According To The Hock Textbook, Which Of The Followings Is A Fallacy (Myth) About Penis Size?

The belief that ancient Greek social club maintained an indulgent attitude towards homosexuality —particularly pederasty — is widely held, both without and inside WN circles. Greg Johnson, for example, says:

Adonis Georgiades disagrees. He is the current vice-president of Greece's New Democracy party and a human being of socially conservative just economically liberal convictions (for instance, he bandage his vote in the Greek parliament in favour of the notorious 'second memorandum'). His 2004 book, Homosexuality in Ancient Hellenic republic: The Myth is Collapsing (available online hither), is a polemical
review of the evidence. To Georgiades, the evidence demonstrates that homosexuality was not considered acceptable, let solitary 'ideal', in ancient Hellenic republic. The sources he examines include simply are not express to the post-obit.

Crucially, Georgiades besides considers the translation of two pairs of ancient Greek words. The kickoff, examined principally through the works of Plato and Xenophon, is erastes-eromenos. This pair is conventionally simply, co-ordinate to Georgiades, quite misleadingly rendered in English equally 'lover'-'loved one'. The second is the distinction betwixt the terms pornos ('male prostitute') and hetairos ('male companion'). Equally the book shows, this second stardom is particularly relevant to the Aeschines-Timarchus lawsuit mentioned above. The successfully prosecuted case against Timarchus indicates that — in Athens at least — even unpaid homosexual conduct was sufficient to expose the practitioner to the take chances of losing his civil rights. I will return after to Georgiades business relationship of the primary sources.

My overall impression, equally a non-specialist, is that Georgiades' conclusions are sound, original and worthy of a wider readership. Possibly the book's greatest weakness is the poor quality of the translation and proofreading. The purpose I accept in listen here, however, is not to review the book exhaustively. Instead I volition summarise its most important arguments and and then try to illuminate its most interesting, though not entirely explicit, theme: 'pederastic' relationships in ancient Greece, far from being motivated by the sexual drives of older men towards younger, were an aspect of what Kevin MacDonald might call the group evolutionary strategy of the Greek polis. The men of ancient Greece did not alive in a Freudian haze; they were concerned with identifying transcendent reality and bringing it virtually in their community, for the sake of the common good. I will explicate farther on what I mean by this. Kickoff, though, I will say a little nearly my ain motivations in writing this article.

I won't bother to pretend that I arroyo these arguments with an open up mind. In fact, I find them at once disturbing and logically implausible. They are disturbing mainly because they are implicitly Freudian. The underlying assumption appears to be that Greek gild did non repress 'natural' tendencies to 'polymorphous perversity'. This means that, for example, sexual relationships betwixt older and younger men were idea normal. Co-ordinate to this view, the erastes-eromenos relationship was a sort of institutionalised pederastic cruising — at its cadre, just an expression of the base sexual urges of individual men. The truth, however, is that the ancient polis was a collectivist entity which produced, for its size, a greater share of accomplished men than any other type of state in history.

There is another disquieting attribute of the theory. It is a commonplace that aboriginal Greece was the 'cradle of Western culture'. But constantly repeated claims that the sexual mores of Greece were qualitatively different from those of the traditional Westward are designed to deny our perception of fundamental continuity with this heritage. I think in that location is in it, too, an insinuation that the absence of sexual strictures in Greek guild forestalled the development of sexual neuroses in talented individuals and so allowed them to realise their own greatness. In familiar Freudian style, the theory pathologises the traditional Christian West. Even at the risk of being accused of committing the 'moralistic fallacy', I would say that in that location are very adept reasons for being suspicious of claims that the free expression of homosexuality was canonical of in ancient Hellenic republic.

This brings me to the theory's prima facie implausibility. Its corollary is that we are supposed to have that all (or most) men of all ages would appoint in pederasty if it were non bailiwick to social repression. We are asked to believe that many of the greatest men of ancient Hellenic republic — real or mythical and in all fields of endeavour — were either pederasts or homosexuals of another kind. Among such men, allegedly, are Solon, Socrates, Sophocles, Alexander the Great, Aeschylus, Alcibiades, Achilles, the Theban Sacred Ring (which may non even accept fought at the decisive battles of Leuctra and Chaeronea) and the elite Spartan hippeis. Many of the Olympian gods are said to have been similarly characterised.

