Tollerance of Sexual Abnormities in Ancient Greek and Rome - Page 4 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Rome, Greece, Egypt & other ancient history (c 4000 BCE - 476 CE) and pre-history.
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By noemon
#1916301
Why is it strange?

Do you have the testimony from his wives(or any other) that he was not fucking them while he had males instead?

I didnt say the Greeks did not accept homosexuality, whatever that means, the laws are explicit, it was legally outlawed however that was swinged. Socially, it was controversial and as such had a current on both sides. No exceptionalism.
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By noemon
#13054961
Those gays are berious susiness.

In all seriousness though, the bisexuality of the antiquity is grossly overblown.

A.H.M. Jones held the chair of Ancient History in UCL and Cambridge University. He is the first academic who exhausted in his work almost all primary material available relating to social and economic spheres of Greece and Rome, while completely ignored secondary ones. His work is monumental and definitive.

Check that link out, am certain you 'll be interested in it.

When he was asked, "What was the effect of the Empire's conversion to christianity?"

He said: "None".
By Alexandros
#13060160
Holy Shit! Apparently noemon has unearthed the gay equivalent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.


look it up.. written by Michael Swift and first Published in Gay Community News, Feb. 15-21, 1987
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By Paradigm
#13060887
Alexandros wrote:look it up.. written by Michael Swift and first Published in Gay Community News, Feb. 15-21, 1987

Okay, I looked it up.

Some commentators have cited a satirical article by Michael Swift which appeared in the Gay Community News in February 1987 as evidence of a more radical "Gay Agenda." Originally titled "Gay Revolutionary", the article describes a scenario in which homosexual men dominate American society and suppress all things heterosexual. The article was reprinted in Congressional Record without an opening disclaimer in which the author makes clear that is satirical.
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By noemon
#13060983
That gay propaganda pervades this subject is a fact that you need not require to read the manifesto to acknowledge it.

Reading the wiki article on Greek pederasty one can understand how radically the myth is maintained.

It repeats the sentence "homoerotic pederasty was institutionalized in Greece" more than 5 times without citation.

Read opening paragraph, this demonstrates it the most profoundly:

In some areas, such as Boeotia, the man and boy were formally joined together and lived as a couple. In other areas, such as Elis, boys were persuaded by means of gifts, and in a few, such as Ionia,[5] such relations were forbidden altogether. The Spartans however were said to practise chaste pederasty.[6]


Ionia is "few", Ionia is Athens and colonies, the majority of the Greek domain in the antiquity. At least it is honest enough to say that it was banned there alltogether. It continues, in Sparta homoerotic pederasty existed but was chaste. How the fuck can one be chaste but also be a homo pederast? This is shouting....wtf? In reality banned by law. So up to now we have Athens and colonies banned, Sparta and colonies banned as well according to the same article that posits homerotic pederasty as "a formalized institution in ancient Greece". Then it says Elis and Boeotia..some villages for which we have no records, and no source it was so and so...

So to wrap up..those we have records of and who make up the majority of Greek domain it was banned, those who we have no records of..and who make up some sq kilometres of land were according to our imagination institutionalized pederasts, and therefore "Greece" had formalized and institutionalized homoerotic pederasty.

:knife:

I dare anybody to touch the article and see what happens.

And for the record, "satire" is by default honest compressed emotion and intention.

Second: "mentorship" .ie educating young men took/takes place by older men and education was idealized and so this relationship(tutor/student) was idealized as well. It cannot be stressed enough that both the moral and legal code prescribed that educational instruction excluded erotic activity. In all articles though, chaste teachers are referred to as pederasts because they instructed younger boys(Idk..who would they instruct?) and the entire educational system as institutionalized pederasty, when it was chaste!

Did some of them went astray in private education? Don't they now and since ever and everywhere?

Simply put, what the heck?
Last edited by noemon on 12 Jun 2009 02:44, edited 2 times in total.
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By noemon
#13061000
Roman versions are Roman not Greek. ;) Don't get carried away.

And Ovid embellished the myth with erotic activity while he was engaged in polemics arguing for homosexuality against the mainstream anti-homosexuality.

Avoid talking about what is Greek myth all-together before reading Kerenyi, Jung's provider of mythology.
By Alexandros
#13061534
Okay, I looked it up.

