Homosexuality In Greece
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Homosexuality in the militaries of ancient Greece was regarded as contributing to morale.[1] Although the primary example is the Sacred Band of Thebes, a unit said to have been formed of same-sex couples, the Spartan tradition of military heroism has also been explained in light of strong emotional bonds resulting from homosexual relationships.[2] Various ancient Greek sources record incidents of courage in battle and interpret them as motivated by homoerotic bonds.
Some Greek philosophers wrote on the subject of homosexuality in the military. In Plato's Symposium, the interlocutor Phaedrus commented on the power of male sexual relationships to improve bravery in the military:[3]
... he would prefer to die many deaths: while as for leaving the one he loves in a lurch, or not succoring him in peril, no man is such a craven that the influence of Love cannot inspire him with a courage that makes him equal to the bravest born
However, the Symposium is a dialectical exploration of the nature of true love, in which Phaedrus' views are soon found to be inadequate compared to the transcendent vision of Socrates, who:
...seizes this favourable moment in the talk at Agathon's party to suggest that visible beauty is the most obvious and distinct reflection in our terrene life of an eternal, immutable Beauty, perceived not with the eye but with the mind. He preaches no avoidance of the contest with appetite, but rather the achievement of a definite victory over the lower elements of love-passion, and the pursuit of beauty on higher and higher levels until, as in a sudden flash, its ultimate and rewarding essence is revealed.[4]
Xenophon, while not criticizing the relationships themselves, ridiculed militaries that made them the sole basis of unit formation:
they sleep with their loved ones, yet station them next to themselves in battle ... with them (Eleians, Thebans) it's a custom, with us a disgrace ... placing your loved one next to you seems to be a sign of distrust ... The Spartans ... make our loved ones such models of perfection that even if stationed with foreigners rather than with their lovers they are ashamed to desert their companion.[5]
According to tradition, the Greeks structured military units along tribal lines, a practice attributed to Nestor in the Homeric epics. The Theban military commander Pammenes, however, is supposed to have advocated military organization based on pairs of lovers:[6]
Homer's Nestor was not well skilled in ordering an army when he advised the Greeks to rank tribe and tribe ... he should have joined lovers and their beloved. For men of the same tribe little value one another when dangers press; but a band cemented by friendship grounded upon love is never to be broken.
One such example took place during the Lelantine War between the Eretrians and the Chalcidians. In a decisive battle the Chalcidians called for the aid of a warrior named Cleomachus. Cleomachus answered their request and brought his lover along with him. He charged against the Eretians and brought the Chalcidians to victory at the cost of his own life. It was said he was inspired with love during the battle. Afterwards the Chalcidians, erected a tomb for him in their marketplace and reversed their negative view of homosexuality and began to honor it.[7] Aristotle attributed a popular local song to the event:[8]
Ye lads of grace and sprung from worthy stock
Grudge not to brave men converse with your beauty
In cities of Chalcis, Love, looser of limbs
Thrives side by side with courage
The importance of these relationships in military formation was not without controversy. According to Xenophon, the Spartans abhorred the thought of using the relationships as the basis of unit formation for placing too much significance on sexuality rather than talent. This was due to their founder Lycurgus who attacked lusts on physical beauty regarding it as shameful. Xenophon asserted that in some city-states the lovers would not even have conversations with one another. He said this type of behavior was horrible because it was entirely based on physical attractions:[9]
If as was evident it was not an attachment to the soul, but a yearning solely towards the body, Lycurgus stamped this thing as foul.
Nonetheless city states that employed the practice in determining military formation enjoyed some success. The Thebans had one such regiment as the core of their entire army. They attributed this group called the Sacred Band of Thebes for making Thebes the most powerful city-state for a generation until its fall to Philip II of Macedon. Philip II of Macedon was so impressed with their bravery during the battle he erected a monument that still stands today on their gravesite. He also gave a harsh criticism of the Spartan views of the band:[10]
Perish miserably they who think that these men did or suffered aught disgraceful.