Perhaps in that location is some demonstrable correlation between homosexual behaviour and greatness; if so, I am unaware of it. But the fact is that, even in the contemporary, post-Christian West, in which traditional morality is everywhere nether assault and 'polymorphous perversity' on the verge of wholesale institutional approval, homosexuality remains uncommon. Is the assertion of thoroughgoing homosexuality in ancient Greece credible, so, on the ground of numbers lonely? I am inclined to think not.

I am as unconvinced by the theory that the condemnation of homosexuality in the West is aught but a Jewish artefact which came to us with Christianity. The most economical explanation, information technology seems to me, is that the dog wagged the tail rather than the other way around: Christian dislike of homosexuality was fundamentally a reflection of the fact that traditional Western guild regarded it every bit undesirable. In curt, I tin't meet how the truth of the matter can be perceived from within either a tacitly Freudian or an anti-Christian framework.

In assessing the social acceptability or otherwise of homosexuality, information technology is if course of import to discriminate amidst the respective attitudes of the constabulary, the lower classes, the upper classes and the intelligentsia. It is conceivable, for example, that the police may have penalised the do even as artists and philosophers — especially would-exist land makers such as Plato — idealised it. Georgiades, I think, succeeds in demonstrating that homosexuality was universally thought unacceptable: penalised in law and deplored past all social classes, including past philosophers such as Plato. In that location are four main lines of set on in his book.

Firstly, there are the relatively short chapters on homosexuality in the Greek myths and on the treatment of the subject by the comic poets of Athens. Both chapters can be dealt with quite briefly.

Homer was the starting time to write down two myths which take become vital to the Greek homosexuality narrative — those of Achilles and Patroclus, and of Zeus and Ganymede. Homer himself never characterises the relationship between either pair as in whatever style homosexual (despite this, Wikipedia informs us that "The myth was a model for the Greek social custom of paiderastía, the socially acceptable romantic relationship between an developed male person and an adolescent male").

Xenophon, in his 4th century BC Symposium, has Socrates agreeing with Homer. He argues in the following terms nearly the relationship between Zeus and Ganymede.

Zeus permit the women he savage for to remain mortal, if he loved them for their physical beauty; just he fabricated immortal whomever he loved for the dazzler of their souls. Among them yous tin see Heracles, the Dioscouri and others. I also claim that Ganymede was brought to Olympus for the beauty of his soul, non of his body. His very name confirms what I am saying, as it is said most it in a passage from Homer, 'One takes pleasure in listening to him'. At that place is also some other passage from Homer which says 'ane who had wise thoughts'. So, if Ganymede has got his name after these ii, he has been honoured among the gods non for his pleasant body, but for his wisdom.

I will come back later to the philosophical distinction between 'celestial' and 'vulgar' love.

The Athenian comic poets had an irreverently hostile attitude to homosexuality. Aristophanes, for instance, uses such epithets as katapigon ('given to unnatural lust') and euriproktos ('broad-breeched'). What is more, Georgiades says:

Aristophanes, willing to express his aversion towards this act, never uses the words erastes-eromenos, 'lover-loved ane'.

This is some other, highly pregnant, discussion pair I will return to in time. The plot of the famous play Lysistrata is also instructive. According to Georgiades:

In this play Athenian women decide not to have sex with their husbands, in club to force them to stop the war with Sparta. If homosexuality was so widely good, this decision would hateful nothing to men, since they could plow to each other to satisfy their desires. Merely this is non what happens. On the contrary, men give way rather quickly, because they cannot stand this compulsory forbearance.

Georgiades disputes that Aristophanes was writing for a lower class audience, and therefore pandering to their prejudices against homosexuality, while the upper class had no such prejudices. The patrons of the Classical theatre were, after all, drawn from the Athenian aristocracy. If the heads of the polis were really idealisers of homosexual behaviour, why would Aristophanes have been and then insulting towards it?

Side by side, the book re-examines the prove from vase illustrations, the source almost often cited to support the notion of widespread and socially-condoned homosexuality in ancient Greece. Georgiades states that approximately 80,000 complete pieces of Attic ware remain, an estimated one per cent of the total produced during the Archaic and Classical eras. In the most influential mod study of the subject, Greek Homosexuality, by Kenneth Dover, 600 of these vases are cited as containing 'homoerotic' themes. But, Georgiades says, but about 30 of the 600 pots depict homosexual scenes. The remainder:

… are totally irrelevant, showing heroes, battles or mythological themes, or correspond heterosexual scenes.

