[QUOTE=Bricker]
As I understand it, “gay,” “straight,” and “bi” are not meaningful labels to apply to the Greeks of Alexander’s time.
As I further understand it, if we were to shoehorn one of those labels to fit, it would be “bi,” since Alexander sought out, for pleasure, sex with both men and women. (I exclude any politically-motivated pairings such as marriages).
[\QUOTE]
This is correct. To make a long story short, to the ancient Greeks and Romans, the role one played in sexual intercourse was far more important than the sex of one’s partner. If a man played his proper role of the penetrator, there was no social difference, as it were, what equipment his partner had.
It was unacceptable for a noble man, especially a leader, be penetrated. In many Roman jurisdictions, this could be punishable by death, though it practice it rarely was. It comes as no surprise that places like Pompeii are filled with political graffiti along the lines of: “Vote for Gaius because Marcus takes it in the ass!”
Not to be too graphic, but between consenting social equals, there usually was no penetration but more “twixt the legs” frottage. Eunuchs, of course, were not social equals and could be penetrated at will, which was probably the appeal of Bagoas (that and the fact that as a dancer he was muscular, limber [eunuchs are more naturally limber anyway] and due to the diminished testosterone feminine enough to be socially acceptable as a concubine.)
Right. I did not mean to imply that penetration was always necessary for sex. Frottage was also the preferred method of Athenian pederasty between an older male and his younger student. There are a few useful Greek terms to describe the various roles one may play in intercourse, but I don’t want to google it at work.
Can’t say I agree with this assesment. The Ottomans for the most part did not make an especially active attempt to convert subject populations or aggresively disrupt non-Muslim religions. Indeed at times the state took the rather unorthodox ( for a Muslim state ) step of authorizing the building of new churches et al, in addition to the more common practice of paying for the repair of old ones. What they did do is seek to establish a certain amount of hands-off, but centralized controlof non-Muslim communities - so for example in the case of the Greeks, instead of abolishing the Patriarchate after the conquest of Constantinople, they instead installed their own preferred choice of Patriarch ( in this case Gennadius Scholarius, a by that time ardent opponent of Latin Catholicism who strongly advocated that submission to Ottoman rule was preferable to union with Rome ). Similarly with the Gregorian Patriarch for the Armenians or the establishment of an office of ‘Grand Rabbi’ for the Jews.
Similarly for language. The Ottoman state was multi-lingual and made no serious attempts to suppress non-Turkish languages - Serbs continued to speak Serb, Bulgarians spoke Bulgarian, Greeks spoke Greek, Arabs spoke Arabic. The only exception was the regular military, which retained Turkish as a necessary command language and the court adminstration. Then again, the official written court language of Osmanlica, a Turkish-based amalgam of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, was pretty unintelligible even to your average Turkish peasant. Greek did decline as a literary language in the Ottoman period, but that is mainly because it was no longer the language of the ruling elite.
Generally speaking the mature Ottoman state ( say from the 15th century ), somewhat in common with the early Caliphate, was more pragmatically concerned with the social and economic activities of its non-Muslim minorities, than it was with their religious beliefs. Their were certainly exceptions, however.
As for machismo, I dare say this wasn’t a primarily Turkish import, but more your typical pan-Mediterranean ( or broader ) values. It’s not obvious to me that Greeks are noticeably more macho and chauvinist than, say, your average Italian or Spaniard of the approximate same background and worldliness.
Of course, in US law you can say pretty well what you like about dead people. Such as that President Kennedy, when he wasn’t playing professional basketball, was a serial killer better known as “Jack the Ripper”, and burried his victims under the rose bushes in the White House grounds. And that President Lincoln, during the quiet days in his career as a pirate captain roaming the Caribbean, used to swindle millions of dollars out of widows and orphans by the use of various pyramid schemes.
I’m with you on this. At some point between Hellenistic/Roman times and “Modernity” there was a negative cultural shift in regards to same-sex sex all over the Mediterranean basin. It could be old-school Christianity, or old-school Islam, or just backlash once the Hellenistic/Roman rulers were out of the picture
All I know about the subject is what my Greek wife tells me they were taught in grammar school. According to her teachers, during the occupation, Greek reading and writing was taught to children secretly because it was forbidden to do so in public. The strictures on Christianity were not quite as tight…but still present.
