When people use the word "homosexual" or "bisexual", they mean it in the modern sense. The word didn't even exist at the time of the Greeks, obviously.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Exactly my point. It's just quibbling over words. The Greeks even had a word for the love between men. It was the same acts, same passions, same ole same ole', but different words. Just the word wasn't "homosexual". The only difference was in how the culture reacted (acceptance, encouragement), but having sex with a man is having sex with a man, despite whatever label you wish to apply to it. To the modern person studying Greece, even avoiding the traps of ethnocentrism, homosexual, bisexual, etc... are still pretty good descriptions. Like modern homosexuality, it's terribly shallow, but not off the mark

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"I have this theory that the Apollo missions were faked when NASA found out that general relativity was wrong because the Earth was expanding due to the Sun's iron core being influenced by magnetic waves from the electric universe after being perturbed by Planet X and thereby causing global warming. Where should I start a thread about this?" ~ ToSeek

"Those are the people that wonder how a thermos knows whether to keep something hot or keep something cold." ~ NeoWatcher

From their perspective, they were. (The Confederates and the Spartans both.) That's the fun thing about storytelling--a lot of things depend on whose perspective you're using.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Running your own city, even if it has slaves in it, is still living in a freeer society than one that's been conquered by a foreign empire; then you'd still have the slaves but even those who once mastered the slaves aren't free either; nobody is. And Sparta was defending not just itself, though, but also the rest of Greece, and this was when democracy arose in Greek cities, although Sparta wasn't democratic yet.

And you don't have to have sex with a mentor or student; you just have to learn, pass on knowledge, and strive to do well to impress each other. Sexualizing that kind of relationship is tremendously missing the point.

The thing is they called it "their" city, but they weren't the only people who lived in it. I'm not sure, but I think they were even a minority in "their" city.

The ancient Greeks had a different opinion on that, apparently.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Just as an aside, for another fictional account of the Battle of Thermopylae, I highly recommend Stephen Pressfield's Gates of Fire.

What I meant wasn't that the way they did certain relationships wasn't the only way it could be done, but that the way they're constantly said to have done it isn't what it was really about... not that they missed the point, but that the people who miss the point are the modernites who say that if two men are close at all then sex must be the only explanation. Close personal (and professional) relationships, yes, but a close relationship between two people just does NOT mean sex. We just smear the idea of sex all over everything even when it's not really there, not just with ancient Greek examples like Achilles's cousin magically turning into a "lover" in later retellings, but also in modern contexts, like the way some audience members will swear there's "obvious sexual chemistry" between every pair of characters that ever appears on screen together, no matter what the characters' actual relationships are like.

Well, it seems you already have your mind made up about this. I guess there's no point in arguing over it. It's not even very relevant to the topic.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

No, you're wrong. You're painting your modernist interpretations of the mentor role upon an entirely different Greek culture

Wether you find it hard to accept or not, pederasty was commonplace in Greece. The very word itself, pederasty, is Greek, which stems from "pais", which means "boy", and "erastes", which means "love". Socrates and Plato write of it, for instance. As does Xenophon, who, like Sappho, also writes of lesbian pederasty.

The older man was known as the "erastes", or "befreinder", and the younger partner was known as the "eromenos", or "beloved".

The only moral quibbles at the time are over wether or not such "love" between men/boys (and women/girls) should be penatrative, or "consummated", or "chaste", or "unconsummated". Note that in both examples other forms of stimulation outside of coitus are accepted.

Plays were written about it. "Dialogues" were devoted to the topic. Art, in paintings, murals, pottery, and sculpture, were made to depict it. This art is often quite graphic and leaves nothing to the imagination, hence I shall not link to it from here.

There are muddied waters, assuredly - Achilles in the earliest writings was said to have lost his cousin, only to likely have this changed by later Greek writers, in a culture of pederasty, as his lover. The Spartans were said to have practiced strictly chaste pederasty, and coitus was forbidden by law. Yet the Athenians had a name for sodomy which translates, roughly, as "Do it the Spartan (Laconic) way".

These examples, however, are quibbles of fact in an environment in which it was known to exist.

The modernist re-writing of history would be your attempt to minimize or disguise the practice. Much as Gillian points out with Spartans owning slaves, the story isn't perfectly what we'd like it to be in the 21st century. The story has slaves and child lovers. It must simply be accepted in the context of the culture.

