#ancient sexuality

[thatblewateverystrand]

Sex acts the ancient Greek approved:

Buttfucking

Intercrural

Circle jerk

Footjob (in a "kinda weird but to each his own" attitude)

Sex act the ancient Greek disapproved:

Oral, both blowjobs and cunnilingus for some reason

[ghouljams]

ghost lets that f word rip out of his mouth any moment he can tbh

ghost is genuinely the worst offender on base with it too, soap and gaz kept a running total of how many times a day he said it once and could not share the results with price because they were afraid he'd ship it over to one of the conduct offices.

he's quick with it and it hits so naturally at this point that it doesn't even register on soap/gaz's radar anymore.

and the worst part- the worst part is that he is so clearly down with the gays. genuinely blows gaz's mind. this man is so far from being pc and yet here he is talking about some transfem he took home the other night and how "suckin' a bird off doesn't make me queer." or the time soap watched ghost grope some guy at the pub and when he asked ghost about it was hit with, "ass is ass." like what are you doing ghost? what is happening here?

soap asks if he's bi and ghost gives him the most confused look and a "the fuck ya just call me?" before going back to watching footie (and immediately calling the ref a f-).

[thatblewateverystrand]

Reblog if you can drink three tumblrs of wine neat

lynn roller’s the ideology of the eunuch priest is a good article but i do not get this argument:

The language used to describe the Galli’s private activities in Rome was not so tolerant. Most references to the Galli make it clear that many Romans viewed them with utter contempt, calling them “pretty things”, “little doves”, “half-women” (Anthologia Palatina 7.222). Galli were clearly perceived as disgusting creatures, whose depraved character was evident both through their distinctive appearance, marked by brightly colored costumes, unusual headdresses, frizzy hairstyles and perfume, and also through a propensity for licentious indulgence in alcohol and sexual activities. Moreover, the Galli’s degraded conduct was directly linked to their lack of masculinity. In Anthologia Palatina 7.233 we meet for the first time a Gallus described in feminine grammatical construct; this was Aristion (a masculine name), “she who used to toss her hair among the pines in honor of Cybele”, as the poet tells us, “and she could drink three tumblrs of wine neat”. And there was Trygonion, the Little Dove, who “was the flower of the eunuch band in their clubhouse; she alone among the half-women [eunuchs] loved the rites of Aphrodite” (Anthologia Palatina 7.222.2-4).

because to me these epigrams are arguably the nicest treatment of gallae we get in antiquity, and i love them dearly:

The castanet dancer Aristion, who used to toss her hair among the pines in honor of Cybele, carried away by the music of the horned flute; she who could empty one upon the other three cups of untempered wine, rests here beneath the poplars, no more taking delight in love and the fatigue of the night-festivals. A long farewell to revels and frenzy! It lies low, the holy head that was covered erst by garlands of flowers. (7.223, trans. W. R. Paton, Loeb Classical Library 68, 1917)

Here lies the tender body of the tender being; here lies Trygonion the flower of the fragile effeminates, she who was at home by the holy shrine of Rhea, amid the noise of music and the gay prattling throng, the darling of the Mother of the gods, she who alone among her effeminate fellows really loved the rites of Cypris, and whose charms came near those of Lais. Give birth, thou holy soil, round the grave-stone of the maenad not to brambles but to the soft petals of white violets. (7.222, trans. W. R. Paton, slightly edited)

and sure, you could read these as sarcastic, but i don’t know why that would be better than embracing the possibility that greco-roman treatment of the gallae is multifaceted and can encompass acceptance and appreciation and even love alongside the traditional reactions of disdain and disgust. what if two thousand years ago there really was a person who was born a man and chose womanhood and was loved and loved to dance and drink and celebrate and sleep with people and someone mourned her when she died? what then?

[kurzler]

i think many people grossly misunderstand the topic of gay people in ancient greece

as with anything ancient greek related, it's wrong to look at these kind of things through a modern lense, these are ancient civilizations and didn't think like us

it seems like some people are under the misconception that greece was a safe haven for queer people and that's simply not the case😭 of course, they didn't have the same gripes with homosexuality that might come with a christian ideology, but it was still a society DEEPLY rooted in patriarchy, and we can't ignore this factor when discussing this topic, especially when talking about queer women

i was googling something unrelated and this question popped up and it made me giggle

like. what do you mean😭 there was no concept of "lgbtq community" in ancient greece i don't even know how you would answer this question

the fact that patrochilles and the myth of apollo and hyacinthus have gotten so popular has started to warp the perception around this topic, and it saddens me to see it being watered down because the topic of sexuality and gender in ancient greece is so interesting and complex

