Movie 300,Troy, Alexander and ity?

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing…” You are trying to force a complicated historical subject into narrow political definitions. Your use of the terms ual, , queer etc. regarding men in the ancient world is not accurate in the modern sense. Moreover, the life of a royal megalomaniac like Alexander sheds no light on common attitudes and practice; his uality may be a bone of much contention, but whatever the details (and they are certainly unknown to history), he was a unique figure trying quite self-consciously to emulate (or recreate) in his own life what he had interpreted to be that of Homer’s Achilles (already a legendary figure, even in Alexander’s day). I will try to make this as brief as possible, and please bear in mind, everyone, that this is a grown-up dialogue: In the ancient pagan world (Greece, for example), free men married, had wives, and raised children. They all did this and all were expected, too. Wives were faithful to their husbands to whom they would have given their virginity upon marriage; as a rule, they would have had no opportunity for ual contact with anyone else, whether they had the inclination or not. Men, on the other hand, may have had, occasionally, such opportunities, but with one very important distinction: They would always remain the active partner: that is, men did the ; women, girls, and adolescent boys were the d. Often these boys would be slaves or prostitutes, though some form of ritualized ity may well have been common in Sparta and, in a far less formal sense, in Athens, between a free man and his free adolescent male student or protégé (I say “ritualized,” because the ual act itself was punishable by death in both Sparta and Athens). One thing must be made clear: for a free man to be himself d by another man would be a fate worse than death because it would mean the loss of his very manhood, and the rare man who did so willingly would live on in disgrace. Is that what you meant by 100% /? I didn’t think so. Now maybe you can understand why this stuff doesn’t get much play in the movies. Also, you have only to read Herodotus and other primary sources for a first-hand account of the contempt which the Greeks held for any man or people (like the Persians) they regarded as “effeminant,” so whatever poetic license Frank Miller has taken (and I've heard it is extreme), he is correct on that score.