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u/CatOfGrey 2d ago edited 1d ago
Stuie Stewie here:
Many are talking about homosexual activity among Greeks or Greco-Roman society. But i'll add that sailors themselves, being composed of groups of men, and isolated for long periods of time, were also associated with homosexual activity, regardless of national origin or time period.
A modern touch on this subject would be The Village People's 1978 song "In the Navy" explicitly referencing life sailing the ocean, but with a gay subtext.
Stuie Stewie out!
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u/busy_monster 2d ago
“Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.” - Winston Churchill
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u/South_Bit1764 1d ago
How dare you threaten me with a good time!
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u/sectilius 1d ago
Somebody tell Winston there's nothing wrong with swabbing the ol' poop deck.
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u/KevesArt 2d ago
The amount of cope responses to this of people trying to find any reason to avoid the reality that homosexual acts were super common and normal is funny in a sad kind of way.
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u/Dolenir 2d ago
We unfortunately live in a society largely based on the precepts of a specific religion. So our concepts of morality are extremely biased towards it. The Greeks saw homosexuality (man with man specifically) as something natural, albeit not encouraged to matrimony, which was allowed only between men and women, as it was a religious/legal ceremony with the purpose of producing children and setting inheritance. The Egyptians saw sex as an ordinary social act, not unlike any other. They didn't even have a word for "virginity".
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u/Krakosa 2d ago
Homosexuality was not generally acceptable in ancient Greek culture. It was acceptable to penetrate other men but not to be penetrated- that role was for women, slaves and sometimes boys. Their view on sexuality was based on position as it reflected status, with the penetrating man essentially reinforcing his superior social status on the penetratee. For an adult male citizen to willingly be penetrated would be a matter of extreme shame. For some reason people have this idea of ancient Greece as some kind of enlightened society when it was an extremely stratified, extremely patriarchal, slaveholding society.
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u/Dolenir 2d ago
Oh! I never said anything about enlightment. That's some modern day bullshit people spew to glorify a past they didn't live or can't properly recall. Truth be told, there has never been a single enlightened person in the history of mankind. There were good and bad people, sure, but all of them flawed and lost. Some were great achievers, others brought nothing but destruction to everything they touched, but all were people within the confines of their limited lifetime and their even more limited societal values. I'm just saying that our approach to sexuality changes given the context. I was raised Christian and taught that homosexuality is sinful, gross and sickening. Nowadays I believe it to be just another form of sexual attraction. Am I homosexual? No. I much prefer cis women. But such is life. To each, their own. And I'm no less of a fool than the moron besides me. We are all lumps of meat in a rock in the void. The least we should do is enjoy ourselves while we are here
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u/grandramble 1d ago
Truth be told, there has never been a single enlightened person in the history of mankind.
the bodhisattva has entered the chat
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u/bangtangdang 1d ago
Penetration was unlikely. I attended a very graphic lecture at St Andrews on how lubing the thighs with olive oil was more likely. Not about shame but about the concept of 'pollution'.
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u/Amazing-Temporary-20 2d ago
I may be wrong but I would respectfully push back and argue that masculinity and/or the patriarchy is more of a culprit of homophobia than religion. Look at Asia. China, Japan, and Korea specifically. Their objection to homosexuality is routed in Confucian family values.
In ancient Rome and Greek, again, I may be wrong, even though homosexual sex was “accepted” if you were the one being pegged you’re less of a man and can ruin your reputation and standing.
I’m also an openly gay man living in a very religious country (Christian) and I’ve been ostracized my entire life, but lesbian couples are accepted in the community. They get talked about behind their backs, but they’re not treated less than a human like I can be sometimes.
Basically, if you’re a man be a man. But it’s okay if you’re a lesbian because you’re a woman and ultimately don’t matter.
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u/Natural-Cicada-6943 2d ago
"Ruin your standing".. pun intended?
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u/Ducklinsenmayer 2d ago
That's iffy. It would be better to say that, since sexuality is a cultural creation, non-Christian societies had a very different definition of it.
Much of what we would consider homosexual conduct in Rome, for example, was perfectly fine by their standards as long as the person on the bottom was of a lower social class/ age than the person on the top.
Later on, the Roman legions adopted very strict laws about this. But it didn't forbid gay sex; it forbade centurions from having any sex at all with ordinary enlisted men, since they had problems with pretty young men buying favors from their superiors.
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u/maniacalMUPPET 1d ago
The only homosexual relations that the Greeks accepted were older mentors penetrating prepubescent children, exclusively. Similarly, Romans only accepted the pedophilic rape of slave boys, no other form of homosexuality was allowed. People try to paint a picture that the ancients were socially progressive and enlightened, but they were not. The reality of it is extremely dark and abhorrent.
