Were spartans gay lovers
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To put it bluntly, homosexuality was illegal in Sparta, but not for the reasons you’d think. (Again, women in Athens were neither educated nor literate, and men treated them as little more than property. Unlike other women in antiquity, Spartan women were educated, literate and had rights, including land ownership. This is in part due to the oft-biased focus of historians on the achievements of Sparta and, in more recent terms, big-budget Hollywood movies such as 300 and 300: Rise of an Empire,which showcase the prowess of Spartan warriors.
Although their fearsome reputation is well established in the historical sources, they were by no means the only professional soldiers with a formidable reputation on the battlefield that arose from ancient Greece.
For approximately forty years during the 4th century BC, a military unit known as the Sacred Band of Thebes was undefeated on the field of combat.
Although debated by historians, the idea of such a fighting force could have been inspired by the earlier writings of the Greek philosopher Plato in his Symposium. Take ancient Greece in 375 B.C., for instance. The Washington Post’s Pride Month piece recounts how Theban rebels, tired of Spartan rule, staged a coup.
But they were not Spartans. Source) Likewise, Sparta didn’t “create” new Spartan families like kings would “create” nobles in later European aristocracies. (This is why Athens famously got Sparta to back down at one point in the Peloponnesian War, after the Battle of Sphacteria when an Athenian force took several hundred Spartans hostage.
The prospect of losing that many full Spartiates was so unappealing to Sparta that its kings agreed to cease hostilities for a time in exchange for the release of those men.) Yet at the same time, Sparta projected power beyond its borders throughout the Peloponnese and, at its height, beyond Attica and into Asia minor.
That is an incredible accomplishment for a village with a fraction of the population of other Greek city-states.
The Spartans didn’t have religious or cultural objections to same-sex relationships.
They did not have the same negative attitudes toward homosexuality that some people in the modern world do. The Thebans, with the help of the Athenians, had recently managed to expel a Spartan garrison occupying the Theban citadel of Cadmea. And just like the men, the ultimate and sacred duty of Spartan women was to produce and raise strong little Spartans, but the women bore the brunt of that duty not only because they raised their young children, but because they had to part with them at age seven, when the boys and girls would be enrolled in the agoge.
Misinterpreting ancient Greek Finally, some people who insist Sparta had sanctioned homosexual relationships are accidentally or willfully misreading words like “knew,” “heard” and references to mentoring.
First deployed onto the battlefield in 378 BC, it was during the Battle of Tegyra in 375 BC that they truly made their mark.
Now under the command of a man named Pelopidas, they looked to seize Orchomenus, a city allied to Sparta.
Spartan laws made procreation a sacred duty Because of this, Spartan society placed an unprecedented emphasis on getting married, having sex and giving birth to children. Spartan women were possessed of the famous Laconian wit, they were the furthest thing from pushovers, and they were not impressed by wealth, political status, fancy clothes or palatial homes.
However, the Athenians used euphemisms for these relationships, so the older men were “ erastês " and the younger men were described as having “heard" their older lovers.
The words for terms like “heard" were the same as the words used for martial/educational mentoring in Sparta, so some modern writers — usually amateur scholars unfamiliar with ancient Greek — misinterpreted the way those relationships were described.
Merchants were forbidden and even musicians had to be approved. In fact, during this time they even defeated the Spartan army, crushing the image of Spartan invincibility and forever altering the balance of power.
The Sacred Band of Thebes was trained, housed, and paid for by the Greek city-state of Thebes. They marched to war with Sparta.
They were auxiliary hoplites in the Spartan military.