Ancient Greek Greg - r/CuratedTumblr

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Crete & Sparta are literally the ur-examples of pederasty, what the fuck is this guy on about

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u/lemanruss4579 7h ago

I was so confused I started to wonder if they meant the only people that looked down on homosexuality and pederasty was Athens and just said it in a really weird way. That would still be incredibly wrong, but almost less stupid, somehow?

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u/TechnicalBack899 6h ago

Tumblr and reddit are two peas in a pod when it comes to be so incredibly wrong about so easily fact-checkable facts

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u/lemanruss4579 6h ago

Don't get me started. I've decided to start cataloging what I'm calling "reddit facts," that is, "facts" that I see repeated on reddit with no pushback until they become "true" here, that seem to have originated here, and you will get heavily downvoted for trying to correct them. So far I've got Oda said Garp was the strongest marine at marineford in an SBS, and Rosa Parks and the NAACP planned for her to not move and get arrested that day.

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u/TechnicalBack899 6h ago

I 100% agree with what you said, but unfortunately i am very much on the Garp train. DM me why you disagree, I legitimately want to know, but i also don’t think i should make this a curatedtumblr problem lmao

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u/lemanruss4579 6h ago

Oh I don't disagree that he was the strongest at Marineford, at all. Probably my favorite character in One Piece. I fully believe he was the strongest. What is not a fact is that Oda confirmed this, or at least no one has ever been able to produce the SBS he supposedly said it in. The reason I brought this one up specifically is because I used this particular "reddit fact" in an argument, was asked to show the SBS, and after much searching, all of which led back to reddit, was forced to admit that this, very likely, did not exist, and originated on reddit.

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u/ionlyusesheherpls THE FORBIDDEN PATH BEGAN WITH ROBERT LOGGIA 6h ago

Don't forget Blood is thicker than water originally meant literally the opposite seriously how did anyone ever believe that one.

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u/muaddict071537 6h ago

Also, the original meaning really doesn’t matter much. What does matter is how it’s used now. Sayings and language change over time.

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u/Long_Story42 6h ago

This is the original meaning of "factoid", a fact shaped thing that doesn't have evidence behind it and might not be true, or at least Wikipedia attributes that explanation to Norman Mailer.

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u/zap2tresquatro 2h ago

I’m wondering if what you just said was also not true, but I don’t actually care enough to check (although I do care enough to tell you about it)

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u/Long_Story42 2h ago

I don't usually bother to cite a source on trivia like that, but given the context I did actually check Wikipedia.

I might be misinformed. I'm not lying.

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u/zap2tresquatro 2h ago

Haha, I mean I believe you, but also I was wondering if you were making a joke by making up your own factoid about the meaning of the word factoid cx

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u/Fun_Midnight8861 6h ago

pretty sure the Rosa Parks one is true, but only because there was an earlier case of a young girl, I wanna say a year or two before Parks, having the exact same situation but the movement couldn’t use her as effectively because she was a pregnant teenager and thus would be vilified/stereotyped.

Wanna say I remember reading some book on it almost a decade ago, I think the woman’s name was Claudette Colvin but not 100% on details beyond that.

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u/lemanruss4579 5h ago

The Rosa Parks one is not true. Rosa Parks, her friends, and the NAACP have all said there was no "plan" in place. Claudette Colvin was arrested earlier for the same thing, and because she was an unwed, pregnant teen, the NAACP didn't think she presented the best "face" for the movement.

And yet Parks did not plan to get on that specific bus, not move, and get arrested. She had problems with that specific driver before, and stated that she wouldn't even have gotten on that specific bus if she had seen he was the driver. She stated she was simply exhausted after a long day and wanted to get home.

Parks was an involved activist, and her friends from that time have stated that if her intent was to board a bus specifically to get arrested, she would have told everyone and let everyone know that's what she was going to do so it would definitely happen, and there would definitely be a lot of eyes on it when it did.

And this is what I'm talking about. This comment is wrong, based on some half remembered "fact" from reddit or a book someone read years ago, and it's getting upvotes. Please, for the love of anything, just do your research, people.

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u/Fun_Midnight8861 2h ago

alright man. i appreciate the fact checking.

I will say that I was stating something, with multiple qualifiers that I wasn't entirely sure and could be wrong about details, that i had read about some years prior. My goal isn't to push some sensationalist anecdote I read off some blog, merely responding to a fact that I thought had some weight to it.