Just for educational purposes, we should mention that all articles related to hoosexuality in the past bore a sign of approval of the LGBT.. Only when they saw that the allegedly impatial encyclopedia which anyone can edit started to appear as bias did they remove the refference to them being the authors or approving (after applying their own edits) it.
By Alexandros
#13061540
Ganymede disapproves of this thread.

Exactly what do you know about Ganymedes?
Ever read Xenophon's Symposium ?

Since you obviously haven't, I'll provide.
Xenophon Symposium 8.59
"Knowing deep devices {medea} in his mind, [59]
which is as much as to say, "Knowing wise counsels in his mind."
Ganymede, therefore, bears a name compounded of the two words, "joy"
and "counsel," and is honoured among the gods, not as one "whose
body," but "whose mind" "gives pleasure."


According to the Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon

ganumai = brighten up, be glad or happy
mhdos (h used for hetta) = counsels, plans, arts, mostly with collat. notion of prudence or cunning
By Einherjar
#13098765
Without going to the other "extreme" of dismissing "homosexual" acts within the Indo-European (and not just Greek) phenomenon of männerbunden, what propagandists of ancient homosexuality fail to realise is that the Ancients never viewed sexuality in the way they do. Pseudo-scientific categories like "homosexuality" never existed. There were no sexual identities - only erotic acts (and this should also hold true to this day).
By Inexorable
#13106643
Pseudo-scientific categories like "homosexuality" never existed. There were no sexual identities - only erotic acts (and this should also hold true to this day).


Very good point. Even in the middle ages homosexuality was viewed as an act rather than an identity. If a male was caught with another male he might be called a sodomite, but this was to imply that he had performed the act of sodomy, no different then sodomy (ie non-vaginal intercourse) with a woman. Sex was more of less seen the way any other act was seen. Some may enjoy a certain genre of music or a certain type of food, just as some may enjoy a certain sexual desire or fetish. It is not until recently that 'gay' 'straight' and 'bi' categories have come to define a person as who they are.
By Adonis
#13115049
I know quite a bit about the practice of pederasty, or "eromenos" in ancient Greece. Not just in Athens, but amongst the Spartans and even the earliest of Cretes; these sexual practices, including prostitution and paraphilic relations, were most common among their symposias (sex and drinking parties) Put in perspective, blatant homoeroticism in even public ordinances (IE bathhouses) was considered rather normal.

You will find that in many ancient Greek scriptures, many of them refrain from male to male direct sex with each other. The reason for this was because Anal sex was considered quite taboo in latent homosexual culture. The type of sex that they often used was called "inter-crural" (sp?), a type of sex we don't often see today.

Plato himself wrote a play entitled "Symposium," a series about the daily ordinance one could expect at the symposias. Plato also had an almost romanticized, ideal notion about how eromenos should go about being practiced, specifically in engaging in acts that do not "harm" the child. However, what Plato means by not "harming" the child is in reference to degrading them sexually with acts of filth and outright abusing the child.

Socrates on the other hand, he neglected to ever engage in pedophilic relations even though he admitted to admiring young boys for their beauty. Socrates realizes that seeking sexual sensations is not wrong, but having sexual intercourse with someone at his early age is, because you might "break" them. That is, you might permanently change their life for the worst, as it generally happens with victims of child molestation. So having sex with children is wrong because you're harming them, and that's point simple and blank.

It was also common for these men to "court" these young boys with the acceptance of that young boy's father. Many times there would be competing suitors, who would often try to buy their suitor's affections with extravagant items. There would be cases where such competing suitors would even engage in fist-fights in the middle of the streets, and the "winner" would thereby win the attraction of the young lover.

From Wikipedia:
A number of ancient sources, such as Plato's Phaedrus and Aeschines' Against Timarchos indicate that the ideal erastes was restrained in his relations with his beloved, and his love was an expression of his generosity and sympathy. He is contrasted to the man who hires boys for his pleasure and "behaves grossly" with them, the mark of an abusive and uneducated person.[2] Xenophon also comments, incidentally, on one of the characteristics of the ideal erastes, indicating that such a man would hide nothing concerning the boy from the father of that youth.[3]

There are people out there who don't find it wrong to imagine themselves having sex with a child of any age, or any person, whether that is your mother or your father or the person you admire the most with. They do not view it as filthy but rather, a privilege, and the expression of one's innermost sexual desire is not one to be denied. This belief is called pansexuality, and there’s actually a whole series of fetishists out there for it.
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By Et In Arcadia Ego
#13485809
Apparently very few people here have read Kenneth Dover's Greek Homosexuality, because it's pretty much the scholarly consensus on the subject. Firstly, regarding the erastēs/eromenos relationship: the etymology says it all. "Erastēs" quite literally means "lover," and "eromenos" means "one who is loved." Both are derived from the verb ἐράω, which means "to love" in a very explicitly romantic and/or physical sense; there is not a single instance in ancient literature where ἐράω is used in another way.

