LogFAQs > #924957956

Lokarin posted...

I never heard the word agape before... in that context.

On the wiki there's 4 ancient greek words for love: Philia, Agape, Eros and Storge. (but also Philautia and Xenia, I guess?)

The Greeks definitely differentiated between types of love, and their assumptions color a lot of how the modern perspective tends to see things. Like using "love" to describe both love of family, love of friends, sexual love, and even "love" of material things or experiences.

Agape usually only ever comes up in a religious context these days, though. This video actually touches on it pretty effectively:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slyevQ1LW7A" data-time="

(That video tends to define it in a Christian context, but it doesn't necessarily have to be limited to a single religion or philosophy.)



dedbus posted...

Wasn't ancient Greece pretty much the precursor to nambla and the Catholic Church rolled into one. Perhaps Plato invented the concept because he wanted to friend zone some deciple with the scraggly toes.

Depends on which city you're talking about. And "when" - "Ancient Greece" covers a lot of time.

Athens at one point in history definitely encouraged "man/boy" relationships as part of acculturation (ie, older men would fuck teen boys, and in return would provide the boys with gifts, general education, and access to a social network that would benefit them later in life - it was basically a mentorship program). But it's hard to even see it as being "wrong" at the time when you consider we're talking about a time period when teens basically WERE adults (both boys and girls could potentially marry and have kids as young as 13). The entire concept of "teen" as an in-between stage between child and adult didn't even exist until the Industrial Revolution, about 200-250 years ago or so. For most of human history, you were an adult by 14 or so (and potentially dead by 40, so you had a lot of life to cram in between the two). It's not really the same as current man/boy practices (though groups like NAMBLA would certainly try to draw those parallels to defend their position) - arguably today, because of how we socialize children, people arguably aren't even fully adult by age 20, let alone younger.

The Spartans, on the other hand, tended to look down on the Athenian practice. They also probably had more progressive views of homosexuality than most modern countries (being gay was pretty much mandatory in their military)... but they also had few qualms with murdering slaves as part of training, so it's not as if we should be looking to them as a model for modern behavior.

Other cities saw relationships in different ways, and you could probably write a book on the full complexity of ancient Greek sexual practices.

For most of history, cultures and groups would adapt to the conditions of their time, and do what worked best for them, in the context of how they saw the world. Our morality today isn't "objectively correct" any more than theirs was, and it's entirely possible that people 1000 years from now might look back at us and consider all sorts of things we do to be repugnant. You can't really expect people to conform to morality that won't exist for centuries after they're long dead (and which may itself in turn be deemed immoral or offensive by later generations).


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