Moreover, anal penetration involving men or boys is never shown:

Only satyrs have office in scenes [involving anal penetration], and satyrs were known to exist perverted and were represented as such.

Georgiades further asserts that the remainder of the 30 homosexual scenes—pederastic acts, involving an older and a younger homo or boy—show either sexual fondling or 'intercrucial intercourse'. The latter, Georgiades believes, was not adept in real life. Instead, information technology was a sort of artistic stand up-in for homosexual anal sex and had to be used in a culture in which a vase painter could hint at the human activity merely never depict it openly, likely owing to general public revulsion. If it could exist unreservedly accepted, this clever speculation would farther undermine the instance for the normalcy of homosexuality in ancient Greece. However, this is the only aspect of Georgiades' critique which, to my mind, is somewhat hundred-to-one. There are, for instance, the starting time, 7th and ninth illustrations here, none of which appears to involve satyrs. The first is fairly obviously inauthentic—an case of the sorts of modern, mass-produced lookalikes that tin can exist establish in many tourist shops in Greece (the photo fifty-fifty looks every bit though it was taken in a tourist store). The 9th and most egregious seems to draw Zeus and Ganymede. I am unsure of its authenticity, only the facial expression of Zeus is anomalous. The seventh likely involves a adult female and 2 men. Still, since I cannot observe confirmation of the provenance of these three pieces, I reserve my judgment on the matter.

Even with such hesitations duly conceded, it's hardly necessary to point out that representations of human homosexual practices on vases are not necessarily evidence of their social acceptability. Although I cannot unequivocally accept his statement that only satyrs are involved in homosexual scenes, if Georgiades' claims for the figures are accurate, Dover and other purveyors of the 'gay vase theory' take still engaged in a sleight of hand: 30 of the 600 cited vases amounts to a mere five per cent of the total. Peradventure to make up the shortfall, Dover uses his imagination. Georgiades quotes several examples. Apparently, in i scene, showing a warrior:

… a spear, carried pointing halt downwardly, prolongs the line of a youth's penis, and its bract and blade-socket symbolise the glands and retracted foreskin.

Once such inventive interpretations are discounted, the much-touted the 'gay vase theory' seems, to put it mildly, a bit weak.

Thirdly, Georgiades looks at accounts of the sexual mores of Sparta and Athens, as glimpsed through accounts of their laws. The picture is of a Sparta which heavily penalised pederasty. According to Xenophon's Respublica Lacedaemoniorum, Lycurgus, the (semi-)mythical Spartan lawgiver:

… approved simply of when a person, being such as he had to exist and admiring a boy'southward moral and intellectual self, tried to be his blameless friend and associate with him; he (Lycurgus) fifty-fifty thought of this every bit the nigh noble course of education. But, when one turned out to yearn for the boy'southward trunk, which was the basest matter to practice according to Lycurgus, he ordered that lovers should concord themselves off the loved boys, just as parents or brothers abjure from having sexual intercourse with their children or brothers.

The morality of the Spartans (here, 'Lacedaemonians'), as depicted in Xenophon's Symposium, is also set firmly confronting pederasty. In this passage Socrates equates it with anaideia: 'shamelessness'.

Lacedaemonians … believe that a loved boy cannot succeed in annihilation noble, when ane yearns for his body …

Plutarch speaks of the severity of Spartan punishments for pederasty:

The aim was to honey the moral and intellectual self of hostage boys and, when a man was defendant of budgeted them with animalism, he was deprived of civic rights for life.

It'south worth noting that, normally, Plutarch is heavily relied on by pro-homosexuality scholars every bit a source. A number of other things are worth mentioning about this passage.

Outset is the stardom it makes between 'celestial' and 'vulgar', or sexual, love. Both Xenophon and Plutarch attribute this distinction to the thought of fifty-fifty the relatively unphilosophical Spartans. It is best encapsulated in English language by the word 'Ideal', only, equally we will see, information technology has a lineage in ancient Greek thought which long precedes Plato. Second is the use of the phrase 'earnest boys', which connotes studiousness, industry and seriousness — all qualities indispensable to leading participants in the political life of the Greek polis. Third is that the penalty for pederasty specified is the consummate loss of an individual's right to involvement in Spartan politics.