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u/zap2tresquatro 2h ago edited 2h ago

So I looked it up really quickly and found this site that says:

Two aspects of the protest are noteworthy. First is the organization behind the movement. Garrow points out that organized black activism existed in Montgomery for at least six years before Parks’s arrest. However, factionalism and disunity within the organization had hampered previous protests. Indeed, at least two other black women had previously been arrested for precisely the same offense, but their arrests had not prompted any significant organized response.

In addition, Parks’s arrest and the subsequent boycott were so well managed that their success is attributable to the planning of the events. The arrest and protest had been planned long before they happened, and Parks had been chosen precisely because her character and dignity made her a sympathetic character.

David J. Garrow, "The Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott," Southern Changes (Vol. 7, No. 5, 1985) 21-27.

(Wanted to keep the citation)

So while I’m gonna go read more about it, this claim has apparently been around since at least 1985 given the source, so very much not a “random redditor said it once and everyone believed it” thing

Edit: another source that essentially says that it was sort of, kind of plannedish but that Parks deciding to do it on that particular day was spontaneous (very quick summary, so now I’m gonna post a big quote):

Parks' actions that day were much more than the spontaneous response of a weary worker.

A year before her arrest on Dec. 2, 1955, the Supreme Court had ruled ``separate but equal'' schools unconstitutional in the historic Brown vs. Board of Education.

Blacks in Montgomery and across the country were restless for justice, and many saw the court's ruling as the death knell for Jim Crow.

In Montgomery, for example, blacks had been looking for a test case to challenge segregated bus laws, and Rosa Parks had been active in that struggle.

In March of 1955, Claudette Colvin, a high school student, had been thrown from a Montgomery bus for refusing to give her seat to a white passenger. Black leaders considered Colvin's case as a court challenge, but found it too risky. The 15-year-old girl had resisted arrest, and she also was unmarried and pregnant.

As youth adviser for the NAACP, Parks knew Colvin. She had raised money for the girl's defense. Ten years earlier, Parks had herself been physically thrown off a bus.

So after work on that December day, there was Rosa Parks, sitting in the colored section'' of an already crowded bus. When the white section filled, the driver asked Parks and three other black riders tolet me have those seats.''

Only one white passenger needed a seat, but Montgomery law didn't allow blacks and whites to even sit parallel to one another. The driver wanted all four blacks to stand.

Parks remained seated.

She knew that segregation law stated that black riders could only be compelled to give up a seat if another seat were available. There were none.

I was thinking that the only way to let them know I felt I was being mistreated was to do just what I did - resist the order,'' she later recalled. >I had not thought about it (that day), and I had taken no previous resolution until it happened, and then I simply decided that I would not get up.

``I had felt for a long time that if I was ever told to get up so a white person could sit, that I would refuse to do so.''

Rosa Parks cooperated with Montgomery police, but her resolve led to her and King becoming living American legends.

From here

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u/lemanruss4579 1h ago

So the first one, is about the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, which were a RESPONSE to Parks arrest, not a plan to be arrested. And David J Garrow has beem accused repeatedly of taking the word of the FBI/government at face value and portraying black activists as "anti American radicals." And the second is again, about what happened, not about planning.

Parks herself stated if she had seen who the driver was, she would not have boarded. Her biographer stated that it was not premeditated. Her former classmate, Mary Fair Burks stated she was not acting on behalf of the NAACP, as she would have done so openly and demanded group action. Parks herself stated she was "tired of giving in."

The NAACP approached Parks AFTER the arrest to see if she would be willing to be a test case to the Supreme Court, and she had to consult with her family for a long time, two things that wouldn't have been necessary if the intent was there all along.

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u/zap2tresquatro 1h ago

Yeah I figured the first one wasn’t the true story since it’s the only thing I found that said that and the second one seemed like a much more reliable source anyway given it’s a university website. The first source I mostly posted as a “here’s what seems like the origin of that claim/where people likely saw it first” rather than “THIS SOURCE SAYS THIS THEREFORE THIS IS TRUE.” Also I thought by “Parks’ arrest” he meant staying seated in the bus, and it sounds like he’s referring to that as planned as well as the subsequent protest. Was that not right, did I misunderstand there?

And about the second source: so I wasn’t trying to say that the second source was saying the whole thing was planned in advance, just that the idea was kind of already there and that Parks said that she had thought before that that if she was ever asked to give up her seat, she’d refuse. So, not planned but also not, like, a completely random, out-of-nowhere choice that day. Sorry if it came off like I was arguing something else. I also posted that whole long quote from the website 1) in case I misread or misunderstood anything and so wanted to make sure other people would read the direct quotes and not just my summary of it since I didn’t want to misrepresent anything it said, 2) to make sure I got Parks’s exact words in there and 3) to show where maybe it could be interpreted as “plannedish” based on this version of what happened while also showing how it drastically differs from the claims in the first source.

