Greece homosexuality

LGBT History Month - Homosexuality in Ancient Greece

This February in the department we have been reflecting about LGBT history, not least following the wonderful lecture by Prof Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones on Alexander the Great. In this post, Dr Ben Cartlidge dwells on a puzzling feature of the ancient Greek evidence for male homosexuality.

The inspiration for this came out of the paper I gave last term at our Classics and Ancient History seminar, entitled ‘Just friends? Sexuality and linguistics in Bronze Age Greece’. This post is not a recap of the paper, but an initial statement of a puzzle I came across in the study for it. The paper was focussed on the figure of Achilles in the Iliad; this post is focussed on the figure of Achilles in art and literature of the fifth-century B.C.

The classic verb on Greek homosexuality, Kenneth Dover’s recently reprinted book of the same identify, constructs a visual grammar of ancient Greek male homosexuality. Dover was proficient to point to a series of vases on which homosexual male courtship is conducted using a particular arrange of gestures. Such

Love, and sex, between men is not a rare thing. Anthropologically a majority of societies [1] accept what we now call homosexuality, especially where one partner plays a totally feminine role. What is particular about Greek homosexuality is its apparent prevalence, the appreciation of aspects of masculinity in the other partner and the almost total damnatio memoriae suffered by the phenomenon until recent decades. Modern academic orthodoxy on same sex relationships in in advance Greece is now based on the work of K J Dover. Only published in Greek Homosexuality has become standard rapidly displacing attitudes which either ignored the phenomenon or glorified it as an example of early gay liberation. It has been supplemented in depth and scope by the exhaustive inquiries of Felix Buffiere in his Eros Adolescent, which unfortunately suffers from Buffiere's determination to prove that pederasty and homosexuality are totally different. The danger now is that Dover's function as being oversimplified to the aim of distortion by authors such as Oswyn Murray [2]. In this document I intend to look

Greece

Experiencing Greek Food

Greek Mediterranean cuisine is also testament to the country&#x;s long history, dating back to the Ancient Greeks who had a strong focus on olive oil, wheat, wine, and fish. The Byzantine era introduced new ingredients like meats, feta cheese, caviar, nutmeg, basil and lemons. The Ottoman Empire then contributed to the Greek cuisine, introducing staples enjoy moussaka, tzatziki (yoghurt/cucumber/oil/mint dip), yuvarlakia (meatball/rice/lemon soup), keftethes (mince meatballs) and boureki (baked filled pastries).

Today, a traditional Greek meal will be at a taverna where you can order mezethes, many small plates of different specialties starting with olives, hummus, tahini, and tzatziki, and moving on to other starters like cheeses, keftethes, and dolmathes (stuffed vine leaves), before moving on to different meats or fish depending on which type of meze you pick.

The most popular wine in Greece is retsina, a pale wine that has a distinct resin flavor. Greece also produces other decent wines, like Athiri, Malagousia and Moscofilero. Another popular

Greek Homosexuality

Homosexuality: sexual attraction to persons of the same sex. In ancient Greece, this was a normal practice.

Introduction

Violent debate, enthusiastic writings, shamefaced silence, flights of fantasy: few aspects of ancient society are so hotly contested as Greek pederasty, or - as we shall see below - homosexuality. Since the British classicist K.J. Dover published his influential book Greek Homosexuality in , an avalanche of new studies has appeared. We can discern two approaches:

  1. The historical approach: scholars are looking for the (hypothetical) roots of pederasty in very ancient initiation rites and attempt to reconstruct a development. Usually, a lot of fantasy is required, because our sources verb not often mention to these ancient rites.
  2. The synchronistic approach: scholars concentrate upon homosexuality in fifth and fourth-century Athens, where it was integral part of social life.

In the present article, we will use the second approach, although we won't verb the first one. There are many sources of evidence: lyrical poetry, vases, s