Regarding the law: to speak about what "the law" allowed or did not allow in "ancient Greece" is shockingly bad history. Customs varied both by region and by time, and what was allowed at one time and in one place was prohibited in another. In any case, our historical evidence suggests that pederasty was a fairly common and well-accepted institution among the Athenian aristocracy in the late 5th and early 4th centuries; slightly earlier evidence (i.e. the Myrmidons of Aeschylus) suggests that the idea of such a relationship was not repugnant to popular sentiment even outside the aristocracy. Our evidence for other times and places is quite scarce, but a plethora of evidence from Aristophanes suggests that Spartans were stereotyped as enjoying the passive role in anal sex; how much truth we should read into this is, of course, a matter of contention.

In any case, Adonis is right on the Athenian front. Spartan and Cretan evidence is much scantier, however, and I'd exercise caution in talking about their sexual customs; most of our evidence is in the form of public records, biography, and historiography. The first can be of some use in establishing what the "public" opinion was insofar as law can be said to correlate with public sentiment, but it tells us nothing about actual practices. Biography and historiography tell us far more about the attitudes of the writer than they do about the attitudes of the subjects.

Roman attitudes about sexuality were certainly much more conservative overall than Athenian ones. To call someone a cinaedus (catamite; sissy) was quite insulting if Catullus is at all reliable, and evidence from Cicero, Tacitus, and Suetonius suggests that any open display of effeminacy was quite strongly discouraged. At the same time, there was no law governing sexual congress with slaves, and the evidence (primarily poetic) suggests that erotic attraction to men became more acceptable as Rome became Hellenized (see various poems of Catullus, the Eclogues of Vergil, and Nisus and Euryalus in the Aeneid), although the prohibition against anal sex with another Roman citizen remained quite rigid, and such allegations form a powerful part of Tacitus's denunciation of Nero in the Annales.

In all this, it's very important to underscore that there was no "gay" identity as we understand it. To cite the Athenian example, many men had physical relationships with other men in the context of the institution of pederasty, but preferred women and refrained from such relationships later in life. Others continued to prefer men, but nonetheless married and produced children, since it was considered their civic duty. There was some concept of sexual identity, as we see articulated in the speech of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium, but we have no evidence that such conceptions ever spread beyond a small circle.

In any case, the political contention over ancient sexuality goes both ways: conservatives seem determined to whitewash ancient sexual practices (see John Finnis's testimony in the Colorado court case Romer v. Evans), and some members of the gay community want to claim the Greeks as their forebears (see James Davidson's The Greeks and Greek Love). Both attempts are, in the end, based on the idea that what was acceptable to the Greeks and Romans should play some role in determining modern attitudes, an idea which has, as far as I can tell, no discernible merit whatsoever. As both an openly gay man and a student of the classics, I find it laughable that the attitudes of people so far removed from us in years, language, and customs are an object of contention by people who, for the most part, cannot read a word of Latin or Greek. There's quite enough maligning and distortion in the gay rights debate without bringing in historical issues that not one in a thousand people properly understands.
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By noemon
#13489597
The fact of the matter is that "pederasty" bears some connotations in modern society, and when people argue that pederasty was widespread they should put it in context of the times.

Is pederasty widespread in our modern European societies? If I want I can find a lot of relative porn on the internets, by comparison definitely more than in ancient literature and art.
Is pederasty banned by law in our European societies? I believe it is. It also was in the ancient Greek city-states according to the primary sources already posited in this thread, not the "latter scholarly consensus". This very simple statement negates the exotic homophiliac pederasty charged on the Classics that is allegedly very different from our modern christian derived societies.

Regarding the verb erao, you are mistaken, it was used for both contexts, not just for physical sexual desire. But also for friendship and love among friends.

