Satyrnalium

Dover, K.J. wrote:

The most widely accepted generalization about Greek homosexuality at the present time is  that it  originated in the military organisation of Dorian states (so  that its  diffusion throughout the
Greek world was a product of Dorian influence)  and that in the classical period overt homosexual behaviour was more acceptable in certain Dorian regions (notably Sparta and Crete) than elsewhere.
The first part of this generalization is not refutable and may be true, but the evidence for it is  not as cogent as is commonly believed and asserted. The second part of the generalization might possibly be true, but it has to contend with a significant body of contrary evidence; the difficulty of assessing the evidence lies  in the fact that Greeks, like other people, passed judgments in  accordance with the  emotion engendered by examples present to their minds at the moment of
speaking, and in the notorious disparity between professed attitudes and actual behaviour.
The generalization is  largely founded on two passages of Plato's Laws, where the  three speakers are an Athenian, a Cretan and Spartan. In 636ab, responding to the Spartan's claim that the military organisation of communal messes and physical training-contribute to
sophrosune, the Athenian says:

These gymnasia and messes ... seem also to have undermined a la~
which is old and in accordance with nature: I mean the pleasure which
man and beast alike have in sexual intercourse. For this your cities
above all should be blamed, and all such cities as make use of
gymnasia .... We must reflect that when the natural forms of female
and male come together for procreation, the pleasure in this act seems
to have been granted them in accordance with nature, but that enjoyed
by males in intercourse with males or by females in intercourse with
females  seems to  be contrary to nature, a crime of the first order,
committed through inability to control the desire for pleasure. We all
blame the Cretans for having made up the myth of Ganymede ...

The Spartan is  embarrassed, and turns the conversation on to the restraints imposed upon drunkenness at Sparta. When in due course  the Athenian comes back to sexual legislation in detail (cf. p. 165) he says (836b):

In many other respects Crete as a whole and Sparta give us a good deal of solid support in our attempt to make laws differing from the way most things are, but in the matter of eros-we're by ourselves (sc. and can therefore speak in confidence)-they are completely opposed to us.

It must be said at once that Plato was not a historian either by trade or by temperament,  and  even  if  he intended to imply  that homosexuality began in Crete and Sparta and spread thence over the Greek world, we are not obliged to respect his authority; neither he nor any other Greek of the classical period was in a strong position to discover how a social usage was diffused two  or three centuries earlier. GREEK HOMOSEXUALITY- Dover, K.J.

Three things to take note of in this segment.

1- The average Greek's 'real' attitude towards homosexuality, and in particular buggery, to dispel Modern myths about it, attention to ridicule and reduce what is above them to something they can relate to, or feel superior to.
An attitude many westerners cannot relate to, but is still present in Greece and in the Mediterranean basin, where being penetrated is shameful whereas penetrating, somehow, makes you less of a homosexual.
The act taking its symbolic status of domination, or how the superior asserts itself upon the inferior, what evolved into a relationship between a mature male accepting a boy, yet to be a full male, us his student, a eromenos - relationship of agape that did not necessaruly develop into anything physical, but in certain historical periods may have, due to decadence spreading practices among the well-off.

2- The dominance of Dorians, and how despite being perceived as brutes, held a esteemed position among the Greeks. Acropolis itself, built using Dorian style is an attestation of it, as is Plato's and many other notable Athenians admiration for the Spartans, and now we can add to it this, the practice of pederstheia, as a byproduct of Dorian militancy.


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Although The ancient Greeks come to us through the Athenians, primarily because of their verbosity, but also because of how Platonism was alter integrated into Modernity by selectively combining it with Abrahamic spirituality of Nihilism, now secularized as Modern, at the time it was the Dorian that held a dominance over the hearts and minds of the Greeks - their imagination seduced by Doric practices and attitudes.
Not only was Athenian Democracy a submission to necessity, but it was also a harbinger of its decline.
Hellenism which we defer to and claim to admire, was totalitarian, by Modern standards.
Plato a fascist, who would be called today a Nazi. His ideals point to natural totalitarianism, natural order imposing itself no feeble human desires.  
A fact later exploited by Abrahamic Messiahs, leading to our present understanding of Hellenism as the Athenian kind, the Ionian type, also cleansed of its dyspeptic, for us Moderns, elements. Our misunderstanding resulting in a glorification of our own modern Nihilism as a continuance of that culture, as America is now considered a continuance of Rome, in its glory, and not an echo of a fragmented Rome, into a holy roman Empire and a Byzantium east, waiting to be conquered by the hoards from Asia, submitting to Christianity as a last effort to save itself from calamity.


