That’s probably what it boils down to at the end of the day, yeah.
I can’t speak for the Greeks, but medevel Europe (which took much of its scientific knowledge, such as it was, from the Greeks and Romans) thought that the male supplied the seed and the female supplied the field where it grew. Not knowing genetics, they believed the woman’s traits were passed along as part of the growing process. Also, they cautioned that the field had to be prepared, and recommended a lot of foreplay and female orgasms as that preperation.
Well, when you add that part, you’re not that far off, when you think about it. I suppose you could see it as a subtle difference, but that is really a different kettle of fish from the idea that the father contributes the traits and the mother only a material substance, which is the version that you seem to get with Aristotle.
Or, well, that Aristotle usually gets boiled down to. Maybe there’s more going on there, I confess that I’m not an expert. I think I’ll go look into it.
Also good advice. 
At which point the nervous scholar stammered a bit, in a noticeably deeper voice, while hastily pressing her fake moustache back into place.
Athenian girls were also married off at a young age, basically as soon as they became old enough to bear children, while Athenian men typically didn’t marry until they were around 30. Aside from slaves and prostitutes, there weren’t really any single young women around.
I specify Athens because Ancient Spartan culture was very different when it came to the role of women. The Spartans considered producing healthy Spartan babies a top priority, which actually resulted in Spartan women being better treated and having more personal freedom than their Athenian counterparts. Spartan women went out in public pretty freely and usually didn’t marry until their late teens, as it was considered best for a mother to be fully grown. It was reportedly also fairly common for Spartan husbands to allow younger single men to have sex with their wives in order to produce more children. (I don’t know if it was acceptable for extramarital sex to be initiated by the wife; what little I’ve heard about this had the husband giving the other man his permission.)
The idea of “women are the passive receptacle of the man’s sperm” shows up in the Eumenides, the final play of Aesculus’s trilogy about Orestes. If you remember the plays, the first play has the Argosian king Agamemnon back from the Trojan War, bringing with him his new slave and mistress, Cassandra, the cursed prophet of Apollo, only to be murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, who’s upset that Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter for fair winds at the beginning of the Trojan War, and because she’s taken Agamemnon’s cousin as lover. In the second play, their other children, Electra and Orestes, plot their revenge against their mother, and Orestes kills Clytemnestra, for which he’s tormented by the Erinyes, the spirits of vengeance.
In the final book, though, they’ve chased Orestes to Athens, where the Goddess Athena gets them to agree to try Orestes’ crime before an Athenian jury to decide if he needs punishment. Orestes is defended by the god Apollo, and one of Apollo’s defenses is that, since it’s the father who contributes the seed that becomes the man, and the mother only holds the seed (as can also be seen by the goddess Athena herself, who was born without a mother), matricide isn’t the equivalent of patricide, and therefore, this murder doesn’t call for divine vengeance (which a patricide would).
Good catch! Although I wonder how much that is meant to sound like “legalese”.
Yeah, Spartan girls were even educated, somewhat. The horror!
Also, good point in general about not extrapolating too much from “Athens” to “Greece”.
This isn’t to say that Spartans were not into some man-boy action, necessarily. Part of the agoge system was formalized relationships between older and younger men/boys. The jury is out on whether this involved a sexual element, though. Some say yes, some say no, and when I asked Gerard Butler, he kicked me down a well.
Nice one, but jus to clarify for general readers, Julius Caesar was never Emperor. That system started after his death. He was “Dictator,” however.
Why would either be an insult?
Because, you know, bigotry?
I always assumed it was because young men are more like women, and women were all shut up in their homes and thus not really available. Sure,. you had your wife, but, like today, people are often dissatisfied with that arrangement.
In other words, it was opportunistic pederasty, kinda like opportunistic homosexuality in (gender separated) prison.
He may have wanted to be the top, but the part about him needing to touch Calpurnia to help with her barrenness indicates he was a virgin in that way.
And his relationship with Caesar implies he was not a virgin receiver.