One of the prominent Greek military figures enjoying such a relationship was Epaminondas, considered the greatest warrior-statesmen of ancient Thebes by many, including the Roman historian Diodorus Siculus. He had two male lovers: Asopichus and Caphisodorus, the latter died with him at Mantineia in battle. They were buried together, something usually reserved for a husband and wife in Greek society. Another pair of warrior-lovers—Harmodius and Aristogeiton—credited with the downfall of tyranny in Athens and the rise of democracy became the emblem of the city.
^ Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (University of California Press, 1994, 2009), p. 124.
^ Hanson, The Western Way of War, p. 124.
^ Plato, Symposium 178e–179a.
^ W.R.M. Lamb, Plato: Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias, Loeb Classical Library (1975 reprint), p. 76
^ Xenophon, Symposium 8.34–5.
^ Plutarch, Pelopidas 18.2; discussed by K.J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Harvard University Press, 1978, 1989), p. 192, and Louis Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization (Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 74.
^ Eva Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World (Yale University Press, 1992, 2002, originally published 1988 in Italian), p. 71.
^ Artistotle, Eroticus fr. 98 Rose (= Plutarch, Amatorius 760f), quoted at Cantarella p. 71 and Crompton p. 10 from the translation of F.C. Babbit, Plutarch: Moralia, vol. 9. Loeb Classical Library no. 425 (London, repr. 1961) p. 377.
^ Xenophon, Spartan Constitution 10.3–4.
^ Plutarch, Pelopidas 18.4.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to LGBT history in Greece.
Tomb of the Diver symposium Homosexuality in ancient Greek was tolerated and regarded as no big deal, and, by some, even considered even fashionable. But apparently not everybody. Orpheus was dismembered by the Maenads for advocating homosexual love.
Among the Greeks homosexuality was common, especially in the military. Some have argued that homosexuality may have been the norm for both men and women and heterosexual sex was primarily just to have babies.
Sexual contact occurred among males in the bath houses. Gymnasiums, where naked men and boys, exercised and worked out together, were regarded as breeding grounds for homo-erotic impulses. At the extreme end, members of Magna Mat cults dressed in women's clothes and sometimes castrated themselves.
Some have argued that homosexual marriages of some kind were widely accepted in classical antiquity and that the medieval church continued the pagan practice. There arguments though tend to be weak and based on anecdotal material. There is no proof that such marriages existed in Greek and Roman culture except among the elite in imperial Roman smart set. Other evidence of homosexual marriages come from isolated or marginal regions, such as post-Minoan Crete, Scythia, Albania, and Serbia, all of which had unique and sometimes bizarre local traditions.
In ancient times men sometimes made a pledge by putting their hands on their testicles as if to say, "If I am lying you can cut off my balls." The practice of making a pledge on the Bible is said to have its roots in this practice.
Categories with related articles in this website: Ancient Greek History (48 articles) factsanddetails.com; Ancient Greek Art and Culture (21 articles) factsanddetails.com; Ancient Greek Life, Government and Infrastructure (29 articles) factsanddetails.com; Ancient Greek and Roman Religion and Myths (35 articles) factsanddetails.com; Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy and Science (33articles) factsanddetails.com; Ancient Persian, Arabian, Phoenician and Near East Cultures (26 articles) factsanddetails.com.
Websites on Ancient Greece: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Greece sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Hellenistic World sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; BBC Ancient Greeks bbc.co.uk/history/; Canadian Museum of History historymuseum.ca; Perseus Project - Tufts University; perseus.tufts.edu ; ; Gutenberg.org gutenberg.org; British Museum ancientgreece.co.uk; Illustrated Greek History, Dr. Janice Siegel, Department of Classics, Hampden–Sydney College, Virginia hsc.edu/drjclassics ; The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization pbs.org/empires/thegreeks ; Oxford Classical Art Research Center: The Beazley Archive beazley.ox.ac.uk ; Ancient-Greek.org ancientgreece.com; Metropolitan Museum of Art metmuseum.org/about-the-met/curatorial-departments/greek-and-roman-art; The Ancient City of Athens stoa.org/athens; The Internet Classics Archive kchanson.com ; Cambridge Classics External Gateway to Humanities Resources web.archive.org/web; Ancient Greek Sites on the Web from Medea showgate.com/medea ; Greek History Course from Reed web.archive.org; Classics FAQ MIT rtfm.mit.edu; 11th Brittanica: History of Ancient Greece sourcebooks.fordham.edu ;Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy iep.utm.edu;Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu
Mary Renault's The Mask of Apollo contains descriptions of romantic homosexual affairs.
