman’s professed reasons for promoting comradeship as well as the different temporalities discussed here: “Yet just as they embraced Greek democracy, Americans recruited classicism for a radically new purpose: antimodernism. Rather than looking to antiquity as a guide to the present, they now looked to the remote past as a way to combat such cancers of modernity as materialism, civic decay, industrialization, and anti-intellectualism” (2002: 4). 44 The phrase, also used as title, was added in the 1867 edition.
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