Day 27 and thanks to the Bolter and pastor Markham, the pond has a possibly NSFW Sunday meditation ... (well an IT company full of Portlandia geeks wouldn't mind) ...

Devastated, heart-broken, shocked, appalled.

It's as if the nation's favourite eccentric aunt had been stuffed in the attic, or perhaps in the fruit cellar,  ...think I'm fruity huh, I'm staying right here, this is my seat and no one will drag me out of it, least of all my big bold love son, a cross between me and John Howard ...

Oh dear, was it so many years ago that the silly shrink in Psycho tried to make sense of it all for viewers?

Who will stand tall and defeat Daesh now? Is all lost?

Never mind, as anyone might have noticed from the penal illustration at the top of the page, it's time for a Sunday meditation of a possibly NSFW kind, and the pond owes it all, not to Bronnie, but to the Bolter ...

It started out typical enough with the Bolter yesterday padding out space by quoting a gobbet at length ...

Now it wouldn't be the Bolter without a display of spurious pedantry and superiority ...

Of course it would have helped if the pretentious and infinitely superior fop had actually got Robert Fagles' name right, as well as providing a link to the pdf of his version, here, so that others might cut and paste it and affect an air of superiority while doing so ...

Why they might even dig up a radio broadcast of that version on YouTube here featuring a man better known for his work in space cowboys yarns and X-men ... Ah the good old days of radio plays, where have you gone? Down in the basement with the fruity ones? The pond points its bony finger at you RN, no longer the 2FC of the glory days ...

But enough of these pleasantries and a missing S's, because then things got really hot ...

It was around that point that the pond began to reach for an ancient Greek vase or three ...

That's better. A Greek with a sense of humour and a bird perch, and finally an explanation of that Eels' line about having a feeder for birds to perch on ...

Now being the Bolter, naturally he stopped the good pastor just as the good Hobart Presbyterian pastor's hysterical outburst was building to a climactic peak, as you can discover here ...

As the storm-clouds of social change gather and loom, here is Sophocles’ ancient and potent inspiration for all those who stand, whether in the Christian tradition or not, for Nature and Justice. Seeing that we must die, we had best do so, in this awesome battle, faithful and brave.

Yes, there, with the greatest respect, goes a remarkably silly man, quoted by an unendurably stupid man.

Perhaps it's the cold air in Hobart and the sense of the impending winter coming on ... but how would that explain the Bolter? Is it in the Melbourne air too?

Never mind, the pond felt the need to head back to ancient times to see how things were in those days of mad, bewildering and accelerating change.

Thankfully James Robson, senior lecturer in Classics at the Open University, was on hand in The Conversation here:

Relationships between men of the same age were not at all common: rather, the standard same-sex relationship would involve an adolescent boy and an older man. Men also used female prostitutes regularly: sex could be brought cheaply in a city that was home to countless brothels, streetwalkers and female “entertainers”. As for marital relations, men seldom married before the age of 30, and apart from the wedding night, it was common for married couples to sleep apart. 

These different sexual relationships are captured in classical vase painting in strikingly different ways. For same-sex relationships, the focus is typically on the courtship; for prostitution, it’s on the sexual act; for marriage, it’s on the moment when the groom leads his new wife home.

Robson had the insolent temerity to propose that Greek men were in generality bisexual, though in the ways he proposed, and then boldly announced that arranged marriages were all the go ...

A girl’s father traditionally saw it as his duty to find a suitable husband for his daughter and, importantly, would generally have played a role in finding a wife for his son as well. In Athens, a girl generally got married at about 16 – typically to a man twice her age, often a paternal uncle or an associate of her father’s.

The deviant old buggers ... and all in the family too. And then Robson kept on going ...

Just as young brides were sexy, it was as adolescents that males were found attractive by other men. A boy’s sexual allure began to diminish the moment he started to grow facial and body hair and this short window of attractiveness perhaps explains the ecstatic reception that poster-boy youths like Charmides received. According to Plato, everyone at the wrestling school gazes at Charmides “as if he were a statue” and Socrates himself “catches fire” when he sees inside the youth’s cloak.

It was around this time that the pond began to get pink in the cheeks and feel a little faint, but still Robson kept going ...

The symposium (an all-male drinking party) was one occasion when Greeks would let their hair down. This was an opportunity for men and older youths to bond and was highly erotically charged. Guests would flirt with each other, with slaves pouring the drinks, and there would be female prostitutes hired as “entertainers” for the evening. The cups from which diners drank at these events are often painted with erotic scenes, ranging from lingering glances to full-blown orgies. But whether these scenes reflect the real goings-on at these parties is another matter. 
Disappointingly for anyone who likes to think of the ancient Greeks as free from sexual hang-ups, these depictions of orgies may just be an erotic fantasy or a tongue-in-cheek warning of the consequences of drunkenness.

