This specific chapter of Sparta and its Law has been moved: here.
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Category: Ancient Greece
Plato goes further. He says with an innocence possible only for a Greek, not a “Christian,” that there would be no Platonic philosophy at all if there were not such beautiful youths in Athens: it is only their sight that transposes the philosopher’s soul into an erotic trance, leaving it no peace until it lowers the seed of all exalted things into such beautiful soil.
Another queer saint! One does not trust one’s ears, even if one should trust Plato. At least one guesses that they philosophized differently in Athens, especially in public. Nothing is less Greek than the conceptual web-spinning of a hermit—amor intellectualis dei [intellectual love of God] after the fashion of Spinoza. Philosophy after the fashion of Plato might rather be defined as an erotic contest, as a further development and turning inward of the ancient agonistic gymnastics and of its presuppositions... What ultimately grew out of this philosophic eroticism of Plato?
A new art form of the Greek agon: dialectics. Finally, I recall—against Schopenhauer and in honor of Plato—that the whole higher culture and literature of classical France too grew on the soil of sexual interest. Everywhere in it one may look for the amatory, the senses, the sexual contest, “the woman”—one will never look in vain…
Oh! That my spirit were yon Heaven of light
To gaze upon thee with a thousand eyes
—Plato
Tomorrow Sunday I won’t post any entry here to leave my visitors the opportunity to read carefully my latest entry on “Women and marriage” in Sparta. The uttermost importance of what the author says in that post is explained in my “metaphysical” comment in that thread.
Since that post is related to Eros in Ancient Greece, the issue of other forms of Greco-Roman sexuality should be addressed.
It irritates me that LGBT deviants and writers like James O’Meara want to usurp the legacy of the classical world to rationalize their lifestyles. The fact is that the missing color in their rainbow flag—the Hellenes’ infatuation with handsome adolescents, not adults—was the only form of homosexuality tolerated in some Greek and Roman cities. This had nothing to do with the contemporary “gay” movement or sex between coeval adults.
As a dilettante in classic literature I tried to say something about it in “On classic pederasty,” but there are people who are far more knowledgeable than me. Today, surfing the internet starting here, I found several posts by a blogger in The Phora that complement what I have said. The erudite blogger, Ixion, is the one who uses as an avatar an image of the Virgin Mary; you may skip the other comments in that thread, “Debunking Ancient Greek Homosexual History.”
But all of this is a distraction related to my differences with Counter-Currents: what really matters is the subject of hetero-sexuality in Ancient Greece.