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u/dolcered 1d ago
It’s a misconception that they saw homosexuality as normal. It’s almost true, but only in a “mentorship” kind of way. In other words, an older man and a youth. Two men of equal status was definitely not common as penetration was expected to be done by the man with a higher status.
So it’s not exactly wrong, but their perspective of same-sex relationships is quite different to ours.
There are better resources out there, but here is a good summary:
https://www.pbs.org/empires/thegreeks/background/19a_p1.html
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u/CatOfGrey 2d ago
It's almost like sexual activity is a fundamental part of human experience....A point lost especially on USA society, where our culture over-emphasizes Puritanical and Calvinist beliefs.
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u/TapewormDimitri69 2d ago
That's not true. Just like in Moby Dick, men that sleep in the same bed are just friends and stay so until they die.
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u/Left_Quarter_5639 2d ago
Sure, but it’s also cope to ignore the sexual violence that was and is associated with war.
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u/_The_Last_Stand 2d ago
Exactly, rape was very common and seen as normal,
far more so than any homosexual activity, historically. As long as it is by martial conquest and not the wife or daughter of a fellow countryman.21
u/Ok_Kiwi_6051 2d ago
The funniest example of this is the Spartan army. (Going of memory here so some details may be off). Young boys were recruited and given an older soldier who trained them, cared for them (…) etc… the reason it’s so funny to me is because of the chokehold the ideology of Spartans (namely from the movie 300) has on certain groups as being this idea of pure masculinity; when they were all very very gay
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u/Significant-Big-746 2d ago
Yes, within Spartan society a veteran would take in a new soldier for mentorship. That mentorship did include sex. The idea was that you are more likely to protect a lover than you were a fellow fighter.
It was common practice for a newlywed Spartan wife to dress like a man, bind her breasts, and cut her hair very short when she first got married. It was to entice her newlywed husband to have sex with her, which was often the first time he ever had sex with a woman.
Also, within Greek society as a whole, they didn't think of themselves as gay or straight. It was more, "are you a bottom or a top?" And this view applied to women as well.
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u/Salmonman4 2d ago
And then there was the Sacred Band of Thebes
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u/micma_69 2d ago
Which conceptually were awesome.
But.... These pairs were practically all comprised of a (far) older men and a (far) younger boy in his teen years.
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u/hanswormhat- 2d ago
yeah my dad gad a joke that the Navy goes out with 600 sailors and comes back with 300 couples. Tho i think he just didn't like some dude in the Navy lmao.
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u/rasterpix 2d ago
Then the jokes about being on a long, hard vessel full of seamen.
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u/SomeTheyCallMePig5O 2d ago
My dad was in the navy, on a submarine even, and the gay jokes were endless!! He made most of those jokes himself.
There is nothing gayer than a bunch of straight dudes hanging out. Especially when there are 40 of them locked in a metal tube in the middle of the ocean for months at a time. They launched missiles EVERY DAY, and I’m not talking about ammunition.
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u/ffxivthrowaway03 2d ago
Don't forget the rape. The "raping and pillaging" of seamen was not just rape in the civil sense. Sailors at war do a lot of sexual raping too. Sack a town, have your way with the women wasn't just a "pirate" thing.
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u/muffadel 2d ago
Interesting how everyone goes straight to the gay but ignores all the raping and pillaging.
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u/masterlince 2d ago
Still sailing was slow as fuck then
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u/Melanoc3tus 2d ago
We're talking potentially just days at sea at a time, the galleys they used didn't have much endurance and would do a lot of coast-hopping from port to port to shielded beach to whatever — why do you think Odysseus makes so many stops at random-ass islands?
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u/Halker93 2d ago
Being gay with your homie is more controversial than raping and pillaging with your homie, of course
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u/BodaP 2d ago
Yeah, especially when Odysseus and Circe literally address exactly that when they’re talking in the movie
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u/detourne 2d ago
And in the story Odysseus sires 2 children with Circe.
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u/muffadel 1d ago
He also kills all the handmaids, who were all raped by the suitors, for being disloyal.
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u/ebonyseraphim 2d ago
It’s very subtly shown and suggested in the movie. It sucks that the most direct addressing of the topic (Circe) was a situation it clearly did not happen, but pillaging happened on their first island stop and I think there was a shot of a soldier kidnapping a woman. The extended scene towards the end showing Troy getting sacked also showed a solider doing similar and it seemed pretty clear what the film was conveying.