Phew, that's a relief. They were just like blowhard Australian males and talked about doing it ...

Now Robson had more to say, but the pond began to wonder about another of the ineffably silly ass Markham's problems. How did the ancient Greeks feel about abortion?

Here the pond turned to the BBC, a dangerous tactic, though they did seem to offer a quote from Aristotle ... as can be found here ...

Oh noes, Aristotle, say it ain't so.

Then the pond began to wander around in other turf and landed on the 7 weirdest sex stories of the ancient world at Publishers' Weekly...

The pond is always up for a good listicle ...

4. The popularity index of anal sex: Few towns win infamy by giving their names to a class-A felony. In Biblical times, a burg we know as Sodom near the Dead Sea did just that. As told in Genesis 19: 5-8, God was fed up, about to destroy it and neighbor cities when Abraham pointed out some decent folks worth saving--his own nephew Lot and family. God sent two male angels down to investigate, who immediately attracted a large mob of sodomy-loving locals. To “protect” his angelic guests, Lot threw his two young daughters to the mob, adding, “They’re virgins, too!” At that point, God had had it with Sodom--and you know the rest. 
In later Greco-Roman times, sodomy lost its standing as an abomination. Called pedico, it was practiced by men and women, the latter largely for contraception. When it came to adultery, however, the law took the practice of pedico in another direction: the guilty party could be sodomized by the injured party. Or, if he chose a stand-in, with a large radish!  
2.Wandering wombs and other private parts: Relaxed about nudity, Greeks and Romans adored the human form. where Greeks especially admired beautiful buttocks, male and female; gorgeous rear ends even had their own goddess cult. Nevertheless, no one tinkered with human bodies after death. Result of this taboo? Human anatomy, largely unexplored, was guesswork. One of the most bizarre beliefs held that women’s wombs vagabonded about the body, causing hysteria. Thus, doctors applied bad smells and loud noises to scare wombs back into position. Medicos (and intimidated husbands) also had dire opinions about the female clitoris. Diminutive was dandy; anything larger called for (gulp) surgery.

Well some things never change, do they? Is it the fear of the female clitoris that drives certain types?

Now the notion of bisexual fluidity already a given, the pond began to wonder about TG and such like, and here the pond turned to the gods.

It was the Greeks and their panoply of gods - given to every diverse ill and good humour of humanity - that first made the pond realise that perhaps the Xian god offered a limited perspective on the world.

Luckily there was a blog here that provided a couple of jolly examples ...

1) My favorite is the myth of Iphis and Ianthe. Iphis, by the way, is a gender neutral name. Like Sam. This is relevant because when Iphis was born, her daddy said he would kill the baby if it wasn’t a boy. Mama Telethusa didn’t want Iphis dead, so she told the world she was a boy. Iphis grows up and falls in love with the girl next door. Dad arranges a marriage. And the crisis begins. It ends when mom helps Iphis pray to Isisand she is transformed to the gender she always felt herself to be.Attis, the boy-toy of Cybele and Agdistis 
 2) You should also get familiar with the myth of Agdistis. It’s a little convoluted, but also fascinating and full of drama - including sex with trees, self-castration, insanity, and a dominatrix of an chthonic goddess (that would be Cybele, by the way). In short, born a hermaphrodite but made feminine by the gods, fell in love with a boy, who went crazy and castrates himself. Agdistis and Cybele are so closely associated that they are often identified as one and the same. The whole thing about her priests castrating themselves (later Roman phenomena) is obviously related. Read the whole myth here.

Now there's plenty more on the blog, and if you follow that last link you end up in a cheerful and colloquial retelling of many of the Greek god yarns some of which the pond hasn't thought about since it was made to stumble painfully through Ovid in the Latin ...

Naturally the pond would have liked to add a touch of bestiality, what with swans and asses, and metamorphoses being dear to the pond, the ancients and Kafka's hearts,  but really it would have been cheating to drag in Apuleius's The Golden Ass ...

Now is there a point to all this, beyond the extremely obvious one that there is more to ancient Greece than Markham and the Bolter's limited imaginings?

HORATIO: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange! 
HAMLET: And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. 
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy ...

Not really. The pond has no doubt that there were incredibly silly and foolish people of the Markham and Bolter kind in ancient Greece and Rome, pointing fingers, tut-tutting and clucking, and turning to their assembled gods to bring down their wrath on the joyous and diverse hordes surrounding them.

There have always been fundamentalists, and fundamentalism remains alive and kicking in the Taliban, hysterical Tasmanian Presbyterian pastors and the Bolter ...

Thank the long absent lords, there also have always been alternatives ...