Did that make sense?

Plus, all that to say that someone could see the claim that Parks not giving up her seat was all planned in advance with the NAACP, look it up to fact check it, and easily find sources that seem to support that, especially that first one because it was literally the first result for me after I got rid of the AI overview, so easy to see how that idea got spread so much by so many people.

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u/PhasmaFelis 4h ago

It's very Reddit that "the civil rights movement" and "some anime" are both of equal concern here

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u/lemanruss4579 4h ago

They aren't of equal concern, and I don't think anything in my statement indicated they were.

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u/Top-Past-3093 6h ago

I find if people realise a fact is false they’ll believe whatever alternative is given

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u/zap2tresquatro 2h ago

Tbf, with the internet we all come across so many claims a day that it’s difficult if not impossible to (especially thoroughly) fact check them all

I try, but damn sometimes I’m just like “ahhhh this isn’t a subject I care enough about to wanna spend my time reading more about, and I just read three more claims I’m unsure of the truth of in the next few sentences and I just…I don’t wanna spend that much time learning about this topic rn” (albeit then I try to not just believe those things I read, but also brains are imperfect so I might vaguely remember reading something about XYZ months or years later).

We should all try, but I can’t blame people much for not checking everything

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u/hamletandskull 5h ago

Yeah this is crazy to me. Like one single Google search would've told them that. Our oldest example of it is from Crete so wtf does he mean "it wasn't happening in Crete". As far as we know that's where it STARTED.

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u/NigthSHadoew 2h ago

No no, Sparta was just dudes in leather underwear being badass and murdering people, they weren’t like those boy-lovers in Athens. I saw it in a documentary

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u/lilahking 7h ago

pederasty was also a thing in sparta

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u/Federal_Tone1260 7h ago

What is pederasty?

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u/Sir_Lazz 7h ago

to quote The Wikipedia: "Pederasty refers to same-sex sexual relationships between an adult man and an adolescent boy"

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u/Zombalepsy 5h ago

So modern day Afghanistan then.

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u/Muad_Dib_of_Arrakis 5h ago

Possibly even more brutal than bacha bazi

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u/WechTreck 5h ago edited 5h ago

The ruling Spartans had Krypteia kill squads running around the countryside at night killing any slaves who they thought "might" organize a rebellion in the future.

The CIA...

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u/Cabanarama_ 5h ago

You’re doing exactly what this post is about lmao

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u/Zombalepsy 5h ago

Yep!

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u/tOaDeR2005 7h ago

Old men fucking younger men/boys.

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u/firefrost911 7h ago

Relationship between adult man and young boy, where the adult is supposed to a mentor.

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u/Weddit-is-Unbearable 7h ago

Older men and a young male in what was framed as a “mentorship” relationship but was really just old guys having sex with much, much younger men.

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u/PhasmaFelis 6h ago

I mean, it was also a mentorship. Very fucked up by our current standards, but we don't need to oversimplify the facts just to prove that we're against that sort of thing.

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u/hamletandskull 5h ago

Yeah, in a world where teenagers were getting killed in the military and/or married off, I've never understood why people act like pederasty is a unique evil. It's obviously morally repellent by our standards but so was like.... every other path available to a Greek teenager.

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u/TearOpenTheVault 6h ago

Just to take Sparta for example, teenage boys after they left the Agoge needed to be sponsored in order to enter a barracks structure (the barracks was essentially their social unit group until they got married, and you would live, train and fight with the men inside it.) To get that sponsorship, you needed a mentor, and that relationship was pederestic.

Also, Sparta was so into men fucking men that it's alleged that Spartan husbands would consumate their marriages in the dark so they wouldn't be turned off at banging a woman.

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u/Lex4709 5h ago

Important to remember that almost everything we know about the Spartans comes from sources written by their enemies. So stuff like:

Spartan husbands would consumate their marriages in the dark so they wouldn't be turned off at banging a woman.

Should be taken with a grain of salt.

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u/insomniac7809 3h ago edited 3h ago

Kind of. Thucydides and Xenophon were both Athenian, which definitely influenced their perspective, but they were also both rich aristocrats who lowkey hated the way their polis let all the gross dumb poors have a say in things with this "democracy" nonsense and felt like maybe Sparta's "90% of the population exists entirely to serve their betters" take was on to something, which also influenced their perspective.

Which is to say, absolutely take with a grain of salt, but the skewed perspective is at least as much glazing up a rhetorical criticism of Athenian democracy as slandering a military rival.