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"I have this theory that the Apollo missions were faked when NASA found out that general relativity was wrong because the Earth was expanding due to the Sun's iron core being influenced by magnetic waves from the electric universe after being perturbed by Planet X and thereby causing global warming. Where should I start a thread about this?" ~ ToSeek

"Those are the people that wonder how a thermos knows whether to keep something hot or keep something cold." ~ NeoWatcher

No, I'm restating what I've seen before from more authoritative sources than myself. And apparently, I can now add you to the sources I've seen this from before:The fact that you gave examples/quibbles is the whole point. I have not disputed homosexuality's or bisexuality's existence or acceptance in ancient Greece; I have disputed only its being expected of all in general, a universal standard. There's a difference between everybody doing something and everybody thinking it's fine for others to do something. (And there's also a difference between the most drastic example of something and the thing's normal or most common form.)

There is no such thing... there's just an opposition to exaggeration. The situation you described yourself is quite different, precisely because of those details and variations you named, from simply "They all did this". You actually made precisely my own point for me , that there's more to it than the simplistic modern-legend version that often gets repeated.

OT--this is a common tactic in slang. English examples include French kissing, letters, and postcards, Dutch courage, and Indian giving.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Apparently we're both making the same point I either was not clear in reading your posts or they were not clear. Either way, yes, you are correct. Not every Greek practiced this. Although commonplace, it was not mandatory or universal. Forgive me if I misread your position - your post seemed geared to denying homosexuality and pederasty and Greece, or at least I read it as such. Hope this clears things up

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"I have this theory that the Apollo missions were faked when NASA found out that general relativity was wrong because the Earth was expanding due to the Sun's iron core being influenced by magnetic waves from the electric universe after being perturbed by Planet X and thereby causing global warming. Where should I start a thread about this?" ~ ToSeek

"Those are the people that wonder how a thermos knows whether to keep something hot or keep something cold." ~ NeoWatcher

What about Freedom Fries?

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"I have this theory that the Apollo missions were faked when NASA found out that general relativity was wrong because the Earth was expanding due to the Sun's iron core being influenced by magnetic waves from the electric universe after being perturbed by Planet X and thereby causing global warming. Where should I start a thread about this?" ~ ToSeek

"Those are the people that wonder how a thermos knows whether to keep something hot or keep something cold." ~ NeoWatcher

This actually just reminded me of something - the interservice rivalry mentioned earlier. As a former Army Ranger in a family of Marines, one of whom, my cousin, was Force Recon, family gatherings, where the Coors and Bud flow freely, can sometimes end up, err.... heated. We start running our mouths about which service is less manly, prone to pederasty/homosexuality, etc... until sometimes the wives step in. "Jarhead" and "Leatherneck" are the only example of a name for Marines I can think of that are forum-safe. Most of our expressions for Marines very much resemble the sentiment of "Do it the Laconic way" And, of course, most of the Marine expressions for the Army are very similar

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"I have this theory that the Apollo missions were faked when NASA found out that general relativity was wrong because the Earth was expanding due to the Sun's iron core being influenced by magnetic waves from the electric universe after being perturbed by Planet X and thereby causing global warming. Where should I start a thread about this?" ~ ToSeek

"Those are the people that wonder how a thermos knows whether to keep something hot or keep something cold." ~ NeoWatcher

Yet they were the ones that attacked Greece. No one asked them to conquer anybody so it's understandable that the Greeks rejected their "benevolence."

Besides, we shouldn't forget that it's a comic book movie. It's not supposed to be historically accurate in any way. For instance they changed the way the real Spartans fought in order to make the movie more entertaining. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0416449/trivia

Sadly, isn't doesn't open here until Good Friday 6th April. I believe this movie marks the beginning of an absolutely terrific movie year.

Is the comic as historically inaccurate as the film? I've never read it.

Anyway, call me an old geezer, but I find historical fiction that is inaccurate just to make things very simple and more exciting rather dull. I don't care how many colorful explosions they add to it.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Agreed. I just thought I'd throw that in.

I think that was my original point

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"I have this theory that the Apollo missions were faked when NASA found out that general relativity was wrong because the Earth was expanding due to the Sun's iron core being influenced by magnetic waves from the electric universe after being perturbed by Planet X and thereby causing global warming. Where should I start a thread about this?" ~ ToSeek

"Those are the people that wonder how a thermos knows whether to keep something hot or keep something cold." ~ NeoWatcher