My main position is that, ancient Greeks were quite open about their sexual practices,much the same way today our society is quite open about her sexual life. They discussed them, that does not mean that they were a bunch of pederastic homosexuals with institutionalized pederasty. They were exactly as all humans are, and have been throughout the ages, men and women have enjoyed the company of both sexes depending on the circumstances. They were not special in any regard, they were just honest about their sexual practices and their records survived the test of time unlike any of their neighbors, who might have never had discussed on paper such matters. That does not make them sexually exceptional. In the Symposium for example a lot of gravity is given to Agathon and Aristophanes, while our Classics scholar in here has failed to notice that erastes/eromenos is eventually ideally defined in that very same book as the ultimate relationship between 2 men at the absense of physical attraction. I mean did you miss Socrates' argument against Alciviades? On the same note, people put effort into "reading behind the lines" of the dialogue to argue about mainstream widespread acceptance but also fail to mention that the symposiasts have in their company prostitutes as was the mainstream Greek symposia. These elit aristocrats who discuss Eros -in a book that has become gospel inside Gay-rights radical activists- argue about the God of Love in the presence of female hookers(hetaire and aulitrides).
The fact that Socrates who by and large ridicules homosexual acts, admits that some men(Charmides) are beautiful and the shtick carries on. I have said to men in here that are handsome when I saw their picture and I have never had homosexual inclinations. This is just honesty, not some undercover homoeroticism.

Regarding education, it has been general practice that men have tutored men, in all societies not just the Greco-Roman one, since they tutored them in letters but also in the art of war, as such in all societies sexual practices may or may not develop among teacher and student. Once again, discussing it, does not demonstrate widespread acceptance, much the same way that the respective scientific field in our universities analyzing the phenomeno does not demonstrate widespread acceptance for our modern societies. Vile sexual acts were condemned by the greatest of Greek philosophers just like and as much as they have been condemned by modern law and christian scripture. On top of that they were banned.

viewtopic.php?p=1183665#p1183665

I sincerely, and trust you me I have a love for the classics and do not have any anti-homosexual tendencies, know that there is nothing special about Greek sexual practices, they were absolutely no different than others in that regard, their laws were on par with post-christian society regarding sexual matters, and if anything can be said is that homosexual practice merely became less visible out in the open market post-christianity but has returned to normality in the modern day and age. With the exception that today, there is a gay identity that seeks symbols and history, this I oppose when my history gets twisted to serve alien interests, just as I oppose the twisting of my history to serve Marxist scenarios, propaganda by foreign countries, or christian exceptionalism. I do not want my history to be appropriated by anybody, twisted and fucked over just so the Gay movement creates its scripture. This charge is very true and real, not just the ramblings of a Greek conservative and it is further inflated by millenia-old christian propaganda who allegedly changed the world, when in reality it made no profound social change, but merely political. This might be the only matter where radical & politicized Homosexuals and radical Christian apologists agree, each for his own reasons of coarse.
#13885444
What is porntube and Qatz all about?

We tend to exaggerate things too much when looking at the past because we assume the past=troglodytes and the present=normality.

The penis in vases is quite a normal percent(about 1% of total art).

If one actually reads ancient literature, and not the nit-picked gay manifestos of the 70's, one can blatantly see a mirror of modern society, there are more Qatzelok's in todays western society than there are Daves and in ancient Greek society there were more Dave's than Qatz's.

Pick a random sample of famous biographies(primary sources), and read them. That is all there is to do and see what commentators had to say about the Lives of Others, what flaws did they pick out, what sexual practices did they notice and so on. Read the sexual vibe, look in between the lines and try to place the individuals in the scales between Qatzism and Daveism and come here afterwards to tell me which one is more pronounced and which one isn't.
#13885943
That doesn't really answer the question. Why did Greek sculptors of around 4 to 200BC feel a need to produce so many male sculptures with their bearded gentleman so prominent? I'm genuinely interested and it's really got to be a question someone asked here. This could become a paper. How should I think of this sort of thing? Obviously our aesthetics differ, I'm not saying it bothers me, but what was their intent do you think? Were they just simpler and more honest? Was there pride in it?
#13886063
Suska wrote:There was quite a bit of penis in Greek art though. What was that all about?


Good point. They seemed to have a fascination with the penis, didn't they? But not so much the female body. Strange, but I've never connsidered it until you mentioned it now.
#13886117
I don't think that all these naked bodies in Greek art were focusing on the penis. I don't think that the artists painted them naked for the penis, you can see in Greek sculptures that the penis is the least focused on and never up. Why did they produce nakedness? Because they had no qualms with nudity(after all they did go to the gym on the nude, 'gym'(gymnasio) literally means 'nude' in Greek) and because their focus was on reproducing perfection, completeness.

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