Did the Ancient Spartans really have homosexual relationships?

Xenophon's description is not at all unlike the defenses of pederasty made by other authors.

Yet Xenophon made a point to distinguish the Spartan erestai system against those that he describes as sexual. "Lycurgus were opposed to all of these" And if this view of erestai is the rule as you say, why do Xenophon claim people won't believe no sex is going on because "In many states the laws are not opposed to the indulgence of these appetites." This makes no sense, I guess we need another lesson in Greek semantics.

Nonsense.

No it's not. the Spartan had an abundance of helots for menial work and had no need of chattel slaves for their common purpose. Chattel slaves in Sparta was a curiosity, or some kind of experts artists teachers etc and very few in numbers compared to other Greek states if we are talking about classical Sparta.

If a Spartiate wanted to have sex with a helot working his estate there would've been no problem, and we have no literature discussing what sort of helots Lacedaemonian masters preferred to keep in the fields and which they used as attendants.

That cannot possible be true. the helots were serfs. They lived in family units and entitled a share of the produce the land they were bound to inherited from father to son. they owned property and couldn't be bought or sold. They had rights under the law. If a Spartan could just force himself on helot women as chattel slaves and impregnate her the entire agricultural system would have fallen apart.

*In any case you're very much missing the point here, that the Athenians by and large described their pederastic relationships in almost exactly the same way as Xenophon described the Lacedaemonians, as an educational institution.

Yes I must be missing the point, since you have provided no evidence of it. there is plenty of discussions about of sexual liasons in Athens and none that I know of about Sparta. Not even something as easy as Critobulus unchaste kiss you brought up.

Plutarch in the Lycurgus (17.1 since you asked before) mentions the older men of the city (πρεσβύτεροι , literally "older ones," but used here as in most contexts in Greek to mean someone not a youth--the Loeb translation as "elders" isn't really right, Plutarch uses different words when he wants to describe the ephors and other "elders") observing the boys at the gymnasium.

lyc 17.1 When the boys reached this age, they were favoured with the society of lovers from among the reputable young men. The elderly men also kept close watch of them, coming more frequently to their places of exercises, and observing their contests of strength and wit, not cursorily, but with the idea that they were all in a sense the fathers and tutors and governors of all the boys. In this way, at every fitting time and in every place, the boy who went wrong had someone to admonish and chastise him.

I see not a trace of your erotic description or the beauty of the boys.

As for the rest of your Greek language lesson I'm afraid I just can't follow. I will simply have to make due with poor translations and try to discuss the subject matter from them and funnily enough I have seen Greeks arguing the opposite of you on this issue liberally spicing up their text with words in the Greek alphabet as well.

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