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Love Island 2017: What the Greek gods can teach us about summer trysts

Love Island? Sex Island more like: ITV
Love Island? Sex Island more like: ITV

Love Island ends tonight, and thank heavens for that. Not to be too Mary Whitehouse about it but I’ve had it with all the tattoos and empty romping.

My objection, actually, is that it hasn’t been romantic enough. It pales in comparison with the love islands I know. Scattered across the Mediterranean and Aegean, my love islands have hidden caves and lovers so strong and eloquent that you’d swear they were gods. It’s probably a good thing that my love islands belong to the ancient past. If they existed in the forms that the ancients described them, I doubt we’d ever come home.

Take Lesbos. Back in the day, its inhabitants were so frisky that they lent their name to a sexual act. Lesbiazein was the ancient Greek for “to act like a person from Lesbos”, which actually meant “to fellate”. It’s little wonder that, in a place such as this, Sappho became one of the most celebrated love poets in antiquity. Although she also fancied men, it was her love for women that preserved her association with “lesbian” love in the modern sense of the word.

But Lesbos had nothing on the love islands Odysseus found himself marooned on. The great hero was on his way home from the Trojan War when he pitched up with Circe, a sorceress who turned his friends into pigs, and then with Calypso, a nymph. Calypso, I think, was the sexier. He spent seven years with her, making love in a cave on the island of Ogygia, which is thought to be Gozo, just off Malta. Surrounded by fragrant cypress trees, freshwater fountains and trailing grape vines, it was rather more sensuous than the plywood shack thrown up on Majorca for Love Island.

Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520-23 (oil on canvas) by Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) (bridgemanimages.com)
Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520-23 (oil on canvas) by Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) (bridgemanimages.com)

Certainly there were worse places to be held captive. As far as I know, Odysseus and Calypso didn’t share their boudoir with a dozen other bed-hoppers. It was pretty private, their island. When Homer said there was no crew, he really meant it. With no obvious means of escape, Odysseus resorted to weeping on the shore until, finally, Calypso handed him the tools to build his own raft. One more night with her and he was off. “My wife’s no match for you in looks,” he told her, “she’s only mortal after all.”

Which makes you realise what a misnomer Love Island is. Sex Island would have been more appropriate. With a £50,000 prize for the last couple standing, or rather, supine, what has love got to do with it?

Historically, at least, islands and an indeterminate mixture of love and lust have always gone hand in hand. Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual as well as romantic love, is said to have been born after the god Kronos castrated his father Uranus and threw his severed genitals into the sea. The goddess rose out of the resulting white foam — “aphros” in Greek. Not for nothing did the poet Christopher Logue call Aphrodite ‘Queen of the foaming hole…she sucks from pole to pole’.

It was no coincidence that Aphrodite was worshipped by sea-loving island-dwellers. The people of Paphos, in Cyprus, built her a shrine, while the small Greek island of Kythera claimed her for its own. She is often called the Cytherean goddess.

Nor was it only the Greek islands that became famous as hotbeds of lust. Island sex was top of the agenda for the Romans, too. Tiberius was particularly partial to it. His chosen island was the now quaint Capri. On arriving there, the notorious emperor used to let his imagination run wild. He had his walls decorated with naughty pictures, and summoned girls and young men to have group sex in front of him, the kind of voyeurism familiar from Love Island. It’s claimed he even had boys swim with him and lap at his genitals.

One needn’t be a pervert to see what Tiberius liked about Capri. It was its relative privacy and sense of seclusion that encouraged him to let himself go. Whilst he had a luxurious villa, he also sought out the island’s secret grottoes and hidden nooks for his trysts. The whole point of an island romance is that it can be illicit. A point that Love Island wholly misses.

It’s surely no coincidence that the love islands of antiquity remain so popular with holidaymakers today. The natural beauty, the heat and ease of stripping off and diving into cooling water, the feeling of being so far away, all conspire to make islands prime locations for romance.

But they ought to come with a warning. You know that line “No man is an island”? Well, an island is an island. Even with the ease of modern travel, an island is too cut off for decisions not to be necessary. For Odysseus, that decision was love over lust. Goodbye, Calypso. For Theseus, that decision was goodbye, Ariadne. The so-called hero heartlessly abandoned the Cretan princess on the Greek island of Naxos after a steamy dalliance.

And it’s their story that probably best encapsulates the problem with island love. What was for her a beautiful romance was for him a forgettable fling. As in Titian’s painting at the National Gallery, she woke at dawn to see his ship disappearing off the horizon. “These were not the promises you once made/Me in a warming tone, these are not what you bade/My wretchedness to hope for, but a happy marriage…,” she cries in Catullus’s version of the tale. Wise words for anyone seeking love on a love island this summer.

Follow Daisy Dunn on Twitter: @DaisyfDunn

Daisy Dunn is author of Catullus’ Bedspread and The Poems of Catullus (both William Collins)