Hell, pretty much everybody banged Timiona.
In the 46th Century, visitors to the Museum of Cultural Antiquities will marvel at an old bathroom stall that was inscribed with the cryptic message “EAT DICK” in wide-tipped sharpie.
It wasn’t Timiona. It was Timion (a man) who got banged by another man. The ‘a’ ending is there to indicate he was the accusative object of said banging. Timion didn’t have a female counterpart name, but if it did, then it would be Timionan in this sentence.
So this is not just graffiti, it’s gay graffiti.
“The letters have been very skillfully inscribed on the face of the rock, evidence that it was not just philosophers, scholars and historians who were trained in the art of writing but ordinary people living on islands too.”
Or that philosophers/scholars/historians would occasionally be involved in sexy fun times, and be interested in leaving a record of their activities.
In an art history class once I was told that those greek drinking vessels (I think they poured wine from large clay flasks, but often drank it from bowl like vessels) were mostly pornographic but that you don’t often see them because the remaining examples are the small minority that nobody in the last 2000+ years found prurient enough to smash.
Shocking! They had the gays in ancient Greece? Somebody should put a stop to this - maybe build them a Hobby Lobby, I dunno.
Kickstarting a coffee table book, “The Complete History of Dictures.”
All of human history is boners.
A large subset of that is gay boners.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, I’m sure.
Naples has quite the collection of erotic art from Pompeii. I saw a really good NG or similar channel documentary on the cat houses and private sex parties in Pompeii.
I really love graffiti. If anyone hasn’t seen this site of the systematic collection and transcription of Pompeiian graf, it’s pretty illuminating. People of all classes wrote it, and they used their full names, which indicates that, as a culture, there was no shame in graf writing and that it was just a normal function of humanity. which is exactly right. we seem to have devolved for quite some time, but attitudes are changing, thank goodness!
excellent point! as we know, certain modern philosophers write graffiti as well:
Wait, is that Mars? Have we drawn wangs on the Red Planet?
Science is awesome.
Went to mars, drew a dick. USA! USA!
It fits in the great human tradition of drawing dicks on things. One of the things that separates us from the other animals, really.
Now if we could get a rover to draw some boobs, the entire solar system will know the ambition and intelligence of the human spirit!
The real reason you don’t see them is because academia used to think they were too obscene or prurient to display, but the reality is that sexual depictions on red-figure pottery are common. This sort of academic paternalism is also why a lot of the sexual terminology in the scholarship is in French: this was seen as a way of ensuring that only sufficiently educated people could understand the references, as though this would ensure their interest was not prurient.
While the sexes are correct, I would be a little hesitant to interpret this as signifying widespread acceptance of homosexuality between men (at least any more than heterosexual sexual graffiti indicates widespread acceptance of promiscuity). The sort of homosexuality encouraged in ancient Greece was one we would find repugnant today: sexual relations between older men and younger boys, as some sort of weird mentorship with sex as the payoff for the mentors. Sexual relationships were seen as involving a dominant and a submissive partner, and it would be pretty taboo for an adult male to take on the submissive role (though it might be a badge of honor for another male to say he was so dominant he was able to make another man submit to him).
A somewhat ancient joke:
How did they separate the men from the boys in ancient Greece?
With a pry-bar.
[ducks out]
They showed us some. I think they said there are more these days (and this was 15 years ago) because they are still discovered buried or whatever now and then, and I suppose glued back together from bits.
Banana? Just look at it.