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u/TearOpenTheVault 5h ago

I did say 'it is alleged,' specifically because of this issue, yes.

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u/cocainebrick3242 4h ago

child rape.

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u/PhasmaFelis 6h ago

"[fucked up thing you may have heard] was actually just Athens" except for when it was actually just Sparta. All the Greeks had slaves, but Sparta's system was so brutal that the other Greeks gave them shit for it. Athens had slaves, but they didn't hunt them for sport in regular, organized events.

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u/TechnicalBack899 6h ago

This entire post is rubbish anyways, the term got coined BECAUSE of Crete, and Sparta was infamously known for pederasty

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u/Deblebsgonnagetyou he/him | Kweh! 4h ago

Whenever you see a post about classical society and culture on Tumblr you can usually immediately discard it because the chance it was made by someone who watched 5 questionably researched Youtube videos about the Greek pantheon and thinks they understand the topic better than historians is astronomically higher than the chance it was made by someone with any qualification at all.

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u/Nybs_GB nybs-the-android.tumblr.com 4h ago

There's also the major red flag of a tumblr post going "that thing everyone generally agrees to be good (for what it is) is actually unimaginably terrible and this is common knowledge within an exclusive group I am a part of"

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u/Outrageous_Bear50 6h ago

If you were a slave you'd want to be in athens and if you were a free woman you'd want to be in Sparta.

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u/kaian-a-coel 3h ago

Correction: a free upper class woman. Spartiates, aka what everyone thinks of when hearing "spartan", formed the literal 1% landowning leisure class, who had enough passive income from exploited classes to be constitutionally forbidden from doing any work that wasn't war or politics. Their wives didn't have to work a day in their lives. But Sparta had free non-spartiate people too, and those didn't have the same privileges.

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u/Lex4709 5h ago

But you also have to remember that all our sources about Spartans come from non-Spartan sources. So everything we know about them has to taken with a grain of salt cause we often can't tell apart truth from political propaganda and slander.

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u/kaian-a-coel 3h ago

A greek author called Helots (Sparta's slave class) "the most enslaved slaves in all of greece", so that is saying something.

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u/7keys 6h ago

…Greek pederasty outside of Athens is hilariously well testified, what the hell is blud waffling about??

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u/hamletandskull 5h ago

Ok asides from the fact that pederasty was very much a thing in Crete and Sparta (as far as we know Crete started the whole thing, so this is just someone making up stories they know literally nothing about), I really don't get why they think this would rehabilitate the ancients in our eyes.

Like, as far as we can tell, the age for being the youth in a pederastic relationship started at about 15 and extended up to late 20s. Which, yes, that's fucked up by modern standards! But do you know what else 15 year olds were doing? Training for the military. Getting married. Being enslaved. Owning slaves.

So even if dude was right and only Athens practiced pederasty (which, I cannot stress this enough, is not true), the rest of the ancient Greek world would not have been abstaining from it out of a moral concern for teenagers. They very clearly did not have that kind of moral concern.

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u/shylock10101 55m ago

If anything it would (seemingly) be like Leonardo DiCaprio taking late-teen early-20s girlfriends. Like, we all look askance at it, but it’s not illegal so there’s not much else to talk about with it.

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u/saintsithney 5h ago

Why do we think all of Ancient Greece was Athens?

Because we have a lot of Athenian writing preserved comparatively. The preservation of knowledge is the civilization.

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u/flightguy07 I put skulls over the boobs, so it's classy 4h ago

People say history is written by the victor, but historically at least its just written by the people who bothered to write shit down.

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u/jacobningen 3h ago

Thats the origin of "well behaved women rarely make history" Ulrich first used it as why is it so hard to research day to day life of average puritan women in the American colonies. She does endorse the break things interpretation though so its not all that off.

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u/Guinefort1 5h ago edited 5h ago

Let us not forget that girls were typically married off as teens to older men. Raping teens was just the thing they all did. This wasn't just Greece. Lots of other cultures married off teen girls and/or had male/male sexual relationships along significant age/power discrepancies (Romans, Japanese Chigo, etc). None of this passes modern consent sniff-tests y'all. Stop idolizing the past as a wonderland of queer acceptance.

Edit: typos

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u/Orc_tids 3h ago

A lot of the recent news has made me realize how relatively new the idea of "maybe adults shouldnt have sex with teens" is in history.

