How would you translate the Greek words erastes and eromenos? They are to do with eros, love. And arguably the most natural translation would be 'lover' and 'beloved', respectively. In the ancient Greek scheme of things, the erastes was likely to be a twenty-something young man, the eromenos a year or two younger. The words have much to do with some of the most famous couples in ancient history including Patroclus and Achilles, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Agathon and Pausanius. They represent the most striking feature of Greek love, that it majored on the homosexual and institutionalised it differently from what we might think of as gay today.

Accept that for the last half century or so, ancient Greek scholarship has seen something at once more explicit and sinister in these words. Unravelling what went wrong, and re-assessing our understanding of Greek love, is the task James Davidson has set himself in his 'radical reappraisal', The Greeks and Greek Love.

The book is a joy to read. Davidson can move from the bawdy and ridiculous to the fascinating and sublime. He quotes pseudo-Archilochus: 'If it's not an upstanding penis sinking into the hidden corridors of his glutes, it is, for him, no sword worth talking about'. Alternatively, his discussion of the Greek way of aging individuals deepens any understanding of why the charge against Socrates of corrupting youth was so serious: it's all to do with the politics of the time and the strict hierachies that the aging inscribed. And then, his reading of the mythical elements in Plato's Phaedrus is of substantial philosophical interest: comparing Plato's analogy of the soul with the myth of Cephalus and Dawn, in her two-horse chariot, expands on Plato's idea of the philosopher being inspired by eros because love can ‘make leaps’ into the unknown that are beyond the rational, and that place the stress 'on seeking truth, not on finding it, on pursuing, not on catching.'

So what of the wrong turn? It all stems from Kenneth Dover's seminal text, Greek Homosexuality, and what Davidson calls his 'sodomania'. In short, Dover saw buggery, and anxieties about buggery, wherever he looked in the ancient world. For him, the erastes is the one who penetrates, the eromenos the one who is penetrated. So Greek love has little to do with love and is all about how the eromenos could overcome the humiliation of being buggered and take his place as a man, not least to become an erastes in turn. Dover coined the term intercrural, meaning between the thighs, as a possible 'third way'.

Dover's obsession was quite unjustified (I think I am right in saying there aren't even any words for anal penetration in ancient Greek) and as Davidson shows, in an entertainingly journalese section of the book, says as much about Dover as the Greeks. It all came out, as it were, in Dover's autobiography, where amongst other things he recalls pleasuring himself over a mountain view.

The other villain of the piece, for Davidson, was Michel Foucault, and then the social constructionists after him, who argued that Greek homosexuality was so different - because it was just about sexual acts - that it wasn't anything like modern homosexuality at all. As David Halperin famously overstated it, homosexuality was invented at the end of the 19th century, when the word first appeared in medical text books. Before, there had been no such thing as sexuality, just men and women who 'did it' in various ways.

To my mind, Davidson overplays his hand in his rebuttal of Foucault; here his journalese lets him down. For example, the weight of his critique of Foucault rests on talks, magazine articles and interviews, not on Foucault's books. Apart from the fact that it just seems silly to say so, The Use of Pleasure, for example - Foucault's second volume in his History of Sexuality - refutes Davidson's claim that Foucault thought the construction of the modern self stems solely from the Greek problem with buggery: sex is only one aspect of Foucault's book, the economics (in the widest sense) of food, marriage, exercise and other forms of pleasure being at least as important. And then there's The Care of the Self to consider too, the third volume, in which Foucault develops his notion of an aesthetic ethics. Foucault might have made mistakes with his Greek scholarship but he is far more interesting, wide-ranging and humane than Davidson would allow. Personally, I think one of Foucault's big, emerging interests before he died was friendship, a love that draws attention away from the sexual, though without necessarily denying it.

Thinking of friendship, it is striking that for all Davidson's learning, which is substantial, he seems to resist thinking of another key Greek word, philia, in terms of friendship, preferring instead translations stressing intimacy. It is true that philein should be translated as 'to love', though that can include the love also called friendship (as indeed the English word love can do). It depends on context. So books VIII and IX of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Plato's Lysis major on a consideration of friendship, I would argue, for all that many other issues come into play - from political constitutions to how the generations should speak with one another. But sidelining friendship has the effect of marginalising its role in Greek love, which certainly when it comes to Plato, is to miss one of his main points. As Cicero put it: 'Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty.'

I suspect the reason Davidson does this is ultimately to do with his argument against Dover et al. Davidson wants to reclaim Greek homosexuality for modern gay love: he seeks to show that there were ancient Greeks who were homosexual by orientation, for all that homosociality coloured their cultural erotics far more than ours. He sees a kind of homophobia operating in Dover's obessession, and a perverse identity politics of choice implicit in the extreme social constructionist agenda. That might well be true. (Davidson is perhaps wary of friendship for the opposite reason, that it might be read as playing down the distinctiveness of the homosexual orientation, as in 'just good friends.') But to go the other way, and argue that the 'stable universal core of Greek Homosexuality is simply the pairing of two members of the same sex' is to overfamiliarise. As Alan Bray warns in his book The Friend, the historical task is always to be conscious of the double gap, gaps in our knowledge and the gap between our time and then. And yet, philosophically speaking and as Foucault suggested, this makes the history of love all the more fascinating, opening up imaginative possibilities for the way we seek to love now, rather than simply validating the way we seek to love now.

That is the politics of Davidson's book. In terms of scholarship, he has undoubtedly set a new agenda for the study of Greek love, though I suspect scholars will want to argue with him as much as thank him for his considerable efforts. Apart from the point about friendship, Oliver Taplin's review, for example, raises some of the issues - such as the way Davidson can characterise eros as strictly non-reciprocal (as if the lover only loves the beloved without it ever being returned), or as Taplin suggests, 'in the course of setting homophilia on its pedestal, (Davidson) is very begrudging, even snide, about heterophilia, love between men and women.'

As gay people can say, evoking all the ambivalence that they might feel about their sexuality, Davidson's book is great; it is now a must-read for anyone interested in the subject areas it covers: but it is 'a bit gay'.