Homosexual Acceptance/Rights Emerging From Roman-Greco Pre-Christian Worldveiw?

In the early days after Iraq's defeat in Gulf War I (when commercial traffic was beginning to resume between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait), I was visiting a camp where convoys of commercial truckers were waiting for clearance to enter Kuwait.

After spotting several occurrences of what might be described as "debauchery" under the parked trucks, I asked my interpreter about it. In response, he said, "Making love to a woman is your duty to Allah; making love to a man is for pleasure".

Just sayin'.
Your point being?
 
Partly because there was no such Classical or Hellenistic view.

From the time he prosecuted Verres to his Philippics against Marcus Antonius, for example, Marcus Tullius Cicero resorted - and it was effective: that was the point - to throwing mud at his opponents by accusing them (or, worse, to show what bad fathers they were, their sons) of having homosexual relations and relationships. As the (in fact, as if it were relevant, gay) historian James N. Davidson notes, such charges were a common form of character assassination in Greek politics before Alexander's and then the Romans' incursions. Caius Julius Caesar never lived down the claim he'd slept with the king of Bithynia; Publius Clodius Pulcher was regularly abused in the courts and the senate by sneers of the same sort. Now, these charges would have had no political utility had the Greeks and Romans "had more tolerance to sex and relationship between two people of same gender."

What the Romans and the Greeks accepted was that a free man could shag whoever he liked, women or (let's not mince words) boys. But if he were shagged, he was unworthy to be a free man and a citizen. What a free man did to others not his equal was one thing. But any relationship, i.e., any mutuality (outside formal erastes-eromenos relationships in Greece for a brief period in Greek history in which the whole point was that there was not mutuality and the eromenos would age out of it to become an erastes in his turn), was a scandal which would have drawn the immediate attention of the Censors.

That is not a basis for a utopian "toleration and acceptance of same-sex relationships," I'm afraid; merely an instance of what would now be called a toxic complex of patriarchy, male privilege, and "rape culture." I fear your sources have misled you.

I seem to recall an incident during the Cimbric Wars when a Roman officer made a pass at one of his subordinates. The subordinate killed him, but was pardoned by Marius, on the grounds that he'd just been taking the necessary steps to defend his virtue.

On another note, the whole notion of "homosexuals" only dates back to the 19th century. Before then you had the idea that some men sometimes slept with other men, but the idea of treating them as a distinct class of person would have seemed as absurd as (say) treating men who like blondes as a distinct class would seem to us today.
 
Hegel's not a an accurate description of how history works.

Okay, it's the 21st Century, and we're all rational adults. There's no reason to offer up warmed up Hegel as a descriptor of how cultures evolved.

Speaking of the Classical world and Christianity as two opposed and contesting thesis is pretty... not at all true. A good start is realizing that Late Antiquity's Christianity has mores that evolved out of the Classical world. This is the case of an evolution, not a struggle.

The Romans and the Greeks had rigid ideas of sexual propriety, as has been addressed above, and the big thing is not being a passive participant. Homo and hetero sexual relationships are viewed equally, in the sense that both males and females of lower status could be freely used by those of higher status, with the only bar being if the person in question belonged, chattel or patronage, to someone of your status or higher. Submitting sexually, as a male Roman, to anyone not of a higher status, was considered unspeakable.

Port that forward, and you have Christian sexual mores. The evolution here is that Christianity has some idea that everyone has some essential spark that's not determined by your status in this world, and the Gospels and some of the epistles of Paul are shockingly friendly towards the idea of women having this spark too. However, as the early church was very much a product of the society it evolved in, the same ideals of status and hierarchy govern sexual norms of the day to day, and did so for a long time come. Any seeds those doctrines planted would be a long time in flowering. If everyone's equal in the eyes of God, well, then there's no natural inferior to do the catching in a same sex relationship.

The short version? The sexual mores of the classical world largely survived. They're present in every man who excuses their sexual assault as not knowing the victim had a husband/boyfriend, or as being excused by the victims lack of property. Or every male who says they can't be a homo, because they were the active party. It's just the classical world may not have been as idyllic as old episodes of Cosmos had you believe.
 
And that's all there is to it. None of the offered arguments are good enough to project an impossibility of something like what we have today developing from the pagan morality of the Romans. It's at least as likely to develop, and maybe more so.

Dubious about this argument if I'm being honest. If you take the sexual ethics in isolation then your argument seems to have merit but to me it ignores the wider context of ancient society. I guess you could point to the influence of the Stoic tradition as a counter-point but when a society is foundationally built on slavery and life being cheap it's very difficult to argue for the kind of ways we approach homosexuality today, which is ultimately an outrgrowth of civil rights. Talking about a rape culture in a slave society isn't artificial constructionism - it's both common sense and something we have ample documentation for.

… that this thread is itself tending towards immoderation; akolasia? I really don’t understand it: there seems to be a sudden uptick in bad temper on the boards of late. Perhaps it’s seasonal, at least in the Northern Hemisphere; I don’t know. So far, I’ve been upbraided for referencing James Davidson (a quick look at JSTOR doesn’t seem – to me at least – to show any widespread dismissal, by the relevant academic community, of Professor Davidson as “a very dubious and erratic source,” but I freely admit this is not my period: although I note he was trained, presumably impeccably, by Oswyn Murray);

If you honestly think me saying that a source you're using is a bit dodgy means I'm losing my temper with you, then tbh it says more about how you're approaching this than me. For the sake of good order I apologise if you got somehow offended by that, but I didn't make either an unreasonable point in itself and nor was it worded unreasonably.

The point regarding Davidson isn't his level of education about the subject, which is inarguable, it's more the way he's approached scholarship of it - a scholarship which incidentally wouldn't support the kind of argument you're making in this thread.
 
So as we know Ancient Rome and Greece in the pre-Christian era had more tolerance to sex and relationship between two people of same gender, with one comment I read summarizing that it was not the wife/husband that other was closest to. Particularly for Rome I had it summarized one as it was not the act itself, but the notion one would be lowering themselves to the position on the female.

So assuming a non-christan morality in regards to sex and homosexuality takes over the larger Greco-Roman world, could something like how the west has come to view it in the last few decades emerge?

Hell, the Greeks were even worse about sex than Christians ever were (entire systems of philosophy founded on the premise of material things being evil does that). The Greeks and Romans are the reason Christianity is so prudish. The patriarchal system didn't come from nowhere. Weaving together Jewish legalism with a Greek hatred for all things carnal... it doesn't make for a liberated atmosphere.
 
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