Talk:Homosexuality in the militaries of ancient Greece

message: By an anon: "But what did the ancient Greeks mean by pederasty and eromenos?Your examples refer to the modern Greek glossa and not to the ancient one.Also treating a wound isn't a homoerotic act!You say that the men on the sculpture are erected but none is!None of your references of ancient scholars proves any of your claims,and making laws against homosexuality should make you think that even if there was any it wasn't the rule but the exception to the rule,making laws against thieves,murdereres doesn't mean we are all thieves,murdereres.
Your reference of Percy, William A is a joke!this is from your link to his book,don't think that's copywriting.:
"The book also has some serious imperfections. It is inconsistent to distinguish sharply and plausibly between (ancient) ‘situational’ or (modern) ‘androphile’ ‘homosexuality’ on the one hand, and (ancient) ‘pederasty’ on the other, while simultaneously declining even to take part, let alone take sides, in the intellectual debate between ‘essentialists’ (a gay is a gay is a gay) and ‘social contructionists’ (there were no gays before the later nineteenth century at the earliest). The appearance of his article ‘Greek Pederasty’ in the Journal of Homosexuality (1987) does nothing to clarify matters. To classify and explain the intellectual court of the tyrant Polycrates of Samos as diagnostically ‘pederastic’ seems hugely reductionist, not to mention parti pris, a criticism that applies in spades to Percy’s unconscionable coinage ‘pederastic democracy’ for the Athens of Aristeides and Themistocles. If pedersastic pedagogy was, as Percy claims, what most accounted for the cultural greatness of early Greece, why, despite is alleged persistence as an institution, did it cease to have that effect during the Classical (post-500) and subsequent ages?
Finally, inevitably, Percy’s non-specialist inexperience does occasionally deserve palmary punishment. For example, Pausanias the character in Plato’s Symposium is confused with Pausanias the second-century CE travel writer (Index s.v. to p. 29). The idea that the ‘Lelantine War’, itself probably a factoid, ‘lasted almost two centuries’ is ludicrous, not to mention the belief that ‘Brelich (1961)’ represents the ‘latest scholarship’ (p. 212 n. 4). More seriously, the proposition that ‘Chrimes’ argument that Sparta preserved its agoge (rigorous training for the Spartiates) with only insignificant changes and brief interruptions from Archaic to imperial [Roman] times is convincing’ (p. 82) is not cogent. A reading of especially A. Spawforth’s contribution to P.A. Cartledge and Spawforth’s Hellenistic and Roman Sparta (1989), not cited, would presumably have been enough to convince him otherwise. Now Nigel Kennell’s Gymnasium of Virtue (1995) must surely complete his re-education.
Nevertheless, this is not a book to be despised, and especially outside Classical circles it may well have some deservedly positive impact.
Clare College, Cambridge
P. A. Cartledge
" Azxd 23:51, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Comment posted in article

message: The list should probably be a separate page. Also, I note that reference is not made to the Greek god Apollo, despite an unambiguous statement in Bulfinch's Mythology regarding his relationship with Hyacinthus (I think that was the name?) Badbilltucker 22:15, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comments 

message: There is not enough scholarship for an article dedicated to this topic. It seems yet one more article designed for tendentious arguments and original research. I note the large part played here by a banned editor. McOoee (talk) 02:14, 5 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  This silly article 

message: I think this article should be deleted. Of the two main contributors, one left in 2005 and the other was banned in 2010. Of the two referenced books, neither is cited within the text. The only cited sources are primary sources and those are not suited to an encyclopaedia of anonymous contributors. The article is like a slyly groping hand. Here it soon ran out of material, so it moved on to explore other articles.  If there are any useful modern sources, by all means the article should stay. But where are they?  Perhaps it could be merged with some other article. Sir Gawain McGarson (talk) 08:16, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: This is not inherently "promotional," but seems to be a collocation of primary sources taken from the secondary sources at the bottom of the page. In my edit summary, I made a typo: I meant to say that while secondary sources are given, page numbers aren't. It needs footnotes. Wikipedia explicitly permits the summary of primary sources. Although an article shouldn't be a grab-bag of quotes, I don't feel this material should be deleted, as it gives editors interested in developing the article clues about where to start. Knowing the primary source passages can help you find appropriate secondary sources. Cynwolfe (talk) 15:22, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

text: See also discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history#AfD?. Constructive editing will require checking the secondary sources given at the bottom of the page and giving footnotes, not deleting wholesale. Cynwolfe (talk) 19:54, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

