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Spartan pederasty?
#46
Just for some comparative anthropology
I recall Marvin Harris had an study on how some societies had both a wider range of rights to women and a hgher degree of tolerance to homosexual relations. The explaination was that in those societies men and women had to live apart for long periods, and the examples, besides the tribes of Papua and the like, were Berbers (seminomadic shepherds, the women remain at home labouring the fields) Vikings and Spartans. There was also a mention ot Sarmathas. I also remember a peculiar institution to modern Galicia (NW Spain) until about 30 years ago, Men in some coastal villages spent long periods fishing in Ireland and Greenland, so Women at home were allowed (I mean socially aproved) to have a "love" relation with a young girl, usually in the domestic service. This relation had an especial name long forgotten by me.
In essence, what I am saying is that those homosexual relations were the social response to especial circunstances, far away from modern homosexuality.
AKA Inaki
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#47
Yep this is also correct. I don't know how true this holds for the rest of the city states except Sparta,but after all it was considered a Dorian custom.
Khaire
Giannis
Giannis K. Hoplite
a.k.a.:Giannis Kadoglou
a.k.a.:Thorax
[Image: -side-1.gif]
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#48
I think that we really have no clue about what really happened. It takes courage to be an ''expert'' and say ''i really dont know''. Thats why i get sick with ''scholars'' ready to proclaim how queer this or that ancient personality was, based on 2-3 lines of writers, most of the time not even contemporary to the man. And what about the possible agendas or personal notions of the quoted writer?

The writings of Xenophon mainly because he was around during the golden time of Sparta may have some extra gravity, but yet we cant base a conclusion on a single man's writings.
Yet the indications seems to show that homosexuality was not institution in ancient Greece, there may be some more tolerance due to different views of sexuality, but certainly you wouldnt see a merry company of men hand in hand and kissing in the street.
There is also another element that show us how different our society became. The element of loving somebody to the highest degree without this including sexual appetites.

Some people seem to not be able to understand any other commitment that the erotic one. I wonder they never thought the simplest thing. Would they die or fight for their best friend? What if we lived in a city where we worked together with our neighbours whith whom we grew up together. We would be in the same class in school, in college. Go to the army together and train together. Get to job together every morning, go to each others house all the time and hung out for beers. Now imagine war breaking and be in the same company, advancing to battle covering each others back. Heck! If you wont die for these guys for whom you are going to die??
I have about 10 very close friends. We are friend since kindergarden and with two of them which they live next door we ate babyfood from the same plate as babies. Would i die for these guys? Hell yes! Am i gay? hell no!

The conclusion about sexuality is that WE DONT KNOW! And nowday gay society should find the guts to proclaim their rights and seek their identity without having to reffer to historical figures! They should feel ok with what they are and leave people long dead in their graves cause simply WE DONT KNOW!!!
aka Yannis
----------------
Molon lave
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#49
Quote:I recall Marvin Harris had an study on how some societies had both a wider range of rights to women and a hgher degree of tolerance to homosexual relations. The explaination was that in those societies men and women had to live apart for long periods, and the examples, besides the tribes of Papua and the like, were Berbers (seminomadic shepherds, the women remain at home labouring the fields) Vikings and Spartans.

The important point is that greater homosexuality does not lead to greater freedom for women. It is that both facultative homosexuality, which ends when women are available, and greater rights for women stem from the society having to deal with the seperation of the sexes.

In cultures where homosexual relationships are normal or preferred even when women are available, such as that of the Samurai and if we are to believe Aristotle, among the kelts, women are often degraded and considered either property or unclean. Sparta was clearly not this.

Remember as well that men lived with their wives after age 30. Since women married late and were at a premium, demography favors men marrying late as well as we see among the noble classes of many societies. Thus, not being able to live with a wife before you were 30 years old may have not been a common problem.
Paul M. Bardunias
MODERATOR: [url:2dqwu8yc]http://www.romanarmytalk.com/rat/viewtopic.php?t=4100[/url]
A Spartan, being asked a question, answered "No." And when the questioner said, "You lie," the Spartan said, "You see, then, that it is stupid of you to ask questions to which you already know the answer!"
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#50
Quote:there may be some more tolerance due to different views of sexuality, but certainly you wouldnt see a merry company of men hand in hand and kissing in the street.

Oddly enough, you might have. As homosexuality is more freely accepted as an alternative to heterosexuality and a distinct "gay culture" has emerged, heterosexual men are less able to show public affection for fear of mistakenly being labelled as part of that culture.

