I don't know if this has any bearing on the matter
Submitted by A.I. Watcher on January 21 2002 14:12:43
In reply to A Possible Reference to Pederasty in the Gospels submitted by J on January 21 2002 00:02:11
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I don't read Greek but I do have more than a passing familiarity with Latin, as I studied it in conjunction with my studies of the Roman Republic. It's interesting to note that the Romans of the Republican era and into the time of Augustus opposed homosexuality because they widely believed that it as well as some other Greek practices made a man soft. Therefore when writing about homosexual relationships Cato the Younger (who was a bit obnoxious according to his peers but highly regarded as a paradigm of incorruptable virtue) would either call the participants Greek lovers or he would call them soft. Reading his works, it seems to me that he was using a term that was universally understood by educated Latin speakers as he never bothered to explain what he meant when saying that the "softs" were responsible for the rot at the core of the Republic. HOWEVER, it's not necessarily that simple because he sometimes used soft to denigrate other Hellenistic practices, such as the tendency of Hellenes to run corrupt municipal governements. He often referred to corrupt ethnarchs as "softs" even when he was clearly not talking about their sexual practices. Anyway, it's interesting that Israel, while being in the Greek sphere and using a form of Greek as a lingua franca, apparently resisted to a large extent the cultural monolithy of other Hellenized parts of the world. It's also interesting to note that Rome at that time had an absolutely enormous population of Jews - merchants, scholars and others who settled in the city in order to advance themselves economically. Rome of that day was the most religiously tolerant city in the world and she welcomed immigrants who had the capacity to contribute to the economy. Traffic between Rome and Jerusalem was very heavy and not particularly difficult either. The journey could be made by ordinary travellors in no more than 3 to 4 weeks in the right season and a man in a hurry could make the trip in much less time if he had the funds to hire a private ship. It's even more interesting that Marcus Aemelius Crassus, a friend and ally of Julius Caesar and a very important Roman politician, once wrote in a dispatch to the Senate that the Jews in Israel considered themselves to be closer and friendlier to Rome than to any element of the Greek world. Of course Crassus was on his way to fight the Parthian Empire - which could have had a major economic impact on Israel had Crassus actually won. So it's possible that Crassus's comments in his dispatch were generated more by Jewish syncophancy than by any genuine feelings of cultural brotherhood. Nevertheless it's more than possible to imagine that the Roman custom of using the Latin word for soft to apply to homosexual behavior found its way into the colloquial Greek used in Israel. Not only was Israel closely connected to the Latin world, any educated man living in western Asia Minor or the Hellenized portion of northern Africa had to speak both Greek and Latin - as did anyone who aspired to political power. So the two languages exchanged a great deal of vocabulary and useage. |
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