Alexander the Great probably had gay lovers. Although he was married twice some historians claim Alexander was a homosexual who was in love with his childhood friend, closest companion and general---Hephaestion. Another lover was a Persian eunuch named Bagoas. But many say that his truest love was his horse Bucephalas.
Relationships between older men and teenage boys was believed to be common. In Clouds Aristophanes wrote: "How to be modest, sitting so as not to expose his crotch, smoothing out the sand when he arose so that the impress of his buttocks would not be visible, and how to be strong...The emphasis was on beauty...A beautiful boy is a good boy. Education is bound up with male love, an idea that is part of the pro-Spartan ideology of Athens...A youth who is inspired by his love of an older male will attempt to emulate him, the heart of educational experience. The older male in his desire of the beauty of the youth will do whatever he can improve it."
In Aristophanes's The Birds , one older man says to another with disgust: "Well, this is a fine state of affairs, you demanded desperado! You meet my son just as he comes out of the gymnasium, all rise from the bath, and don't kiss him, you don't say a word to him, you don't hug him, you don't feel his balls! And you're supposed to be a friend of ours!"
Homosexuality and athleticism were said to have gone hand in hand in ancient Greece. Ron Grossman wrote in Chicago Tribune, “Far from finding homosexuality and athleticism mutually exclusive, they considered gay sex an excellent training regimen and an inspiration for military valor." Plato said, “if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made of lovers they would overcome the world."
Homosexuality appears to have been the norm in ancient Sparta for both men and women with more than a touch of sadomasochism thrown in. The Spartans believed that beating was good for the soul. Heterosexual sex was primarily just to have babies. Young boys were paired with older boys in a relationship that had homosexual overtones. Plutarch wrote: “They were favored with the society of young lovers among the reputable young men...The boy lovers also shared with them in their honor and disgrace."
When a boy reached 18, they were trained in combat. At twenty they moved into a permanent barrack-style living and eating arrangement with other men. They married at any time, but lived with men. At 30 they were elected to citizenship. Before a Sparta wedding , the bride was usually kidnapped, her hair was cut short and she dressed as a man, and laid down on a pallet on the floor. "Then," Plutarch wrote, "the bride groom...slipped stealthily into the room where his bride lay, loosed her virgin's zone, and bore her in his arms to the marriage-bed. Then after spending a short time with her, he went away composedly to his usual quarters, there to sleep with the other men."||
The Sacred Band was an army unit and warrior caste from Thebes, northwest of Athens. Ranked second in fierceness after the Spartans and celebrated in the song Boeotia , the region of Greece from which they were from," they were often paired with theirs lovers under the assumption they would fight harder for their lover than they would for themselves. It was said they never were defeated in battle until Greece lost its independence to Philip II of Macedonia. But even then Philip was moved by their bravery. Plutarch wrote: “When after the battle, Philip was surveying the dead, and stopped at the place where the 300 were lying and learned that thus was a band of lovers and beloved, he burst into tears and said, “Perish, miserably they who think that these men died or suffered anything disgraceful."
Alma-Tadema's view of a
woman reading poetry Sappho wrote sensuously about love between females. The word "lesbian" comes from her home island of Lesbos. Born in 610 B.C. in Lesbos, off of Asia Minor, she was probably from a noble family and her father was probably a wine merchant. Little is known about her because she didn't write much about herself and few others did.
In Sappho's time, Lesbos was inhabited by the Aeolians, a people known for free thinking and liberal sexual customs. Women had more freedom than they did in other places in the Greek world and Sappho is believed to have received a quality education and moved in intellectual circles.
Sappho formed a society for women in which women were taught arts such as music, poetry and chorus singing for marriage ceremonies. Although the relationship between Sappho and the women in her society is unclear she wrote about love and jealousy she felt for them. In spite of this, she had a child named Kleis and may have been married.