Of course, her teachers may not have been the best historical scholars but some of them were old enough to have been present at the time
Oh, goodness…not to disparage your wife, Satyagrahi, because she’s probably as much a victim of misinformation as anyone in this case, but anything the Greeks say about the Turks (and vice-versa) needs to be swallowed with about a tablespoon of salt.
I’m well aware of that, JayJay, which is why I chose not to contradict Tamerlane directly. I’m not sure just who might have the most accurate viewpoint but I think we must give the Greeks at least some small amount of credence and, if anyone is in the least interested, investigate further.
Of course, this is all a side issue to my point: Greek and Turkish culture have much in common.
Hmm…makes me wonder ‘which’ occupation - they may be conflating very late tensions with the entire history of the Ottoman state ( which is veryyyy long ). Under the Young Turks, education in Turkish became obligatory in public schools ( by this point the state was drifting away from a multi-ethnic concept, towards a more explicitly Turkish-centered polity ). But that was very late - early 20th century. And public education was only a recent introduction - before the mid-nineteenth century all education was private ( mostly through various endowments - wealthy Greek merchants financed many private Greek primary schools ). Even with that according to one source out of 36,000 schools in 1914, 1,800 were Greek millet schools with 185,000 students ( all primary - higher education was understandably Turkicized ).
Of course after the successful Greek revolt the Greek position in the Ottoman state did erode a bit as the 19th century wore on. Here’s a short essay on the topic:
But despite this, I don’t think there was ever a widespread ban on the Greek language in everyday life. Also I had forgotten that Greek was sometimes used as a diplomatic language - check out this tidbit I ran across:
*Teaching Staff: Elizabeth Zachariadou
spring semester seminar 1995-1996, 3 hours per week course
Title: Ottoman official documents in greek language, (TOY 321, Seminar)
Description: The greek language was used by the ottomans for their foreign relations with Christian states. The reading of such documents is usefull for the reconstruction of certain events and for the understanding of ottoman political thought.*
Which isn’t to say the Ottomans made it easy to study Greek. Just that they appear to have been more often indifferent to itthan hostile.
When I was in Greece I had greek coffee. When I went to Croatia, I tried croatian coffee. When I visit my sister’s in-laws, they serve me arab coffee. Sometimes I like to have some turkish coffee. The funny thing, though, is that all these things are exactly the same but everyone insists that’s it’s a typically Greek/Croatian/Arab/Turkish drink. There’s a message in there, I’m sure.
Apart from the sexual aspect, there was a lot of emphasis on the mentor/protege aspect. On the physical side, at least in classical Athens: “Greek literature distinguished carefully between the erastes, the active, older partner, and the eromenos {or paidika}, the youth whom the erastes was trying to win. Greek pottery gives abundant evidence of a typical approach by an erastes to a possible eromenos: close conversations, then giving of gifts, handling of the eromenos’ body {particularly the testicles} and finally copulation, virtually always between the thighs. Greeks believed that, while the physical gratification enjoyed by the erastes was intense, the eromenos got {or should get} little or no physical pleasure from the older erastes {so that the erastes was usually depicted as having an erection, while the eromenos never was}.”
“Love from a woman, herself a dependent member of society, was perhaps not felt to be worth as much as love from a male, especially an older, wealthy, handsome, influential one. For all that, the eromenos would only go so far. To allow anal penetration was, for a Greek male, to be treated like a woman, and therefore a degrading humiliation.”
“It would be quite wrong, however, to conclude that all Greeks practised both homosexual and heterosexual relationships. Homosexuality may have been a preserve of the wealthy and leisured rather than the normal Greek male, struggling to make a living from the land, and was probably confined to defined phases of the masculine life-cycle {there seem to have been few regular ‘gays’}. Certainly Aristophanes laughed as loud and brutally at ‘queers’ as any modern comedian.”
The World Of Athens: An Introduction To Classical Athenian Culture, Cambridge University Press, 1985 edition
If it’s anything like the last ‘turkish’ coffee I had, the message is - ‘Don’t just dump coffee ground in a cup and add hot water. Use a bloody filter. It’s the 21st century and not everyone has a damn thick moustache to drink through.’
