greek spartans

[lenandcath]

where the greek spartans apparently gay

[Quizmonster]

Click here for an article about homosexual - male and female - relationships in Ancient Greece.

[lugus]

I'm sure that some of them were.

[Upforit]

I say this. It is so long ago, I doubt anybody will ever know for sure. We can read from the writers of the time, but could we not see that their views might be jaded? Put into perspective, do any of us believe our troops in Iraq, a band of fighting men, living together with only themselves for company are gay? As lugus says, I am sure some of them were/are.

[fairkatrina]

Plato wrote in "The Symposium":

"If there was any mechanism for producing a city or army consisting of [male] lovers and boyfriends, there could be no better form of social organisation than this; they would hold back from anything discraceful and compete for honour in each others' eyes. If even small numbers of such men fought side by side, the could defeat virtually the whole human race. The last person a lover can bear to be seen by, when leaving his place in the battle-line or abandoning his weapons, is his boyfriend; instead he'd prefer to die many times. As for abandoning his boyfriend or failing to help him in danger - no one is such a coward that he could not be inspired to courage by love and made the equal of someone who's naturally very brave."

Such an army did exist in Thebes, they were the elite of the Theban army, known as the Theban Band, and the idea for the regiment was inspired by Plato, but they were massacred at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, the decisive contest in which Philip II of Macedon (with his son, Alexander the Great, as he would later be known) extinguished the authority of the Greek city-states. The traditional Greek hoplite infantry were no match for the novel long-speared Macedonian phalanx: the Theban army and its allies broke and fled, but the Sacred Band, though surrounded and overwhelmed, refused to surrender. They held their ground and fell where they stood.

Before defeat the Theban Band had vanquished the Spartan army three times larger at Tegyra in 375 BC.

[Peter Pedant]

No or else they would have died out pretty quickly

In fact the Spartans DID die out
but they did it slowly
and that apparently was because they could not give up the idea of exposing sickly children ...
Only the Perfect child was allowed to survive and they could not bring themselves to loosen their ideas of perfection (and so more kids would live and they wouldnt die out,....) because by doing so, it negated their whole view of life (only the perfect.....)
So in the end, they ran out of perfect kids.......

SO not particularly gay, just crazy