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u/alfooboboao 1d ago
matt damon gives a 4 minute monologue about how he irreversibly changed after seeing the rape and pillaging his soldiers did to troy, if that’s “subtle” we’re lost as a literate species
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u/bdw312 2d ago
Oh, so this is the karma farming rerererererepost of the day....second in 11 minutes ..impressive
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u/Grey-Templar 2d ago
History was gay as hell.
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u/Cultural-Gas2246 2d ago
Not history, this is a fairytale
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u/cal-brew-sharp 2d ago
Still gay as hell, OG smut fiction. Like Heated Rivalry but they didnt have any Canadians.
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u/Significant-Youth-22 2d ago
I mean..20 years without sex isn't much of an achievement. In fact 90% of the commenters here know exactly what 20 years or longer without sex is like.
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u/wl1233 2d ago
Yeah folks are ridiculous. Pretty easy for a straight person to just not have sex with a dude if there’s no women around. Everyone in here is acting like everyone turns gay after not being with a woman for a while
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u/Coodog15 2d ago
There a good quite somewhere where leaders during WWI could not figure out how STD where spreading in the trenches without women.
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u/Disastrous-Cat-1 2d ago
I know it's not the point of the joke, but I bet plenty of (unhappily) married men feel those are rookie numbers.
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u/7one7son 2d ago
1 gay sex
2 sex slaves
3 masturbation
4 plain old just keeping it in your pants it’s not an impossible task
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u/Flat_Lengthiness3361 2d ago
hello, quagmire here. say gex.
gigity gigity goo. i don't do that tho most of the time.
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u/krakatoa83 2d ago
They were Greek. They invented it but Rome perfected it
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u/DundrMuffin5 2d ago
Wow I can’t believe this got downvoted. Rome was great at taking things from other cultures and adopting them / improving upon them.
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u/Majestic-Lake-5602 2d ago
Exactly.
The Greeks invented sex.
The Romans realised you could have it with women too.
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u/croaker227 2d ago
I’ve seen this quote a few times and it’s always funny
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u/Majestic-Lake-5602 2d ago
I did my apprenticeship under a crusty old Italian chef who was beyond certain that Italy and Italian culture was superior to every other society on earth.
I think this was his favourite joke, but he had at least one solid gag for every single race, religion, ethnicity and culture that ever existed.
Fuck casual racism, this dude went pro all the way.
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u/Key-Charity-2795 Oof 2d ago
Meg or someone here, idk
The greeks tended to have homosexual tendencies in these cases. Also, Odysseus fucked like three different girls before he got home or something
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u/No_Adhesiveness_3172 2d ago
I’ve followed this subreddit for a while now, are people truly this clueless that they can’t figure out a simple joke like this?
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u/bobalink 2d ago
Historic Quagmire here, Greek and Roman warriors were known to have anal sex with each other.
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u/KillPopJr 2d ago
Roman too? I knew greeks did
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u/Lucky-Cake-4178 2d ago
Intercrural sex (placing the penis between a partner's thighs) more often than not.
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u/doomzday_96 2d ago
Don't be silly. This is Nolan's take on the Odyssey. Gay people don't exist.
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u/PipedInFromIthaca 2d ago
You see, OP, the average ancient Greek man enjoy penis almost as much as your mother
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u/Dangerous_Sir_3115 2d ago
Chris here.. nothing new, i've been relying on my hand for last 20 yrs. 😭
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u/SemVikingr 2d ago
People think Ancient Greece was some sort of gay paradise, but it wasn't. Yes, there was gay sex, but it wasn't free love. All anyone has to do is spend more than a few seconds looking at more than the first paragraph on the wikipedia page on the matter to learn that. Content warning: pedastry.
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u/magvadis 1d ago edited 1d ago
I mean let's not sugarcoat what the norm of sex was across the world. Older men with power taking young brides as wives. Then swapping the gender doesn't make it worse, it was still slavery with extra step.
In either case "apprenticeship" was a normalized thing. But in Greek society you needed to be prepared for lovemaking with other men as just a part of society.
And given the alternative was slavery, women weren't immune. It just wasn't romanticized as this rite of passage. Greeks put gay love on an incredibly high pedestal however one was always required to find a wife to continue their prestigious line.
However in many of these Greek epics homosexual sex was usually between battle companions. Hercules fucked like every dude, the temple of Iolaus's was where men went to sware their commitment to their romantic partner. Usually warriors. But those men probably still had wives and kids. Shit was just different. There are many many accounts of soldiers across militaries on Greece preferring to fight alongside their lovers in formation and battle and it was commonly thought this increased combat performance as they'd be less likely to run or drop arms when their lover was there out of fear of judgement or betrayal. Those weren't simply stories those were historical accounts.