Athenian police, for its part, mandated a heavy fine or death to pederasts loitering about schools or making lewd suggestions to boys:

If someone insults [in this instance, Georgiades says, 'insult' has the sense of 'existence lustful to someone'] a child, woman or man, gratis or slave, he should be denounced by whatsoever Athenian to the half dozen junior archons and they should bring the case before courtroom within thirty days, if there aren't other urgent public affairs; if there are, whenever this is possible. And, when he is found guilty, he must immediately be sentenced to pay a fine or be executed.

Moreover, the case of Timarchus shows that the Athenians penalised homosexual relations of all kinds, even between adult males, with bully severity.

In 346 BC, when war between Athens and Macedon was imminent, Aeschines was accused by Demosthenes, through Timarchus, of having accepted bribes from Philip 2 of Macedon during his service every bit ambassador to the northern Greek kingdom. Aeschines responded by bringing a counter-conform against Timarchus which declared that he had engaged in homosexual behaviour. Aeschines' intention was to demonstrate that Timarchus was for this reason unfit to bring a adjust against him in an Athenian court. The counter-suit was successful: Timarchus was effectively disenfranchised. But what kinds of homosexual acts was Timarchus accused of?

The usual explanation is that Timarchus is alleged to have prostituted himself and that this was the reason for his being barred from participation in political life. Georgiades' view is otherwise. He shows that Aeschines' speech, which quotes extensively from the laws of Athens, uses the word hetairos ('male person companion'), not pornos ('male prostitute'), in reference to Timarchus. Ane of the meanings of hetairos is, patently, an unpaid (though, in Timarchus' case, a 'kept') homosexual partner.

Furthermore, Georgiades contends that civic exclusion was ane possible sentence — the other was a heavy fine — for those accused of being either a pornos or a hetairos, in the relevant sense of the discussion. This argument is again backed by excerpts from Aeschines' oral communication.

According to Georgiades, the case confronting Timarchus demonstrates that not only prostitutes but also the 'passive' and the 'agile' hetairos were subject to the penalty of civic exclusion. In this case the 'agile' hetairos, Misgolas, who admitted to having 'kept' the 'passive' Timarchus, paid a fine of i,000 drachmae rather than face the court.

Aeschines' speech was contrived to entreatment to the sentiments of an Athenian jury, which comprised members drawn from all social classes. As pointed out here, it is more than than probable that Aeschines anticipated that his citing of anti-homosexual legislation would detect approval amongst all Athenians, regardless of their social class. This, along with the attitudes expressed in the plays of Aristophanes and the paucity of the bear witness from vase paintings, suggests that at that place is no good reason to believe that either the Athenian authorities or its aristocracy was whatever more pro-homosexuality in its outlook than were the common people.

So much, then, for the legal status of homosexual behaviour in Sparta and Athens.

Finally, there is a crucial chapter which discusses the true significant of erastes-eromenosouthward, generally translated into English language as 'lover'-'loved one'. I mentioned earlier Georgiades' business relationship of the very harsh punishments meted out to men in both Athens and Sparta who preyed on boys. Such castigating laws lone imply that those Athenians, including Plato and Xenophon, who used the terms erastes-eromenos (no main sources from Sparta take survived) are unlikely to have used them to denote pederasty in the mod sense of the give-and-take.

In essence, Georgiades' argument is that, to the ancient Greeks, the word pair erastes-eromenos (likewise every bit the discussion paiderastia) did non denote homosexual relations. Instead, the erastes was the mentor, the eromenos his protégé, and paiderastia the non-sexual relationship between them.

The philosophical underpinning of relationships amidst older and younger men was in the distinction between two impulses given to men past Aphrodite — the 'celestial' and 'vulgar' love I mentioned earlier. Greek gods are well known for their multiple attributes, and an older man's love of a younger male denizen of his city was expected to exist inspired solely by the 'celestial', not the 'vulgar', Aphrodite.

Those who attempt to represent Plato's Symposium as praising sexual pederasty are therefore, co-ordinate to Georgiades, mistaken. Of 'vulgar' and 'celestial' love, Plato in fact says:

… love of the vulgar Aphrodite is, only every bit its name signifies, vulgar and interim occasionally. And it is the i which takes control of the vulgar people. These people … care only for the sexual act itself and are neglectful of whether information technology is moral or not .… Just beloved of celestial Aphrodite is the one where women do not take part, only men. This is pederasty. And it is the older and the chastest kind of love. So, those who are animated by this form of love, turn to males, considering they love the most vigorous and thoughtful.

