Greek Homosexuality

Shouldn't be a long article

I think I speak for all of my subscribers, when I say that it is extremely annoying listening to people say that the “Greeks were gay”. It’s something which you can’t criticize without suggesting that you have skin in the game, and it’s a nigh-unfalsifiable argument. Obviously, *some* Greeks were gay, or at least bisexual. There will never be an answer to the extent of this homosexuality. Also, there isn’t ever going to be an answer to what extent pederastic relationships in Greece, on average, were sexual. We know that it was very socially taboo for such relationships to involve oral or anal sex, however, so when people post that Kratos meme they’re just plain wrong (also, Kratos was Spartan, and according to Xenophon the Spartans didn’t accept sexual pederasty).

We know many influential Greeks participated in the pederastic system. Pindar, Theognis, and Philip II are examples. We also know many influential Greeks were against the pederastic system. Plato, Lycurgus, and Parmenides are examples. Some seemed to have mixed views on it, particularly Socrates. I’ve seen some Socrates fans say Socrates was entirely opposed to it (as far as the sexual element went), and never actually had intimacy with Alcibiades. Others say Socrates was not necessarily opposed to it. I’ve also heard people say Socrates was against it, but was personally bisexual and so struggled. Plato was in favor of it early on but against it later in life. Aristotle didn’t speak a lot about it but talked about it in the same vein as pathological behavior like pulling your hair out and eating dirt. Alexander the Great was against it if you trust Plutarch, which I think is fair in this case. I’ll obviously trust Xenophon over Plutarch when it comes to Sparta since Xenophon actually lived contemporarily to it.

What can I say? It was a flaw in a society which I otherwise admire, and no I do not think it is a sign of moral decline. I think it is a sign of a reoccurring issue in societies which are too haywire with sexual segregation. The Greeks didn’t make it any better by delaying age of marriage for men into their late 20s. Aristotle and Plato recognize Crete as the birthplace of the pederastic system, around the late 7th century BC. Modern archaeologists and historians corroborate this, it’s not controversial, you can look it up. So no, just because *some* Classical authors were attributing pederastic relationships to Achaean heroes does not actually suggest that those Achaean heroes were in any sort of pederastic relationship. Achilles and Patroclus were, in other words, probably not gay. There’s no evidence that they were gay. Reading the Iliad, I never once thought to myself that they sounded gay. And more to the point, attributions of pederastic relationships to gods past the late Archaic era were recognized by Greeks to have been recent editions to older Myths. Pindar flat out states in his first Olympian Ode that he wrote Pelops to be swept away by an infatuated Poseidon because he didn’t like the previous and more common form of the myth involving Pelops getting diced up and eaten. Understandable, I guess. Plato (in Laws) also similarly suggests that the myth of Ganymede was well-known by Athenians to have been altered in Crete to justify their ‘perverse’ pederastic system. Albeit, Plato and Aristotle are skeptical of a lot of myths, but here it is suggested that this was Athenian public opinion.

The reason pederasty was attributed to deities was because pederasty was understood as normal enough that it could be used to represent divine favor. In older myths this was done through claiming divine ancestry (ex: Thetis and Achilles), or it was done through the person favored being an instance of whatever profession or position that deity is a patron of (for example, Athena’s relationship with Odysseus and Heracles). Its purpose in these myths is not to alter the character of the gods or portray them as lusty, and clearly it was not recognized as “canonical information” about these deities…

So, you know, now that I’ve actually sort of defended Greek religion from idiotic morons who claim you cannot be a Hellenist without worshipping “gay gods” (apparently Homer and Hesiod were not Hellenists!) I do want to defend Greek civilization, which I think is among the best, in spite of its obvious flaw. Which, it obviously is. It is a sullying of a good system (the pedagogic system and the veneration of male beauty and athleticism) by adding fetishistic (unnatural) carnal desire to it, first of all. Secondly, no young man should be disgraced by being ogled at or touched by another man. No, young men were not sodomized. The Greeks, who were clearly smarter than us, understood that oral and anal sex were not only excessively degrading to the receiving end but also presumably unhealthy and unhygienic, which is why I don’t include them in this description.

But why did pederasty become common in Greece? Well, again, we’ll never know how common it was and to what degree of physicality the average pederastic relationship was. But Aristotle seems to credit the creation of pederasty to the ruling authority of Crete, who used it as a means of population control. This was meant to sustain the communal Cretan system not too different from the Spartan system. Men were delayed from marriage, and so in the meantime were presumably encouraged to relieve their passions on adolescent males. It’s quite interesting since in Sparta the exact opposite emerged, even though we’re dealing with similar systems and both Dorian in origin. Was this, perhaps, a product of Minoan influence? The Cretan system was, after all, attributed to King Minos, who predated Dorian rule on the island. Or maybe it was of oriental origin? Aristotle does suggest that Near Eastern peoples are ehh, soft, effeminate, you know. They too were no strangers to homosexuality and gender segregation, if we go by what the Bible says. I think it’s possible that it originated from the east. The Persians by Alexander’s time engaged in some things like that, although I think Aristotle also might have said somewhere that the Persians got that from the Greeks, not the other way around. I don’t remember. If you want to go find that, I guess you can look it up.

It seems that the reason pederasty spread outside of Crete has to do with the extreme sex segregation which began during the Archaic period in Greece. Women were only expected to leave their house, let alone speak to men outside the family, if necessary. We see in the Islamic world, despite Islam being quite blatantly against homosexuality, that quasi-pederastic attitudes also emerge. Homoerotic poetry is not uncommon in Andalusian courts. Leaders like Mehmed the Conqueror and Shah Abbas have been suggested to have certain… Inclinations, shall we say… Towards their youthful cup-bearers. The Ottomans were historically lax on homosexuality compared to Europeans, and reportedly forced Devshirme into pederastic relationships fairly often. Of course, in contemporary Afghanistan, we have all heard of the infamous ‘Bacha Bazi’ sexual abuse tradition which the Taliban has put the kibosh on. And also there is the stereotype of male sex abuse in prisons and the military. Point being, all of these have the same thing in common. Islamic society, Classical Greece, prison, they all are very sex-segregated and last for a long time during adulthood. In less sex-segregated areas like Sparta, and later on Rome and Germania, there is a much stronger stigma against pederasty. Roman conservatives viewed the practice as a violation of the dignity of the younger citizen, and also associated it with Greek decadence. Homosexual relationships between freeborn men were legally persecuted. To allow oneself to be sexually acted upon by another man in the military also might have come with the punishment of Fustarium, or cudgeling to death. It isn’t entirely clear.

Let me be clear, I am fully in favor of sex-segregated society. This is merely the most extreme end of sex-segregation where these issues start to arise, and they are not a given. Especially not in societies which are less communal. That is my theory, at least. Aristotle seems to also think this. When he’s talking about the Spartans he says that their love for their women is related to their disinterest in pederasty, but of course for the Spartans they gave their women the disastrous ability to inherit their husband’s land and it resulted in the downfall of Sparta. Very sad stuff.