3- Further support that homosexuality is a byproduct of natural imbalances, in this case caused by the intervention of social rules, motivated to produce a cohesive fighting unity in defence of the City.
Human intervention creating an artificial situation of deficiency - absence of females, or no access to sexual gratification, forcing the adoption of alternatives.
A related phenomenon would be imprisonment.  
In Modern times this 'imbalance' might be hormonal, inherited as a disposition, or socially imposed due to social attitudes, and ideal idealizing promiscuity, hedonism, and sexual dysfunction as an exploration of body and its possible hidden potentials.
In this the modern can feel kinship among the Greeks of certain periods, when successes resulted in periods of affluence, or of access to energies that had to be expunged, and periods of peace and prosperity where such relief was only possible through entertainment and play.    


The Spartan's embarrassment, when hearing the words of the Athenian, corresponds to documented attitudes to the idea of males desiring, finding pleasure, in being used as females.
The Athenian expresses the average Hellenes attitude toward homosexual practices, describing them as "unnatural".
We can fill in the absence of definitions, with out own differentiation of 'natural' from 'artificial', as an indication of willful intervention, to a degree where the consequences of these intervention effect the actor more than the circumstances (environment), intervened upon.  
The natural method of reproducing species can only be corrupted due to mitigating circumstances, such as, in the wild, an absence of females, due to disease, or predation, such as a display of dominance within a social unity that does not exclude competing males, such as play/practice, for maturity, or as a means of dispelling energies and/or reinforcing social hierarchies, and such as in the case of Sparta as a byproduct of human interventions which impose rules separating for long periods of time males form females.

We an only wonder how Moderns mange to deal with their fragmented, self-contradicting positions.

When their metaphysics do not harmonize with their positions on physics, how do they then expect their morals, and their ideals to make sense, and how do they expect to formulate a way of living within the world when their interpretations of the world are so compartmentalized and schizophrenic?

The short answer is they apply different standards to different circumstances, directed by an emotional need, or pure self-interest pretending to be selfless, and by a denied arrogance pretending to be humility.

What, other than hubris, can you call a position that claims the universe cares for its well-being, that then evolves to a position that makes it knowable?
From belonging to God, to becoming A god.

My entire thesis is not arbitrary.
I must harmonize my metaphysics not with my desires, but with physics, as these appear to me, or are told to me by those who study patterns in the cosmos.
My ideals are not based on what is pleasing to me, but are derived from this cohesion of metaphysics and physics, beginning with the simple act of sensual awareness, tested over time - empiricism.
All contradictions I explain as a product of an error, and make sure I correct it before I proceed to the next issue.

This I call Bottom<>Up thinking.
Starting with no more than how my brain perceives and interpret, my own consciousness, I proceed upwards from ignorance towards increasing gnosis, knowing this will never be completed.
My outward exploration is accompanied by an inward exploration, as the body/mind must be integrated into a cohesive unity, imperfect and forever incomplete.

This has lead me to the awareness that consciousness is fundamentally imperfect, because it is the extension of a physical organism, dependent on order in a disordering cosmos.
The next stage in the evolution of cognition is reached when the mind realizes that its own conceptions contradict the real, because they are absolutes attempting to represent the fluctuating.
As an artist realizes that his art is insufficient to fully grasp, and hold the real, he developed techniques to allude to the real, capturing its dynamism in rock, or on canvas, or, more appropriately, by using music, the kind of all art forms.

To say that someone is cerebral, or intellectual, is to describe an organism dominated by its nervous system, and its central hub, the brain.
The descriptions presupposes a sophisticated brain as collector and director of energies.
Energies can accumulate in the form of stress, libidinal, or abstractions (memory, ideas).

Energies are collected internally, from the body, or externally, from the world.
The former are stored as energies on standby, to be directed to the fight/flight mechanism, or converted to libidinal energies, in the form of ovum/sperm, or on standby, similar to the previous, for the purpose of copulation (procreation) – the sexual impulse – or they may be collected from external sources as stimulation, converted to abstractions, or maintained in the raw form as sensation, triggering emotions, feelings.
These energies come from the digestive system.
The high energy demands of the brain make the nervous system, in higher life-forms, an organ dedicated to managing excess, whereas in lower life-forms it is completely dedicated to dealing with lack.

A 'truth' cannot be absolute, if it is defined as a perspective.
It can be superior or inferior, therefore any 'truth' that proposes an absolute is burdens with providing absolute evidence...so as to avoid the mistake of assuming an /absent absolute' by having to prove an absolute negative.
As such anyone beginning with the assumption of an absolute, should be considered insane, until he provides evidence of what only exits in his brain as a idea, an ambiguous abstraction with no reference to anything outside if it.