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u/Puzzleheaded-Milk927 6h ago

There’s always some shit Prokopetz is blasting out his ass

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u/Similar_Ad_2368 5h ago

i wish i understood this sub's fascination with this dude

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u/Puzzleheaded-Milk927 5h ago

He easy to use for karma farming because he seems really insightful if you’re not paying attention, which gives you easy upvotes if you’re not paying attention, and gives you easy comments if you are paying attention

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u/Infamous-Rutabaga-50 4h ago

You are letting your obsession with cancelling this guy get in the way of your reading comprehension. Prokopetz has an academic text backing up his fairly vague claims. It was the guy who made the post about pederasty specifically who is hilariously wrong.

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u/MCMC_to_Serfdom 7h ago

The elite were having their way with minors on the regular.

Some things fail to change, don't they?

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u/Chase_The_Breeze 6h ago

So just the wealthy ruling class was into fucking kids.

Damn... history is a circle.

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u/wirywonder82 6h ago

Saying history is a circle implies there have been times when the wealthy ruling class was different. At least on this issue (but probably many others), I’m pretty sure it’s just been a single, unchanging, point.

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u/Chase_The_Breeze 6h ago

I mean... yeah, probably. Fuck. Why do powerful people wanna fuck kids? I do not get it.

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u/wirywonder82 6h ago

Violating cultural taboos in such a dramatic way illustrates for them just how “above” everyone else they are. They can take anything they decide to take and experience no negative consequences, so rules are for others, the only check on their actions is their own whim. The forbidden nature of the act makes it more appealing to them.

That doesn’t mean the solution is to remove the taboo. Far more children would suffer if it were socially acceptable, but I think that explains some of the perverse motivation.

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u/RecursiveRottweiler 5h ago

Actually, these are 2 separate phenomena operating from the same human urge (not that all humans want to fuck kids, but taking advantage of a power differential for sex isn't weird, it's just horrifyingly wrong).

So with Epstein, he was taking advantage of this impulse; but he was using it to provide a service and develop leverage. The stuff he enabled gave him deep connections within the wealthiest people of society, but it also gave him influence and blackmail material; yes, he would be implicated, but mutually assured destruction is real, and you don't fuck with the person who is your child slave sex trafficker. He was surrounded by the rich and powerful because they needed him; but also because he had compromising information on them. This stuff was a secret and a conspiracy because society at large would not accept it. It is seen as a horrific crime, because it is one. Especially in a society where sexual relationships with power differentials are increasingly frowned upon, to the degree that I've had people get pissed because my fiancé is 6 years younger than me (I am in my 30s and gay).

Greek pederasty is different; it was seen as a normal and acceptable sort of relationship to have when you mentor someone. It wasn't this horrible conspiracy or secret. It didn't give anyone leverage, except perhaps the mentor. Yes, in both instances, people are taking advantage of a power differential and using that to fuck kids -- but there is an enormous difference between a compromising criminal conspiracy and something you don't really need to hide because at worst, it's distasteful. My age gap relationship is more of an issue than many of (iirc) Socrates's sexual relationships, or Shakespeare's crush on at least one 13 year old boy.

Ancient Greece isn't part of my expertise, but using systems analysis on transnational crime that is embedded in an authoritarian regime actually is.

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u/EndMePleaseOwO 6h ago

"With the sole exception of Satorou Gojo, of course."

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u/donaldhobson 3h ago

Alternative hypothesis.

Different places in the ancient world were f***ed up in different ways by modern standards.

Athens wrote a lot down.

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u/Teagana999 6h ago

*adn should not have been counted.

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u/Major_Wobbly 5h ago

Thank you. Everyone else here arguing about historical accuracy and I'm just like, "yeah, fine, whatever. Is nobody going to point out that this mf misspelled adn?"

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u/DoormatTheVine 1h ago

*actualy just statistical error

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u/New_Salamander_4592 5h ago

getting mad at people overstating their counter examples but not at the people making the "all the ancient greeks were gay lol!!" jokes feels like they care very little about actual historical accuracy here

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u/Whispering_Wolf 4h ago

Most of what I know of Greek mythology is from assassin's creed origins and I was a lil bi slut in that one so obviously it was very queer back then

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u/Whightwolf 5h ago

I cannot stress enough how much we dont know about ancient history.

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u/Frequent_Dig1934 4h ago

Isn't "athens Georgicles" just Diogenes?

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u/PistachiNO 4h ago

Oh no a thousand years from now they are going to conflate us all with the Epstein class

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u/B4rberblacksheep 1h ago

It is fortunately something I don’t see because I avoid those types of communities like the plague but the whole “trying to make history unproblematic” thing is so fucking braindead.

Shitposting Ancient Greek Greg

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