In cultures where there is no acceptance of a seperate culture for exclusive homosexuals, such as in the middle east, men are much more openly affectionate. They hold hands and kiss on greeting. In fact there probably is more "undercover" gay activity there than opened gay activity in the US, since in america there is an assumption that sexulaity is an either/or situation and men are less likely to dabble in it.
Paul M. Bardunias
MODERATOR: [url:2dqwu8yc]http://www.romanarmytalk.com/rat/viewtopic.php?t=4100[/url]
A Spartan, being asked a question, answered "No." And when the questioner said, "You lie," the Spartan said, "You see, then, that it is stupid of you to ask questions to which you already know the answer!"
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#51
Quote:In cultures where homosexual relationships are normal or preferred even when women are available, such as that of the [size=150:39ltb3wa]Samurai[/size]
Really? I had no idea, could you please recommend me any source on the subject?
(sorry for the off theme question)
AKA Inaki
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#52
I just read this thread. I am a bit surprised that almost no one quotes recent literature, like Dover's Greek Homosexuality (1978) or Hupperts' Eros Dikaios (2000). This is remarkable, because when we're discussing this panoply or that battle, we have no difficulty in quoting modern books.

I am also surprised that so many quotes above are from Plutarch, who writes in the second century AD and is a (sympathetic) propagandist of all kinds of self-constraint, but may not be very accurate in rendering the sixth and fifth century BC. (Compare his uncritical acceptance of those fake Letters of Alexander in his Life of Alexander.)

Paintings on vases are mentioned, and it is rightly stated that they are a difficult source. (I agree that we must hope that future generations will not try to reconstruct our actual sexual behaviour from the pornographic sites on the internet.)

A point that has not been mentioned, is that art historians have so far underestimated the homosexual nature of many paintings. Hupperts offers a very good example: if we see a naked man and a naked woman dancing, art historians like John Beazley would immediately have called this an erotic scene; but if we see two naked men dancing, Beazley did not see any erotic connotations. Much more study is needed.

Hupperts also proves convincingly that at least Plato can not be used as a source for actual sexual behavior. Platonic love was not an asexual, paedogogical love, but sex for sex's sake. If you come to think of it, it is quite remarkable that classicists have so long believed Plato's ideas as representative of actual behavior, because these ideas can be found in the Symposium, a text that contains all kinds of obvious fantasy constructions, like Aristophanes' famous, funny creation myth about those globular human beings. Accepting, from the very same text, one part as a literary fantasy and the other as an accurate description is poor method.

We try to reconstruct sexual behavior from sources that are dealing with philosophy (Plato) or morality (Plutarch) or politics (Xenophon). We simply do not have any text that concentrates on what actually happened between the sheets. If only we had an ancient equivalent of "Ask Doctor Ruth" or the internet discussion boards where people discuss their experiences. (Here in Holland, there's the Viva Forum; no doubt there are equivalents in other countries.)

We have to wait until the twelfth century until we have the Books of Penitence, which for the first time give us an idea about what people found problematic and confessed to the priests, - and hence, what they actually did. (I always liked that having sex in a church is not a sin. Wink )

So that's the crux: we do not have the sources to establish what really happened, and I think that asking questions about sexuality in the past, tells a lot more about our own ideas, hopes, frustrations, and obsessions. Nor do we have the words: labels like "homosexual" or "heterosexual" are nineteenth-century inventions and can hardly be used to describe ancient practices.

And, let's face it: sexuality is irrelevant to the study of the past - as Leopold von Ranke said, what happens below the waist is not the subject of a serious historian. This simple lesson is something we must learn again.

Some time ago, I published a book on Alexander the Great. Following Ranke, I did not really deal with Alexander's affairs with Hephaestion and Bagoas (although I think that Diogenes' contemporary remark about Alexander being defeated by Hephaestion's thighs suggests that Alexander did indeed have sexual affairs with men). If Alexander had gone to India to chase a lover, my book would have been different, but Alexander's policy was never dictated by sexual greed, so it was irrelevant to my story. The funny thing is that several reviewers wrote about my book as if I had actually dealt with the sexual aspect.

Many people today think sex is important -I will not blame them- but they find it very different to accept that in the past, sex was just one thing among others. Spartans, homosexual or not, would have been surprised to see how much fuzz we post-Freudians make about it.
Jona Lendering
Relevance is the enemy of history
My website
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#53
Quote: Accepting, from the very same text, one part as a literary fantasy and the other as an accurate description is poor method.
So true, yet so common...
AKA Inaki
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#54
And also so probable... Sad
Giannis K. Hoplite
a.k.a.:Giannis Kadoglou
a.k.a.:Thorax
[Image: -side-1.gif]
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#55
Quote:I just read this thread. I am a bit surprised that almost no one quotes recent literature, like Dover's Greek Homosexuality (1978) or Hupperts' Eros Dikaios (2000). This is remarkable, because when we're discussing this panoply or that battle, we have no difficulty in quoting modern books.

If anyone is interested in the topic I suggest you start with Foucault's notion of socially constructed sexual identity. I have many papers on .pdf on the topic of Greek pederasty and homosexuality by Halperin and others if anyone wants some. A rather confused and ultimately ambiguous chapter by Cartledge on "the politics of Spartan pederasty" would be a good one as well if taken with salt- especially the inapropriate comparative anthropology. He rightly seperates the origin of the pederastic relationship in ancient greece from the relationship, which I would not even label pederasty since I disagree with an obligate eroticism, between men and youths at Sparta in the classical era.