[dandelion-roots]

[ID: a digital drawing of kristen and tracker from fantasy high cradling the moon. kristen's hand is on the dark side and tracker's on the light side. on kristen's side of the drawing are stars and she's holding a cowboy hat out of which are falling nacho chips and sauce, as well as wearing a 'kristen for president' sash. on tracker's side are snowflakes and coins, and she's holding a candy cane. additionally, there is a halo behind kristen's head. the second image is the reverse of the first. End ID]

[a-gnosis]

Hi! I had a mythos/broader cultural context question. Given that we can pretty easily separate Artemis and Apollo into gods of Wilderness/Civilization and that Hunters are one of those links between the two, why is sex/romance so explicitly forbidden for them in the myths? What is it about crossing that threshold that makes men and woman apparently "unfit" as marital partners? Given that they're very much being threatened out of it by the theming of the myths themselves. Thanks!

Are you asking why Artemis and Apollo never were a couple in the same way as other god-siblings were? I don't have a definitive answer to this, but one of Apollo's and Artemis' key functions was to oversee young people's transition to adulthood. As such it might have been seen as inapropriate if they were married, since they then didn't represent the group of people that they were supposed to protect. Women were supposed to be virgins before their marriage and Artemis reflected that. A goddess who roams the wilderness and delights in the hunt was also not seen as compatible with marriage. It was important that she remained "untamed".

"In the language of myth, female virginity indicates purity, but also autonomy and freedom from subjection to a husband. This freedom is essential, in different ways, to the personalities of Athena and Artemis, while Hestia's virginity relates to the integrity of the home and the purity of fire" (Greek and Roman Sexualities: A Sourcebook by Jennifer Larson).

[thatblewateverystrand]

Imagine being a bisexual poet in the Roman Empire and being legally and morally only allowed to fuck twinks who are either slaves/prostitutes, which you do, but then you get the hots by a freeborn young Roman who's off-limits so you cope with it by writing

"Girl what did you do to this hot dude? Now he just wants to fuck you, he ain't going to the gym anymore, he doesn't show off his manly muscles gleaming with oil anymore, girl you're ruining my hot dude 😩"

[vixnarts]

Claiming that Greek gods are “ocs” is utterly disgusting and very disrespectful. That’s like saying Jesus Christ (again as an example) is an oc. Greek Gods are not ocs, they’re religious beings that still get worshiped to this day.

This user saying this is NOT Hellenistic, they just enjoy the misinformation and the fan fictions of the gods. To this user, who supposedly blocked me and possibly the other people who are Greek, you are not HELLENISTIC. You’re just some fan girl that simps over and treats Greek gods as some Hazbin Hotel fantasy to ship whoever you please. Whether if it’s your oc you come up with for your misinformed fanfic rewrite.

[jeannereames]

Good day, Dr. Reames! I'd like to ask you if you think the relationship between Alexander and Hephaestion (as well as that between Achilles and Patroclus) generates so much debate and is less accepted because both participants were of a similar age, rather than older men with younger men? I hope you can answer me. Thank you very much for your attention and constant work!

Modern Debate and Ancient Attitudes Regarding Alexander and Hephaistion

So, by debate, I’m not entirely clear in what arena the asker meant, academic or popular (or both), and the acceptance of these would also differ between then and now. So, I’ll try to hit several points below, to cover all the bases.

In antiquity, yes, same-age-cohort romantic relationships were less accepted, but we do see visual evidence for them. In contrast, moderns tend to be squicked by too much of an age gap, while some pictures of older men with youths would suggest as much as 10 (or more!) years. Of course, ancient marriage also included quite substantial age differences, so they’d be puzzled by our abhorrence. The fact Alexander and Hephaistion were around the same age makes their pairing more acceptable to the modern mind, rather than less.

Also, Achilles and Patroklos weren’t the same age. Patroklos was older. (The perception that they were the same age might owe to The Song of Achilles.) To the ancients, the problem in their case was the younger partner having the superior social status. Both were princes, but Achilles was the celebrated warrior and son of a goddess, which problematized it. (I made use of this at the end of Becoming, in Dancing with the Lion.)

So, we must separate ancient reactions from modern ones. What bothered them is rather different from what bothers us.

As for debate about the relationships themselves, by the 4th century, the average Greek did assume Achilles and Patroklos had been lovers, although there was some pushback among the mythographers apparently, whose point (not unlike moderns’) was that Homer never called them that. Yet Homer “coded” Patroklos’s behavior as closer to female, paralleling him with some of the women such as Andromache; this is likely why, when Aeschylus did portray them as lovers in the Myrmiddons, he made Patroklos younger, despite it contradicting Homer (and tradition). Yet a lot of post-Homer literature changed or contradicted Homer, so that wasn’t unusual. I’ve often said that we can regard both lyric poetry and tragic plays as “fanfic” on Homer and the other epic poets. 😊 They played fast and loose with the details of Homeric canon.

