Marianne wrote:
>Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights were familiar
>often at second
hand with the classical sources, but >not especially with
the sociological and philosophical >background of what
they found there. You are >quoting a purely Tudor piece of
dialogue - and my
>prettyfarofftopic response should be read with the
>footnote that I'll
shut up on this one now.
I just tossed that quote in to show that if I was a neurotic
at least I was in good company, not as proof that Achilles
was a poof. I would have preferred to quote from Aeschylus'
trilogy of plays about Achilles but unfortunately I wasn't
able to locate a copy. I did find this tidbit on the web
yesterday:
> Aeschylus made Achilles the older lover and teacher
of Patroclus.
Plutarch and Athenaeus state that after >Patroclus' death
Achilles looked down upon his >naked lover's body and talk
of the "coitus of his
>thighs". "You have no reverence for the holiness of
>thighs, ungrateful
>after all our kisses." Source - 1
Of course, it came from a "gay" website, so Anthony, for one,
will automatically discredit it but I personally found no
evidence that the other information on the site
(http://gsaglobal.net/theoutlife/encyclopedia/a.html)
was inaccurate. I also came across a Nation of Islam website
that claimed that Othello was black but I don't want to buy
into that level of controversy. By the way, Marianne,
although we appear to be disagreeing re: Greeks &
homosexuality, I think it's just a semantic confusion arising
from my necessarily imprecise use of the term "homosexual".
The Greeks had a pragmatic attitude & tolerance towards
homosexual acts, it's just men who loved other grown men they
looked down upon. If this kind of masculine double-think
seems hard to comprehend just pick up a video of just about
any prison flick made in the last 30 years or just about any
book by Edward Bunker.
Rene
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 28 Jul 2002 EDT