Quote:And, let's face it: sexuality is irrelevant to the study of the past - as Leopold von Ranke said, what happens below the waist is not the subject of a serious historian. This simple lesson is something we must learn again.

I couldn't disagree with this more. Pairing, homo or hetero, is the fundamental building block of social politics. If it is important historically to know if Alcibiades was doing a Spartan queen, then it is equally important to know if Lysander was doing a Spartan King.
Paul M. Bardunias
MODERATOR: [url:2dqwu8yc]http://www.romanarmytalk.com/rat/viewtopic.php?t=4100[/url]
A Spartan, being asked a question, answered "No." And when the questioner said, "You lie," the Spartan said, "You see, then, that it is stupid of you to ask questions to which you already know the answer!"
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#56
I, personally, find the study of sexual history interesting. So for me it's an important part of my studies. I find it fascinating and eye opening that sex has been viewed quite differently throughout various times and places. Sex is one of many parts of the social fabric and so it has helped me understand who our ancestors were.

If I were to make a demand to myself and say 'The study of sex is not important to history' then what's the point of studying what people ate or wore on a daily basis. This is just my personal style of thought and I'm in no way implying others should think likewise.

I did state that I enjoy sexual history but I'm no expert so I won't dive into a precise debate with anyone here. I would just like to say that it seems some people are ignoring (perhaps conveniently) certain sources when they say Greek sexuality wasn't much different from ours today.

Also, there's nothing wrong with this debate as to whether X ancient civilization practiced pederasty or not. We debate till our brains hurt about troop numbers, Caesar's bald head or where exactly the Varus disaster was. Why is this any different. In essence, it isn't. On the surface, however, the difference is that this is a touchy feely subject (cheesy pun not intended) and people tend to put their two cents in and jump away.

Honestly, I'm a little disturbed by the level of defensiveness in a few of these posts as if the Greeks being pederasts would be the utmost travesty. I understand people are tired of lingering false generalizations about the Greeks and want historical accuracy but some of the tones I've seen spoke more than that. If I'm making false assumptions about some of your posts, I apologize.
Michael Paglia
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#57
Quote:I couldn't disagree with this more. Pairing, homo or hetero, is the fundamental building block of social politics. If it is important historically to know if Alcibiades was doing a Spartan queen, then it is equally important to know if Lysander was doing a Spartan King.

He, he, he. He was. Not certain about Alcibiades though.

It is, most definitely, a part of social politics and, in Sparta, of "kingly" politics...
Paralus|Michael Park

Ἐπὶ τοὺς πατέρας, ὦ κακαὶ κεφαλαί, τοὺς μετὰ Φιλίππου καὶ Ἀλεξάνδρου τὰ ὅλα κατειργασμένους

Wicked men, you are sinning against your fathers, who conquered the whole world under Philip and Alexander!

Academia.edu
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#58
Quote:In cultures where homosexual relationships are normal or preferred even when women are available, such as that of the Samurai and if we are to believe Aristotle, among the kelts, women are often degraded and considered either property or unclean. Sparta was clearly not this.

Where did you read that Paul? I have to admit, in all the books I've read on samurai and katana, as well as swordforum or samuraihistoryforum, I've never heard of that.
____________________________________________________________
Magnus/Matt
Du Courage Viens La Verité

Legion: TBD
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#59
Quote:He, he, he. He was. Not certain about Alcibiades though.

You are an evil man :twisted:
Paul M. Bardunias
MODERATOR: [url:2dqwu8yc]http://www.romanarmytalk.com/rat/viewtopic.php?t=4100[/url]
A Spartan, being asked a question, answered "No." And when the questioner said, "You lie," the Spartan said, "You see, then, that it is stupid of you to ask questions to which you already know the answer!"
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#60
Quote:Where did you read that Paul? I have to admit, in all the books I've read on samurai and katana, as well as swordforum or samuraihistoryforum, I've never heard of that.

Saikaku wrote a series of works on the contemporary Samurai class. His first book on samurai in 1687 "Nanshoku Okagami" "The Great Mirror of Manly Love" is dominated by homosexual affairs.

I may be wrong in calling this homosexuality, and implying with the modern term that it is among equals, since Nanshuko would seem to be between man and boy as with greeks, while Doseiaia is the word for man-man intercourse (Joshuku is with women). In the Meji reform, a wave of homophobia seems to have occurred.
Paul M. Bardunias
MODERATOR: [url:2dqwu8yc]http://www.romanarmytalk.com/rat/viewtopic.php?t=4100[/url]
A Spartan, being asked a question, answered "No." And when the questioner said, "You lie," the Spartan said, "You see, then, that it is stupid of you to ask questions to which you already know the answer!"
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