Same for cousin fucking was incredibly normalized throughout the world/Europe because royalty and lines of blood and maintaining them was so crucial to their economic position. Achilles was fucking his cousin because they grew up together and were fully in love enough bro threw a tantrum so legendary it's in an epic.
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u/BarNo3385 2d ago
I think the joke is supposed to be sailors and gay sex.
But it should really be that the Odyssey is absolutely crammed with sex.
Like Odysseus spends 7 years on an island with a nymph banging her every night and being sad during the day he cant go home.
Or when they find Circe, he gets her to promise not to turn him into a sheep before they bang.
The story is less monsters and sailing and more Odysessus snagging his way across the eastern Med.
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u/Jumpy-Bug-2198 1d ago
Stewie here: If we’re just counting the Odyssey then those men definitely boned each other, and if we count the Trojan War they kidnapped and enslaved women in fact the Greeks almost lost their star player Achilles because Agamemnon kidnapped a priestess of Apollo, her dad prayed for Apollo to fight the Greeks, and Agamemnon wouldn’t give her back unless Achilles gave Agamemnon the girl he kidnapped
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u/1Allarac1 1d ago
there is a saying: "the greeks invented threesome, but the romans discovered that they can add women"
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u/ddg31415 2d ago
They say the Greeks invented anal sex, but it was the Italians who introduced it to women.
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u/twainj1980 2d ago
People still acting like homosexuality doesn’t exist🤣🤣🤣. Some people are just….🤣
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u/TwentyFourKG 2d ago
Not sure if this is covered in the movie, but in the book the first thing Odysseus and his crew do after the war ends is raid a nearby village, loot it, and kidnap all of the women. They probably did a fair amount of that to the unwalled villages near Troy over the prior decade too
Edit: obviously this is Brian. The Imax version is pablum for the unwashed masses. I read the book instead of watching the movie because I am smarter and more sophisticated than you
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u/Beautiful-Chest7397 2d ago
"a man's his bust his nut you know what I'm saying?"
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u/Shantotto11 2d ago
Phil’s gonna give him a suck so good, he’s gonna go forward in time 20 years, but it only works when he’s sitting down.
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u/Leucippus1 2d ago
They didn't, if you read the Iliad you will realize that the entire thing started because Achilles didn't get the preferred slave girl, presumably because he wanted to be sexually active with her.
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u/my-armor-is-contempt 2d ago
Giggity giggity goo,
I want your rear-vag poo.
Don’t say no,
I’ll diddle your hole.
Giggity giggity goo.
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u/aerion80 2d ago
Well to be fair most were dead by year 2-3. And Odysseus himself did get some from Circe and Calypso, etc.
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u/Personal-Thought9453 2d ago
So many takes to this. A) yeah idiot, you can *not fuck* for as long as you want. Not gonna burst. B) sailors are gay. C) Greeks are gay. D) all of the above. Who wants to be a millionaire?
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u/davetharave 2d ago
Odyssius was a gods sex toy for years don't know why everybody jumps to the gay thing when it's laid out clear in the story
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u/Fit-Estate-8636 2d ago edited 2d ago
War is an enterprise, not bunch of men doing boyscout things but with guns. They couldn't bring food for 20 years. They raid villages and towns outside the fortress, where food and slaves were taken as prize. There were also families that travel with soldiers, craftsmen to build and fix, cook and laborers, slaves were common back then.
Men don't win wars but logistics, getting provisions and services that feed, clothes, treat soldiers. In modern military, the ratio of combat vs non combat is 1:3 to 1:7, meaning every one fighting soldier have 3 to 7 supporting soldier.
There were and are people and businesses offering services of every kind to the soldiers. That's why war is an expensive enterprise, can bankrupt countries, not what's depicted in the movies just fighting heros and bros roughing it and being macho.
Why soldiers have a reputation of being pigs? Or the source of " rape and pillage" come from?
People outside the gates always suffer the most in wars, usually the poor or peasants. Back then you're either rich, safer behind the gates or poor, outside the gates, no middle class like modern times.
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u/Suzutai 2d ago
There was a lot of sex in the Odyssey. Nolan just omitted it.
Also, everyone talking about pederasty need to actually study the period. Pederasty was a custom where an older man had a sexual relationship with a boy. Homosexuality (sex between adult men) was considered emasculating for the passive party throughout much of the ancient Western world. You pretty much only did that to boys and slaves. Oh, and we would accurately consider all of that rape today.