This is how you avoid the linguistic paradox of negating an absurdity by accepting it as a premises, as it is obvious in the phrase 'there is absolutely no absolute' and 'truth is there is no truth' where truth implied absolute certainty, or a subjectivity that is absolute.
The only reason one lowers one self to the level of such morons, is because they are a majority, with political power.

Cost/Benefit can be expressed differently as negative/positive, or bad/good, in relation to an idea(l), a goal, where the self can be considered the all, encompassing and corrupting most popular one.
Negative/Positive retaining its theoretical, and bad/good its ambiguous relativity nuances.

Cost/Benefit with its own economic pragmatic implications, places the self as the living gauge of all theoretical, ambiguous nuances.
The 'self' as representation of the idea(l), the desired goal, becomes the organic recipient of the theory's ambiguity.
Cost/Benefit the perceptible consequences of what remains a hypothesis, a subjective interpretation, beyond emotional and unemotional criteria, exposing the individual's commitment and performance, in relation to the objective, but also the objectives real qualities, as these impact the individual, the natural agency relating to it, as undeniable costs & benefits, accumulating over time/space.

Upon the body of the individual, costs/benefits become perceptible, and obvious, measuring not only his approach towards the particular goal, but also the real-world effect of the goal itself, beyond all theoretical noetic conceptualizations.

When a dis-ease is accurately diagnosed witch-doctors come out of the woodwork wanting to claim it as their own, offering supernatural redefinition of the original prognosis, and then providing the pharmakon, often involving such concoctions as bat wing bones, elephant tusk powder, mixed with pixie dust, boiled in a silver cauldron on the night of the spring solstice, then to be meditated upon for no more and no less than 88 minutes, following a precise ritual of inhales and exhales.

Success has many parents, failure is an orphan.

With the female it is the first one that penetrated them, physically, and mentally if she be more intellectually inclined.
All her subsequent experiences with men, and woman, are compared to that first intrusion into her essence, breaking through her inherited nature as a thrilling, intimidating alien entity.
Such a shock may not result in heights of ecstasy, because its strangeness, and the fear it brings, does not permit the abandonment to it, as would be required for the heights to be attained, but if such abandonment is possible the accompanying orgasm solidifies and accentuates the event as seminal, as life-changing, consciousness expanding.
All that follow are compared to it.
Woman never forgets her first.
All pale in comparison, when memory cleanses the experience of all negativity, leaving only a pristine moment in time, multiplying, inflating, the actual event with emotion, and nostalgia.

There is no limit to what the poetic spirit can invent with the manipulation of words freed from their worldly relationships.
It can cast his enemies to the pits of hell, build empires with a sentence, accuse non-living matter of possessing a soul with a motive, and that the simplest interaction of force can be named eros, alluding to an organic essence.
Repeating Spinoza, he will come up with new words to describe what that old secular Jew already proclaimed: that all is Deus, and Deus is all.

Will we not forgive the wandering chosen-ones their desire to return to their ancient ways, wanting to take root in the soil they once uprooted themselves from, losing themselves in the deserts, where they reinvented themselves at the feet of the Sphinx, as the eternal victims.
Once their power grew they could reaffirm what they had denounced, and emerge as pagan Semites, ready to synthesize their brief sojourn on the sands of time, with the hearth they had to leave behind to liberate themselves from the soil they were slaves upon.

Metaphorical Malevolence
How many sheep have been led astray, and taken to their slaughter convinced they were being freed, by the twist of a literary phrase and the inspiring triggers of a seductive metaphor.
Bible is full of them, but we can see it in Nietzsche appeal to the romantic emotional boy and, more rarely, girl, or in the seduction of Hellenic poetic philosophy convincing Moderns raised to think in impoverished languages that the literati speaks literally.

Sensitive, lost souls cower before an indifferent cosmos, hungry for some care.
An artist's warm embrace feeds their emaciation with symbols, warm and vague enough to touch their emotions.
What was meant to appeal to the mind's conventions, a manner of speaking and expressing the intangible, the mysterious, is turned into an audiences emotional thrill.

Spinoza tells us about how Biblical metaphor, reflecting idiomatic practices, have been misunderstood by moderns, more often wilfully.
But we know of many such cases besides the artistic musing of a Nietzsche who has become the last-man's erotic embrace.
We can recall Heraclitus and his own metaphor, fire, burning in the imagination of those who understood it with no artistic imagination.

Did the Greeks not speak of philosophical matters using poetry?
We should not wonder, because the Moderns Greeks also have this flare for hyperbole, simile, and insinuating linguistic artistry something that, no doubt, inspires Nietzsche in his cold Germanic austerity.
It is, often those, born and raised to speak and think using languages with less flare, less style, that have come to misinterpret the truths implied in prose, as truths themselves.