Politics
How To Make Better Soldiers
by Clay Staggs
I know that Ron Paul says equally kooky things on the GOP side, and that the minor candidates in a presidential nomination are really cheap shots, but I just couldn’t resist this.
Citing the ancient Spartans, Mike Gravel has some ideas about making our military men more effective fighters by not only allowing, but in fact encouraging homosexuality in the military.
I’m not making this up. Go here and watch the video.
For once in my life, I’m speechless.
Posted by Clay Staggs at August 8, 2007 02:48 PM
Somehow I think that the men of the 101st Airborne in Band of Brothers who spoke of fighting for their “brothers” next to them would have taken offense at this. It also puts Shakespeare’s speech of Henry V at Agincourt in a different light also!
but didn’t any of you see the movie Alexander?
Tim,
Good question. I know it was tongue-in-cheek, but, believe it or not, Victor Davis Hanson has actually responded to this on NR’s Corner blog. I’ll copy and paste his comments below:
Presidential aspirant Mike Gravel recently opined on the advantages of having gays in the military: “…the Spartans trained their people to be homosexuals because they were better fighters.”
Not quite.
I think the popular myth that has fooled Gravel has arisen lately because of the movie 300 — and the natural confusion between the Spartan 300 who died holding the pass at Thermopylai (480 BC) and the 300 of the Theban Sacred Band (378-338 BC).
The Spartans did not instruct their youth to be homosexuals (no word really exists in the Greek vocabulary for our notion of homosexual). Xenophon (Lac. Pol. 2.13), for example, insisted that the older males in the army were specifically not to engage in physical relations with their younger warrior-pages (paidika).
And if in reality some hoplite soldiers occasionally did engage in what we would call gay sex, in Sparta or elsewhere, the practice was analogous to the protocols of the modern prison in the absence of women: physical relationships were loosely defined among those interested as an active older male and a younger male that served as a surrogate female.
In general, most Greeks thought that male sexual passivity was shameful, as was exclusively male sex, as were those who appeared outwardly feminine.
The closest the classical Greek world of the polis came to Gravel’s notion of an idealized gay warrior cult was in Thebes, where the 300 aristocrats (150 pairs of “lovers”) of the Sacred Band fought often at the acme of the phalanx-a very small cadre (perhaps less than 2-3% of the Boiotian army) that was predicated on class and philosophically idealized.
But even here we are not quite sure what actually was the relationship between eromenoi (“beloved”) and erastai (“lovers”) in this tiny clique; it might not necessarily have even been physical.
So in general, the Spartans most certainly did not train their soldiers to be homosexuals.