Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: SunkenCiv
I admit that that is an aspect of ancient Greek history that I tend to gloss over (and cover my eyes and just say ‘ewwww’...). I read of the ‘Sacred Band’ (actually I remembered them as the ‘Theban Fabulous Brigade’ ... but I eventually found the reference. At least I got the Thebes part correct), and other various accounts of Greek buggery, but I tend to skip those sections. Just seems very bizarre, and it makes me wonder if someone just had bad press agents and made-up slander eventually became enshrined as history... Either that, or there was an abundance of weird folks in that area of the world at that time ...
36 posted on 07/30/2013 3:43:04 PM PDT by El Cid (Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 35 | View Replies ]


To: El Cid
Oh, yeah. The Sacred Band actually won the Battle of Leuctra - Thebans against the Spartans, who knew how to fight, in 371 BC. Can't take that away from them. They didn't do so well when Philip II of Macedon came down to play - in the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC) they were wiped out to the last man.

The Boeotians, of which Thebes numbered, had a widespread reputation for buggery (so did the cities of Chalcis and Sardis) for which the Athenians held them in disdain. And the Athenians got most the press. How much of it was real is anyone's guess. Different times, different mores.

If anyone is curious about my sourcing, it's Michael Grant's Rise of the Greeks - Phoenix Press, 2001, but I think it was originally published in 1987. I'm doing some crash reading for a Greek Civilization course I'm taking starting next month.

39 posted on 07/30/2013 3:58:26 PM PDT by Billthedrill
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 36 | View Replies ]

To: El Cid

Ancient Sparta was an elitist gang of pederasts who enslaved as many of their neighbors as they could get their hands (a nice change) on. Thebes was nominally on Sparta’s side in the Peloponnesian War against Athens, but after Athens was defeated and its wall torn down, Thebes began to assert itself. Within a few decades the jackass king Agesilaus got Sparta to go to war *again* with Thebes, and convinced his co-king to lead the charge while A stayed home with the kids (ahem). The Battle of Leuktra was the best victory ever won in ancient Greece, destroying the last Spartan army; the Thebans proceeded to march around the formerly enslaved areas and set up fortified towns for the locals, ending Sparta’s hideous slavery-based economy for good.


45 posted on 07/30/2013 5:35:11 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (It's no coincidence that some "conservatives" echo the hard left.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 36 | View Replies ]

To: El Cid

But of course, yes, classical Greece and Rome didn’t really pay that much attention to homosexuality, even among leaders — the decline of the Roman Empire began with the accession of the flaming queen Hadrian, who succeeded the great conqueror Trajan, leader of the Roman Empire at its peak. The difference was, Sparta’s monstrous system made child sexual (and physical abuse beginning in infancy) compulsory.


49 posted on 07/30/2013 6:43:56 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (It's no coincidence that some "conservatives" echo the hard left.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 36 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson