Introduction
Violent debate, enthusiastic writings, shamefaced silence, routes of dream: few facets of ancient culture are incredibly hotly contested as Greek pederasty, or – even as we shall see below – homosexuality. Since the British classicist K.J. Dover published their influential guide Greek Homosexuality in 1978, an avalanche of the latest studies has showed up. We are able to discern two approaches:
- The historic approach: scholars are searching for the (hypothetical) roots of pederasty in extremely ancient initiation rites and attempt to reconstruct a development. Often, plenty of dream is necessary, because our sources usually do not frequently relate to these rites that are ancient.
- The approach that is synchronistic scholars focus upon homosexuality in fifth and fourth-century Athens, where it absolutely was vital element of social life.
Within the current article, we’re going to make use of the 2nd approach, although we will not overlook the first one. There are lots of resources of proof: lyrical poetry, vases, statues, fables, philosophical treatises, speeches, inscriptions, medical texts, tragedies, comedies, curses (instance), and anecdotes by which homosexual methods are mentioned, lauded, ignored, and often frustrated.
The usually outspoken poems additionally the philosophy of Plato (427-347) have actually led to our phrase “Greek axioms” to spell it out homosexuality that is male. Unfortuitously, we all know almost nothing about feminine homosexuality. Needless to say, this does not always mean we simply don’t know much about lesbianism that it did not exist (cf. the lyrical poetess Sappho), but. Consequently, in this specific article, we will need certainly to give attention to male homosexuality.
Let us begin with the word “homosexual”. It appears to be such as an ancient Greek phrase, but term and concept are contemporary inventions: the phrase had been created in 1869 by the Hungarian physician Karoly Maria Benkert (1824-1882). Weiterlesen