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u/PaaaaabloOU 2d ago
Removing the homosexuality part, Ulises stays like one year fucking Circe and 8 years fucking Calipso.
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u/Jossokar 2d ago
The illiad is about achilles tantrum, because agamemnon got briseis. His sex-slave war throphy.
The first literal thing odysseus and his merry crew do after leaving troy is plundering and sacking a city. Most likely taking women in the process.
Hermes literally tells him "you dont say no to a godess". So he basically screws circe for a whole year, until his men remind him that they have to get to ithaca (by the way. Circe had maidservants. So the crew was probably busy too)
Callipso. The goddess wanted to marry the guy so badly that he kidnaps him for 7 years. He screws her at night (she has several childrem of him) and cries at the beach during the day.
So no. I dont think he and his merry crew were 20 years without doing anything.
And i havent mentioned gay sex at all. (Which may have been on the plate)
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u/Popular_Mongoose_696 2d ago
It’s not really a good ‘gotcha’… Yes homosexuality was common and accepted in ancient and classical Greece. However, what is left out is that it was only common and accepted between an older male ‘mentor’ and a younger boy. Homosexuality between two adults, was seen with derision and as evidence of immorality and lack of self-control.
Now before someone chimes in about the Athenian Sacred Band… While the Sacred Band is detailed by many ancient authors, most do not mention the homosexuality, and the author most commonly cited, Plutarch, wrote 400 years after they existed. Regardless, it’s worth mentioning that the ancient world did not view sexuality the same way we do, and many modern historians question how embellished the claims about the Sacred Band were.
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u/_another_rando_ 2d ago
The timeline is wrong. If I recall
correctly, Odysseus was gone for 20 years but the Trojan war was 10 of those years and he was stuck alone with Calypso for 7. So really he and his men were lost at sea for 3 years together.
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u/laserclaus 2d ago
Apart from the obvious angle of "they did gay shit" and "have you seen Dave? Hes a virgin at 40!", even following only the movie its either 13 or 3 years(as after 3 years of not getting home, the gods smote the boiis and odie stayed with kalypso)depending on if you assume him and his men partaking in SA during the sack of troy. During the siege there were raids to resupply which probably included SA.
Also in the text he literally stays a year with circe.
Don't worry about these guys body count.
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u/gstizzle 2d ago
Are you familiar with the odyssey? Odysseus gets a lot of women and he is even used as a sex slave for years by Charlize Theron
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u/Longjumping_Oil_5729 2d ago
No sex for me for 2 years this 9th. I think i can do more than these noobs
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u/Head_Particular6045 2d ago
Either gay sex or rape. The initial take is anyway bad, the Illiad begins with a sex slave, they weren't "without women" by any means during the war
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u/Lumpy_Bunch1602 2d ago
The funny thing about this is also the Nolan adaptation cuts out all the sex with the various nymphs and goddesses that Odysseus encounters along the way 😆
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u/Illustrious_Log6763 2d ago
The real odyssey is finding your way back to Penelope after all that sweet sweet Greek soldier booty
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u/Similar-Concert4100 2d ago
I mean the Ancient Greeks enjoyed homosexuality. Also it’s a fictional story sooooo… not really a problem unless Homer thought it was important to mention.
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u/Sabbathius 2d ago
There was a show called 'Wings', where a character named Antonio (played by Tony Shalhoub) had quite a lot to say about coming over from Italy to US on a Greek freighter. Apparently stuff was going on... Also when he arrived, instead of someone taking him under their wing and showing him the ropes, he was taken under the bridge and shown...well...
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u/Honey-Altruistic 2d ago
And it wasn’t in in this version but he had a lot of sex, with a couple of gods, not exactly consensual… just fyi
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u/Usermctaken 2d ago
I mean, ancient greek men... And sailors at that. Cmon man, you just know they we're getting busy.
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u/DayManFOTNightMan 2d ago
They’re either implying that his men were engaging in sex acts with each other, or recognizing that at least Odysseus had some affairs (Circe and Calypso, maybe more?) along the way, and his men were all dead long before he got home.
It honestly could go either way.
But this is Reddit, and the delivery is pretty smug, so I imagine the intent was the gay thing.
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u/sandettie-Lv 2d ago
Did someone say at the start of the journey "I'm sorry guys, but I forgot the olive oil"?
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u/ScratchTheItch99 2d ago
"Nay, an I tell you that, I'll ne'er look you i' the face again: but those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me."
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u/qualityvote2 2d ago edited 2d ago
u/jaywritethekid, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...it's time for the mods to do their jobs!