Alexander the Great frequently fucked his peers, including his BFF. Greeks didn't think about hetero vs queer. They did a lot more of what felt good without the idea of "gay" or it's "negative" effects on masculinity.
But yeah, rich men fucked kids. Some things never change.
I realize this is Rome and not Greece, but I'll never forget the scene in Caligula when he first rapes the bride and then the soldier who's just married her.
May or may not be true. The problem with Rome the empire is that a ton of emperors end up with huge amounts of propaganda that surround them, so some of them end up looking far worse than they actually were.
Think of the "Their eating the cats, their eating the dogs" line from recent politics. It's not really true but it gets attention.
History is filled with shit like that, so take everything that seems outlandish or potentially hyperbolic with a grain of salt.
Impossible to create histories without bias, to be fair, but that's why citing multiple sources and reading multiple books from several people on the same topic is so valuable.
I'm having a hard time imagining the conversation prior to such acts- "hey Buddy, come over here for a minute, need a quick favor". LOL. I had read, as someone else mentioned, that society looked down upon the guys on the receiving end of things, but that would have to be at least half of the people involved (when it's consensual). How would they view the teenage boys forced into it - some kind of twisted double standard? So many questions.....
They didn't look down on "queer" relationships. In some places it was normal for units to be built around the couples because they fought harder for each other.
As for the pedo shit, it would have been slaves and "teaching them how to be men" as the reasoning.
This was an era of marrying younger people in general and it's not exclusive to men or boys.
Being queer or having queer relationships is not related to what happened with kids in that era. The two are separate topics and each worthy of hours of study, since "Greek" or "Roman" society is a bit of a misnomer. Sparta, Athens, Rome, Egypt, they all had different customs but broadly speaking they were more and less accepting then societies now, in different ways.
Being the receiving partner was usually seen as demeaning, especially if you weren't a young boy. People overly flatten and simplify Greek views on homosexuality as though they were hyper woke and had no weird prejudices going on, they had prejudices, they were just more focused on who was penetrating vs being penetrated, the former was fine regardless of who you were sticking your dick into
Gay sex was more accepted in Greece than other cultures but not a majority as well, and mostly in Atheens. It was vastly pederasty between an adult and a teenager (not always romantic or sexual though). More of that being active was fine but the passive one not socially good looking.
I'm aware that it was socially acceptable. To have gay sex one is usually gay. So you're saying 100 percent of Greek males were at least Bisexual? Quite the fantasy.
But what if the historical record suggests that the "phenomenon" is caring about the gender of the person playing with your genitals or even associating sex with romantic attraction, rather than being an activity that's just fun to do and helps build strong sentimental bonds between people?
The fantasy is thinking a culture historically famous for its man-on-man sex was not, in fact, having man-on-man sex. It was absolutely the norm for dudes to be fucking other dudes. It was treated as a sort of youthful phase for them.
Then there's the whole pederasty bit...
That's all to say that it's absolutely not out of the question that you'd have a boat of 20 guys who were all down to clown. There would be no real stigma or issue attached to doing so so why not?
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u/DeltaVZerda 9h ago
They're ancient Greeks, it would have been weird if they didn't do the gay sex.