He is supposed to have become a Bithynian Bum Boy for the purposes of getting the services of the Kings fleet. He in short
i) Was the passive partner
ii) With a foreign potentate
iii) For the purposes of getting a military support from a foreigner
So for a Roman; an insult.
[QUOTE=Miller]
Basically, if you let someone fuck you, you were acting like a woman. An adult Greek citizen would, as a general rule, never submit to being the receptive partner in a homosexual encounter. The closest thing the Greeks had to our modern concept of a homosexual relationship would be between a slave-owner (who would always be the top) and his male slave. This sort of relationship would generally be considered unexceptional, so long as the citizen also had a wife and a few kids - it was part of every citizen’s civic duty to provide the next generation of Greeks. A citizen who wasn’t raising a family by a certain age would be viewed as an irresponsible wastrel. Whether he was shirking his family obligations in favor of fucking female prostitutes or male slaves didn’t make too much of a difference, socially.
Which brings us to the OP’s question: were ancient Greek men bisexual? Depending on how you define “bisexual,” either they almost all were, or almost none of them were. If you define “bisexual” as “sexually attracted to both genders in roughly equal measure,” then very few Greeks were bisexual. If you define it as “ever had sex with someone their own gender,” on the other hand, probably most of them were.
The concept of sexuality as identity is a very modern invention. That’s not to say that there weren’t gay people before the 19th century - the percentage of humans who are predisposed to exclusive sexual attraction to their own gender is probably fairly consistent across most cultures and eras. But such a person would not identify as “gay,” nor would the majority of the people around him identify as “straight.” It simply wasn’t part of their self-identity. A consequence of this was that sexual acts that fell outside their normal attractions weren’t a threat to their self-identity. And sexual attraction isn’t always a necessary part of sexual activity. Think how many guys you’ve known who were willing to have sex with a woman they considered unattractive, because hey, it’s still sex, right? To an ancient Greek, fucking a slave would be more or less the equivalent of fucking an ugly girl. You just close your eyes, think of that hot dancer you saw in the forum last week, and let friction do the work for you.
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That might be true for Republican Rome. Its not true for Greeks at all. The Greek city states were quite different in culture so generalisations are difficult.
This actually makes some sense if you think about it the way you might think about grapes for making wine. Anyone with any interest in wine can tell you that the kind of conditions that grapes grow in makes a difference to the finished product- a Pinot Noir grown in Burgundy, France, is not the same as one grown in California. The Greeks and Romans (and at least some medieval Europeans) presumably would have known about the effects of different growing conditions on wine grapes. That theory wouldn’t have made them expect every child to be a copy of the father if the father is the only one providing the genetic material.
Good point about the political implications. It’s not just about Caesar bending over for Nicomedes, it’s about Rome bending over for a minor power. That makes everyone look bad. I hadn’t really considered that angle.
Let’s also keep in mind that the yammerings of playwrights and philosophers aren’t necessarily what your average person thought. If Plato goes on and on about how male-male love is totally the bestest, well, that’s just what Plato thought. He was a philosopher, if you know what I mean, and I’m sure you do. And everyone knows about vase-painters, come on.
Plato is a tricky case, anyway. Since everything is always put into the mouths of various characters (such as Aristophanes and Socrates), who may or may not resemble their historical counterparts, and may or may not express Plato’s opinion, he always comes with at least a couple of layers of built-in irony.
Some of these graffiti from Pompeii are tangentially related, like the very first one on the list. Roman and not Greek, obviously though.
*Analysis of contemporary films have shown that 21st century married women typically could pay for sexual intercourse outside marriage by summoning a younger male known a the “Pizzia Delivery Boy”. The male was expected to bring foodstuff as tribute/courtesy to the matron and infact the word "Pizzia"is believed to refer to a snack popular at the time. *
-Notes from a lecture given at the University of Tauras-Littrow, Sep 4302 AD.
Do we have any actual data on what percentage of Greek men had sex with men or boys? It obviously wasn’t zero, but do we know how common it actually was?