text: A reasonable point, and one that will hopefully be addressed.  Just FYI for whoever actually decides to polish this all up: I believe that the Plato, Symposium 178e–179a quote ultimately derives from J. Boswell, "Battle-worn", The New Republic 10 May 1993, though a GoogleBook search makes it look likely that subsequent handbooks followed him on whatever the topic was.  I have no idea.  davidiad.: 01:27, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: So far, the summaries of the primary sources I've looked at are, as I suspected, paraphrased from Crompton, who gives them as exempla. They aren't the editor's/editors' own summaries, nor do they represent any original research on their part, since the primary sources are collocated by the secondary source that's always been cited at the bottom of the page. This is why they're so easy to verify. Crompton himself seems to be relying on Dover and possibly Cantarella, as his summaries of the primary sources are remarkably like theirs. So Crompton, who's more a comp list/history of sexuality scholar, draws on various specialists. All the information here is therefore well-established in the scholarship. In the early days of Wikipedia, there was less emphasis on footnotes. Some editors are unaware that WP:V still says they're needed only for quotations and material that's been challenged or is likely to be challenged; I try to footnote everything as a prophylactic measure. (However, a summary sentence in the intro that is supported by the body text per WP:LEDE requires no footnote.) Many, many articles used to be summaries of a very few major sources, which were merely listed at the end, as in conventional print encyclopedias. That's one reason plagiarism became an issue, because some editors weren't skilled at 'digesting' the secondary scholarship, and moreover were used to lifting public domain entries wholesale. So there's nothing original about this article at all. It was written and put together inexpertly, though not exceptionally so at the time. Wikipedia has just overall improved. Daniel Ogden's "Homosexuality and Warfare in Ancient Greece" sounds like it would be an excellent overview source for this article, since it's part of a book on Battle in Antiquity. It runs about 60 pages, so it's a significant treatment of the subject. Cynwolfe (talk) 02:39, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Delete this promotional article 

message: I have commitments off-Wikipedia which will take me away for a while, but I did locate the Xenophon source I mentioned. I remembered it as a balanced perspective on why Xenophon seems to contradict himself at points on homosexuality in the military. Because I don't have time to write and think through it for integrating into the article, I'm just going to give the reference in case someone else is interested in pursuing it. (Unlike Dover and Crompton and Cantarella, it isn't online unless you have JSTOR access.) But I'll take a minute to give some of his introductory and concluding material, since I type faster than I think (sometimes to my sorrow). This is from Clifford Handley, "Eros and Military Command in Xenophon," Classical Quarterly 44.2 (1994) 347–366, and info in square brackets is from Handley's footnotes:
p. 347 Xenophon's manifold writings contain an intriguing variety of anecdotes and narratives reflecting erotic relationships among men, and philosophical or ethical discussion about the nature of such affairs. … In military matters, a positive view of the relationship between erastes and eromenos is based on the belief that the presence of his eromenos will inspire a man to valor and, through shame, save him from cowardice. This explanation, put into the mouth of Pausanias' 'lover of Agathon' in the 8th chapter of Xenophon's Symposium, is immediately rejected by Socrates. Yet Xenophon himself evinces some sympathy for it, when, quite parenthetically, in the treatise On Hunting, [12.20] he takes it as self-evident that 'when any man is within sight of his eromenos he excels himself and avoids saying or doing things which are base or cowardly so that he may not be seen by him.' Moreover, elsewhere in the Symposium [4.15–16] Xenophon allows Kritoboulos to give an enthusiastic exposition of the principle, and go on to declare that it is madness not to elect handsome men as generals. No doubt some allowance must be made here for dramatic effect, yet the 'Sacred Band' of Thebes was famously organized on the basis of erotic relationships, and as Sir Kenneth Dover has pointed out, the story of Episthenes in Xenophon's Anabasis reflects the same belief in stiffening a fighting force with the powerful bonds of eros. … Even among the p. 348 Spartans, who did not as a matter of policy station lovers together in battle, we find a general, Anaxibios, being faithfully attended by his paidika as he courted death on the battlefield.[Hell. 4.8.39]We may conclude that not only did Xenophon accept the practice of pederasty as a part of life, but that he also recognized the potential of the feelings it aroused to prompt nobility and valour. There is, however, a converse possibility—and one which alarmed Xenophon—that erotic desire might threaten to interfere with the performance of one's military or civic duty, particularly on the part of a man set in authority. Against this destructive eros he sets the virtue of self-control (enkrateia), and it is the relationship between these principles, particularly in the exercise of military command, which I wish to examine in more detail in Xenophon's writings.Handley then goes on to do so, concludingp. 365 The morality involved is a morality of military and political duty, not a morality of sexual acts per se. … The opportunities for homoerotic pleasure available to Greek armies and their commanders in the field must have been many, and the resulting relationships complex. … Xenophon recognised that such relationships might well be honourable, and motivate men to valour in battle. But experience also taught him that situations could well arise where to indulge in eros was fraught with military or political danger. In such situations, he had no doubt that the welfare of the city should take precedence over individual impulse, and for him the ability to resist p. 366 erotic desire where necessary ranked high among the qualities required by a military leader. Some failed the test, and, like Alketas and Thibron, brought military reverses upon their city. Others, like Agesilaos in his relations with Megabates, survived the test with honour, and this was not the least of Xenophon's reasons for according him high praise.
Sorry I can't help more at present. For a more balanced perspective, though, a careful treatment of Xenophon would help, so I thought a sample from the article might help another editor decide whether it was worth obtaining the whole thing. Cynwolfe (talk) 04:33, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Xenophon 

message: As far as I know, Diodorus says nothing about the sexual orientation of Epaminondas or The Sacred Band, and I have added this observation to the article. I'll be happy to be proved wrong. Sir Gawain McGarson (talk) 14:14, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Diodorus Siculus 

message: — Assignment last updated by Bunny322 (talk) 20:01, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: History of Sexuality