In his book The First Poets , Michael Schmidt speculates on where she was born and raised on Lesbos: was it in the western village of Eressus in rough, barren country, or in the cosmopolitan eastern seaport of Mytilene? He subtly evokes her poetic style: ''Sappho's art is to dovetail, smooth and rub down, to avoid the over-emphatic.'' And he aptly compares the relationship between voice and musical accompaniment in Sappho's performance of her poems to the recitative in opera. [Source: Camille Paglia, New York Times, August 28, 2005]
Over the centuries passionate arguments over Sappho's character, public life and sexual orientation have sprung up. Even though there is no direct reference to homosexual or heterosexual sex religious leaders---including Pope Gregory VIII, who called her a "lewd nymphomaniac in 1073---ordered her books burned.
See Sappho Under Poetry Under Literature
Paul Halsall wrote in “People with a History: An Online Guide to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans History”: “For modern western gays and lesbians, Ancient Greece has long functioned as sort of homosexual Arcadia. Greek culture was, and is, highly privileged as one of the foundations of Western culture and the culture of sexuality apparent in its literature was quite different from the "repression" experienced by moderns. The sense of possibility the Greek experienced opened up can be seen in a scene in E.M. Forster's “Maurice” where the hero is seen reading Plato's Symposium at Cambridge.
“It would be too simple, however, to see Greek homosexuality as just a more idyllic form than modern versions. As scholars have gone to work on the -- plentiful -- material several tropes have become common. One set of scholars (slightly old-fashioned now) looks for the "origin" of Greek homosexuality, as if it were a new type of game, and argues that, since the literature depicts homosexual eros among the fifth-century aristocracy, it functioned as sort of fashion among that group. This is rather like arguing that because nineteenth-century English novels depict romance as an activity of the gentry and aristocracy, other classes did not have romantic relationships.
“Another, now more prevalent, group of scholars argue that term "homosexual", referring they say to sexual orientation, is inappropriate to discussions of Greek sexual worlds. Rather they stress the age dissonance in literary homoerotic ideals, and the importance of "active" and "passive" roles. Some stress these themes so intently that it comes as a surprise to discover that we now know the names of quite number of long-term Greek homosexual couples.
“As a result of such scholarly discussions, it is no longer possible to portray Greece as a homosexual paradise. It remains the case that the Greek experience of eros was quite different from experiences in the modern world, and yet continues, because of Greece's persistent influence on modern norms to be of special interest."
Paul Halsall wrote in a 1986 graduate school paper titled “Homosexual Eros in Early Greece”: “Homer and Hesiod give some idea of pre-archaic mores concerning erotic desire. From the archaic period itself we have a wealth of erotic poetry - Sappho, the lone female witness, Anacreon, Ibycus and Solon all writing lyric poetry and Theognis, whose elegiac corpus was later conveniently divided into political and pederastic sections. Classical sources include Aristophanes' comedy and some comments from Thucydides and Herodotus. Plato: writes frequently about eros, above all in the Symposium and Phraedrus but just as instructive are comments in other dialogues about Socrates relationships with a number of younger men. The speech of Aischines against Timarchus gives a good example of oratory on homosexual acts from the 4th century." Another “group of sources are scraps of information we can draw from the vocabulary used about erotic desire, information we have about laws and privileges in certain cities and modern prosopography that can identify phenomena like the homosexualisation of mythical persons which occurred in our period.
“Homer's heroes have strong emotional bonds with each other but erotic desire is directed at women. Achilles' love for Patroclus was seen later as homosexual but despite the effect of Patroclus' death no physical relationship is mentioned. Hesiod is not much concerned with eros at all but he is clearly describing a country life where a man's chief end was to produce sons. There have been attempts to say that homosexuality entered Greek culture with the arrival of the Dorians. The wide acceptance of homosexuality in Dorian cities is cited as the grounds for this. Our earliest evidence of a culture of homosexual eros comes however from Ionian Solon and Aeolian Sappho rather than Dorian Tyrtaeus. It is not then a question of homosexuality coming from anywhere. What we have is a situation where early sources show no emphasis on homosexuality then fairly quickly toward's the end of the 7th century the appearance of homosexual poems, followed on by vases and more poems in the early 6th century. The geographical extent of the phenomenon makes attempts to ascribe homosexuality to more leisure on behalf of the Athenian aristocracy untenable. Sparta was not at
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