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With each new entry Plutarch makes at GLTTA, I grow fonder of him. For some reason I had harboured negative thoughts about him regarding pederasty. Not sure why – but I had suborned the witness! More Plutarch! Especially in his chatty table-talk mode. His writing superbly demonstrates how pederasty was a normal integrated part of life, for at least a thousand years before the axe fell and probably going back to the apes. His first boy-love mention in Book I of Table-Talk is an excellent example. He's addressing the question of whether a dinner-party host "should arrange the placing of his guests or leave it to the guests themselves": And I shall put together men who like to drink,—and lovers too, not only those “Who feel the bite of love for lads,” as Sophokles says, but also those bitten by love for women and for maidens. For they will cleave to each other all the more for being heated by the same fire, like welded iron,—unless, by Zeus, they happen to be in love with the same lad or the same girl.” What an excellent indication of the way sexual behaviour was interpreted – and so different to our fraught, overcooked approach. He's acknowledging preferences while considering them coming from the same basic sexual agency--something we've degraded into "identity". Amazing how significant the difference is. Once you seriously ponder this notion, apply it to oneself and the observable world, it becomes quite obvious. Why is it proving so impossible to rediscover? Which came first, pedophobia or the fake category of homosexuality? They certainly feed mightily off each other. |