Similarly, by the late Hellenistic and Roman imperial eras, Hephaistion as Alexander’s lover was also assumed. How widely is less clear, but wide enough for an aphorism to emerge that Alexander had been conquered only by Hephaistion’s thighs. The Latin authors Justin and even Curtius use language for Hephaistion that’s suggestive of a sexual favorite, without coming out and saying so. Note, however, neither of them meant that in a good way. It would have been an insult for an adult male and military general to be Alexander’s boy-toy.

Now, as for modern resistance to the idea, these fall into two basic categories: 1) homophobic, and 2) critical attention to the source problem. These are obviously not the same. Homophobic speaks for itself and was the driving force up until the 1960s/70s, as I’ve explained elsewhere. After that, most specialists on Alexander swung to general assumption/acceptance of Alexander and Hephaistion as lovers. “Of course,” with a shoulder shrug.

Achilles and Patroklos are harder because they’re fictional, not real people. They did exist prior to Homer, but we’re still dealing with a piece of literature, not trying to see behind the curtain of historical accounts to what real people did (or didn’t do). That means the question is what Homer meant, which becomes literary interpretation. We might even ask if what Homer meant is all that important, versus how Homer was understood by subsequent generations. These are not real people. But Alexander and Hephaistion were, so that’s a horse of a different color.

Current academic questioning of Hephaistion and Alexander as lovers arises from a SOURCE issue. E.g., when the sources were written and what they imply. We don’t have anything until 300 years after Alexander’s reign, and that earliest source (Diodoros) doesn’t imply anything. Does that owe to Diodoros’s general abbreviated nature? Or did he imply nothing because there was nothing?

It’s not till we hit Curtius and Second Sophistic authors—or those even later such as Athenaeus (end of the second century CE)—that we find “hints and allegations,” or even blunt claims. So what’s that about? Were they using implication as a form of character assassination for Hephaistion, and Alexander too? Were they simply repeating “common knowledge” that arose more from gossip than reality? Athenaeus (603a/13.80) is quite blunt in stating Alexander liked “boys” (meaning youths), but he’s also 600+ years from Alexander. And he never links Alexander to Hephaistion; Hephaistion wasn’t, after all, a “boy.”

In short, we must look at how THEY meant it and detach that from how WE might understand it … or what we might like it to mean. This will (inevitably) annoy both sides of the socio-political fence: those who hate the idea that Alexander might have had male lovers AND those who really, really, really want him to have been gay.

It’s also why historians make enemies among the extreme Right and the extreme Left. We want history to be history, not political sloganeering.

In the ancient—especially Roman—world, two adult men carrying on a sexual affair past their very early 20s (at the latest) was BAD. So, those authors who are engaged in a program of portraying Alexander as sinking into Oriental Debauchery found it useful to imply that Alexander 1) kept a bunch of concubines, 2) had sex with a Persian eunuch (who he let influence official policy), and 3) even retained his very own general as his lover. That’s Curtius—bluntly for the first two, and with a with a wink-wink, nudge-nudge for the third. (As does Justin, albeit in abbreviated form.)

Arrian, who had a different—less negative—goal, is more restrained, ignoring claims of concubines and a eunuch. In his history, he never bluntly calls Hephaistion Alexander’s lover, but in his writings on Epiktatos, he does. Or rather, he has Epiktatos say so. In the history, Arrian uses comparatives with Achilles and Patroklos to imply what he wants to imply. The reader is meant to make the connection. This probably owes to Arrian’s flattery of his friend the Emperor Hadrian, who had Antinoös.

Plutarch is different yet again. Early in his biography, he portrays Alexander as a champion of sophrosune, so he didn’t carry on with anybody except his wives, and then only for love. (For reasons that are not Christian, which my friend and colleague Borja Antela-Benardez will address in a forthcoming book.) Yet too often, readers take his early claims as true in an absolute way and miss how Plutarch portrays Alexander changing (for the worse) in his later years. That owes to a tendency for readers to approach Plutarch piecemeal because of the anecdotal nature of the work. Don’t do that. How is Plutarch using that anecdote…and where is it in the larger work? Those questions matter. A lot. It also owes to people taking material from his rhetorical essays, “On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander,” and mixing them up with his Life.

ANYway…. looking at all that, one can understand why trying to figure out what was really going on between Alexander and Hephaistion is…rough, to say the least.

