Were the greeks cute twinks? @Miffin and @GigaNew2024Account have a 20+ comment long slapfight about it, featuring many a longpost.

They're both wrong.

I dunno if the Sacred Band really were gay or whatever, that's not a period I'm particularly knowledgeable about. But at least the story of them being gay goes back to ancient times. Maybe it originally was like "these bros totally loved each other" but it really seems that pretty soon it was understood to be sexual.

On the other hand, this isn't evidence for gay s*x among Greek soldiers to be common. It's evidence that this was considered unusual and noteworthy, maybe even a little titillating. For example, Plutarch isn't writing about normal people doing normal things. He's writing exaggerated caricatures of exceptional people doing exceptional things.

The true, centrist answers to these questions:

It was not common for Greek soldiers to bugger each other, but it was not considered incredibly shocking that they sometimes did.

The myth of all Greeks being gay was not invented by a conspiracy of homos in the 1970s. It was invented by a conspiracy of homos in the late 1800s. British academia and the Anglican church it was intricately tied to were dominated by gays. They were pulling the strings behind the scenes, but there was still a "don't ask, don't tell" policy where you couldn't just announce it openly. So they saw in the classical languages an opportunity to let themselves go wild. They could write whatever they wanted about buttfricking each other as long as it was in a Greek or (more commonly at the time) Latin poem. The common people had a pretty good idea what was going on but were okay with it as long as they didn't have to find out the details. When the homostocracy went too far and got out of line, like in the telegraph boys scandal or the Oscar Wilde situation they would get slapped back, but classical studies remained their turf. Since everything in the field believed in the 1800s pretty much became written in stone, we're still living the consequences of that today.

As the capy-appointed Official Historian of rDrama, I declare this to be the unquestionable truth.

!historychads