Georgiades argues that this passage can be taken equally a clear statement against sexual pederasty. The 'pederastic' relationship — that is, between erastes and eromenos, or 'lover' and 'loved one' — was to exist educational, not sexual. Plato again:

… at that place are too those with fecund souls, those who bear, in their souls more than in their bodies, the things that deserve to be born from the soul … And, since he is waiting to requite birth, he embraces beautiful bodies rather than ugly ones, and, if he meets a beautiful, brave and noble soul, he embraces more eagerly this combination of body and soul. To such a person he speaks, without difficulty, of virtue, of how an honest homo should be, of which activities suit him; and he tries to brainwash him.

In short: beautiful bodies, beautiful souls (and minds). The philosophers of the greatest centuries of ancient Greece, such as Pythagoras, Parmenides, Socrates and Plato himself, differentiate between the perfection of an immutable superlunary reality, on the ane hand, and the transitory and unreal material earth on the other. Information technology is from the pre-Socratics that Plato derives his famous 'allegory of the cave'. To engage in 'angelic' love of the soul and intellect is, in a sense, to know reality. To practice 'vulgar' love of the torso is to be constrained by the base and illusory world of matter. Georgiades shows that Plato's attitude towards homosexuality was not fundamentally dissimilar from the shared outlook of all classes and the law in ancient Athens. To him, as to them, homosexuality was base.

The Greeks in general identified physical beauty, morality and intellectual ability very closely with one another. Physical beauty carried with it the proffer that its owner was closer to the heavens — similar Ganymede, better man material in every way — than others less gifted. Information technology could be argued that it'southward easy to be misled by Plato's talk of 'beautiful bodies', and mayhap on this basis the charitable would give the motivations of pro-homosexuality scholars the benefit of the doubt. But Georgiades is in no doubt in last that the 'pederasty' of the Greek polis was biopolitical, not sexual. He does not employ this word, but his summing upwardly amounts to much the aforementioned affair. The 'pederastic' relationship was:

… a most educational one. Its aim was to initiate the boyish Athenians not in mathematics or music, only in the secrets of social life, the way the organization of authorities was performance, the good manners, the moral values, virtue and, also, the dangers of life. An elder Athenian was bold this role towards an adolescent, between 12 and 18, that is, until the boy was old enough ("until he starts having a bristles", the texts say) to have no need of such guidance.

This passage recalls Xenophon's and Plutarch'south representation of the right treatment of 'earnest' immature Spartans. In Sparta, as in Athens, the erastes-eromenos relationship was apparently intended to prepare worthy young men for participation in the public life of the polis. Xenophon, once again speaking of Sparta, says in his Respublica Lacedaemoniorum:

I think I must speak of pederasty, since it is a way of educating.

Considering the highly collectivist nature of both Sparta and Athens, I would like to expand a little on Georgiades' biopolitical theory. The practice of 'pederasty', every bit a moral and political educational activity, was aimed at securing the future of the polis through tutelage of the best, not all, young men — physically, intellectually and morally — in the community. This meritocratic selection was conducted past citizens of citizens, within their own organically-constituted city. The 'loved ones' who were selected and tutored by their 'lovers' were intended to deed, when they had become mature citizens of the polis, every bit elite exemplars and executors of its political and moral tradition.

Key to the ideology of the polis was that information technology comprised free people of a common stock: a truly national customs. As is well known, the cities of Greece were in an almost constant state of competition, and frequently of outright warfare, throughout the Archaic and Classical periods. From the vantage betoken of the long philosophical tradition represented by Pythagoras, Parmenides, Socrates and Plato, 'pederasty' was zip less than an attempt to bring the polis into line with the divine gild through preparing its best bachelor homo material for leadership. From the perspective of a Greece in which inter-state competition and warfare was practically the norm, 'pederasty' was a sort of group evolutionary strategy to secure the national community in the confront of numerous hostile rivals. Each view is entirely uniform with the other.

Seen through an implicitly Freudian lens, tutelage of the immature in ancient Greece was a mere cover for satisfaction of the endemic pederastic impulses of individuals rather than a collectivist project to realise the ideal of a healthy and supremely competitive national community. Georgiades has done of import work in making out a convincing instance to the contrary.

According To The Hock Textbook, Which Of The Followings Is A Fallacy (Myth) About Penis Size?,

Source: https://www.eurocanadians.ca/2018/04/the-myth-of-homosexuality-in-ancient-greece.html

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