Is The American Military Ready For Greek Love? [Reader Post]

The love of one warrior for another has played an important part of many warrior cultures, sacrificing one life for another and never letting down your fellow warriors has been the foundation of loyalty within armies throughout history. Older men have traditionally had relationships with younger recruits as part of their initiation into a fraternity of warriors. The esprit de corps has to be learned along with the code of martial values, an experienced older warrior is the perfect instructor. In our traditional boot camps, the Drill Instructor taught military discipline and set an example of how a warrior conducts himself.

The ancient Greek Warrior culture was based on this format, it has been described in detail by Homer. The role of a mentor and a youth was seen as a means of educating the youth to assume an adult position in society. The intensity of the youth for his mentor would form greater bonds to the military unit and the mentor’s love for his student exhibited his love for the youth’s beauty and moral innocence.

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle wrote of this love between a youth and his mentor, without details of physical love itself. Plato in particular wrote of a chaste passion that transcended physical passion, thus the phrase “Platonic Love” came into being in modern English.

Plutarch wrote of these relationships being chaste, that it was unthinkable for an older man to have sexual union with his young love; if a male couple yielded to sexual temptation and sexual congress occurred, the couple must address the honor of Sparta and either go into exile or commit suicide.

Spartans believed that the love of an accomplished aristocrat for an adolescent boy was essential for the boy to develop as a free citizen and faithful warrior. Plato wrote in his “Laws” that homosexuality was “beyond nature,” yet several contemporaries wrote that the concept of Spartan pederasty was haste but still erotic. This concept for us is hard to understand, but we must remember these are cultural concepts that were a part of life in the dawn of Western Civilization, our culture and concepts of love and friendship are infinitely different.

We in the 21st century must realize that we view these events through a prism that is nearly 2,500 years old and the culture of man has undergone uncountable changes. That this ancient culture can easily be subverted by different influences to present a political view or agenda.

These conflicts began almost immediately, Athens had a great deal of enmity toward the Spartans and wrote of this male love with much derision in that same era. The Comedians of Athens often based their whole routine on a perverted view of the Spartan version of love between males.

Homer’s Illiad doesn’t describe a sexual relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, it describes a “Platonic” love between warriors, but because the pair placed their relationship foremost in regard to their tribe and after Achilles’ dramatic reaction to the death of Patroclus, modern man assumes the relationship to have been homoerotic.

The fascination of homoerotica makes a story more provocative, William Shakespeare used this ploy in “Troilus And Cressida.” In this play brutal sexual language substitutes for combat in a 17th century version of The Trojan Wars, an English version of Homer’s Illiad. Here in an epic satire of war, love is devalued and the love that existed between Achilles and Patroclus becomes a sordid affair of homosexuality tinged more with venereal disease than innocent chaste male love between warriors.

In the play, Thersites, a camp follower torments and insults them with curses on their supposed sex life.

Troilus and Cressida: Act 5, Scene 1

{Achilles and Patroclus are lounging in bed}

Thersites: Prithee be silent, boy…. Thou are thought to be Achilles’ male varlet.

Patroclus: Male varlet, you rogue? What’s that?

Thersites: Why, his masculine whore. Now the rotten diseases of the south, the guts-griping, ruptures, loads of gravel in the back, lethargies, old palsies, raw eyes, dirt-rotten livers, wheeing lungs, bladders full of impostume, sciaticas, lime-kilns, incurable bone ache, and the rivelled fee-smple of the tetter, take and take again such preposterous discoveries!

Patroclus: Why, thou damnable box of envy thou, what mean’st thou to curse thus?

Thersites: Do I curse thee?

Patroclus: Why, no, you ruinous butt, you whoreson indistinguishable cur, no.
In reality, any man who approached either of these two warriors with such an attitude would have met an immediate death; but from two thousand years away, William was fairly safe with his portrayal of Patroclus as an effeminate sexual partner of Achilles. The idea appealed to the prurient nature of the theater fan, thus tickets were sold at the expense of the reputation of men long dead.

Alexander of Macedon was and is reputed to have been a homosexual, although he had several wives who seemed to enjoy his companionship. Like Achilles, Alexander had a close friend, Hephasestion. They were both warriors and fought like any man in their units.

Alexander had a dramatic flair and began dressing in the clothing of Persian kings and was adopting Persian customs, the most obvious was Proskynesis, a Persian custom of prostrating or kissing the hand of a ruler to show subservience. To the Dorian Greeks this was shameful and indicated that Alexander meant to deify himself. They began to become disillusioned with Alexander and of course the rumors began.

Hephasestion died and Alexander again became overly dramatic and flung himself on the corpse in an out pouring of grief that was very un-Greek like, he mourned for six months. For the Greeks who had lost many friends during their long years of warfare, this was gross indecency and sowed the seeds of discontent.

Were the Spartans, Achilles, and Alexander raging homosexuals, not likely if we are to believe the writing of the period, if we are to follow the enthusiastic gay lobby and William Shakespeare, we are then to assume they were all homosexuals.

In 1993, President Clinton signed into law, the don’t ask don’t tell law, that didn’t give homosexuals rights to be in the military, it merely stated that if you keep a low profile and no one knows, you can serve in the military; pretty much the way it has always been.

During the presidential campaign, B. Obama promised the gays that he would make it so that gay, lesbian, and trans-gendered people could serve and flaunt their homo-sexuality openly. The gay community is demanding that he make good on his campaign pledge. President Obama seems to be wavering on his campaign promise by saying, “Later folks, I am working on the details.”

Of course there is a small matter of whether military personnel wants to rely on gay individuals for their life and for leadership. They can only use the examples of gay individuals they have known in their life and often that is less than promising.

Can gay people lead men into combat?

Are we ready to gamble on misinformation from 2500 years ago that has gone through many agendas?

Are trans-gendered people stable enough to withstand the demands of combat?

These are questions that President Obama and the Pentagon are hopefully considering before restructuring the American Military and its proud traditions. To many of us a President’s campaign promises are insignificant to having a strong and reliable military.