What is calumnia (invented accusation to cause harm to someone’s reputation), versus simple gossip, versus Roman and earlier southern Greek/Athenian pearl-clutching over differing Macedonian sexual practices?

It’s genuinely hard to know.

If they were lovers as youths, then “grew out of” the physical but maintained the emotional attachment, that would explain such things as Alexander’s extreme reaction to Hephaistion’s death. And also, why later historians (dealing with events in their adulthood) didn’t mention it.

YET that assumes they were childhood friends. It’s probably one of the biggest difference between my evaluation of Hephaistion and Sabine’s—when did Hephaistion join the army and meet Alexander? I don’t plan to go into that here; I’ll save it for the book.

Another possibility, which rests on Theopompos’s criticisms of Philip’s court, is that Macedonians ended same-sex affairs later than southern Greek city-states, or at least later than Athens. That takes us back to the calumnia-or-pearl-clutching question. If such affairs did continue later in Macedonia, then Alexander and Hephaistion may not have been especially unusual, although they would have been expected to end things once they reached marriageable age.

And last, of course, is the very real possibility that they never were lovers, simply as close as brothers.

The difficulty there is a sort of reverse-homophobia, that anyone who claims such a thing must BE homophobic and deliberately trying to repress the Truth <tm>. This gets a bit exhausting to discuss with the average person who may not care about the ins-and-outs of source problems. It also, unfortunately, then feeds complaints by the alt-right about “political correctness” taking over history. That is JUST as frustrating for people trying to make a cogent historical argument. For some, if the explanation is longer than 3 sentences, it’s TL;DR. They prefer the short (and usually wrong) answer. Don’t bother me with the details. Oh, and shut up about the details, you’re just harshing my historical squee.

Yeah, I might get a bit frustrated with this.

I say that as someone who does think Alexander and Hephaistion were lovers, at least when younger. But I have sympathy for my colleagues who, for perfectly valid historiographic reasons, do not. So here I am, waving my arms around and saying, “Stop picking on them!” Even while I plan to make my own arguments against their position in the book. I have historiographic reasons of my own for believing I’m right—but accusations of homophobia are not among them.

For other posts I’ve done on various angles:

[nova-moshi]

In the midst of writing my fic, I had to wip this up to visualize it.

Found family but make it aspec!

Headcannons under the cut about sexual preference, nothing explicit <3

Cacao only sometimes feels sexual attraction but he has no desire for any kind of romantic/sexual relationship, his friends are good enough at making him feel fulfilled. Especially when he gets pulled into an impromptu cuddle session by the fire.

Cheese wants a relationship at some point, but realizes that she doesn't feel any type of way for anyone, and she's completely sex repulsed, let her shower a future lover in gifts any day to show how much she cares. Sometimes it feels like she doesn't want physical affection at all and other times she's stuck to her friend's sides like a cuddlebug- it changes day by day!

A relationship isn't important to Hollyberry (at the current moment) but she won't feel sexual desire towards anyone unless she's in a committed relationship, and even then it's like...barely there. Not something important to her at the end of the day.

White Lily is interested by the idea of sexual reproduction specifically, but not the act itself, likewise she wants to do it once to knock it off a checklist in her mind and then never talk about it again, she doesn't feel sexual attraction in any case.

Pure Vanilla is just, asexual. Doesn't care about it at all, barely thinks about it really, it's not something that interests or matters to him and not something he's ever thought about doing. If the aforementioned Lily ever brought the subject up to him however, he would be very knowledgeable about it.

Grand group scheme of things: Cacao and Cheese's banter is them getting along swimmingly, Cheese and Holly fulfill the need for being intimate with each other, and Lily and Vanilla are just those idiots in love. Smaller interpersonal things are there, but this is the main meat and potatoes.

[theweightofdivinity]

Some of us are not students of the mysteries,

we are the mysteries returning.

Mystery schools.

Sacred rites.

Blood rituals.

The serpent is rising.

And it will continue,

up the spiral,

through the spine,

3, 6, 9.

The sacred sequence.

The forgotten key.

Some of us are just the beginning.

The breath before the veil tears.

[thatblewateverystrand]

This will probably be lay in the void with how niche it is, but it's fascinating how the old Greek had very common words for effeminate homosexual (málakos) and bottom (pathikos) but the word for a top (androbates) is very obscure.

[cartoonscientist]

uh oh guys the organics found us

[bonetrousledbones]

i'm also looking through a lot of my old papyrus analysis posts and my brain keeps pointing at shit like HEY!!! HEY!!!!!! as if i don't already know that papyrus has always had some bullshit going on