Moderation Questions

Plato’s Symposium had a guy that was really thirsty for Socrates’s loving, but Socrates was portrayed as badass and manly because he was super ambivalent. IIRC they ended up in bed at the end of the night, after a debate on the meaning of love.

now that i think about it, you do post a lot like a deeply closeted passive bottom

I find it interesting that you appear to be intimately familiar with the specific posting style in question.

You are referring to Alcibiades, who was a central figure in Greece during Socrates's time (and a pivotal figure in the Peloponnesian War). Alcibiades was reputed to be astonishingly good looking. There is an almost surely apocryphal story about how soldiers came to arrest Alcibiades and he dissuaded them by disrobing.

Are there any artist renditions of this Alcibiades? Asking for a friend…

I guess that vocabulary isn't associated with intelligence.

Can confirm that if you try that these days, you just catch an extra charge.

Virtually all ancient Greek painting has been lost to history, so there is nothing from his time.

But if you want later renditions, you have plenty to choose from. Here you go:

https://eclecticlight.co/2018/08/06/plutarchs-lives-in-paint-9a-alcibiades/

The Eclectic Light Company

Plutarch’s Lives in Paint: 9a Alcibiades

does not look promising i'm afraid

What does this prove? We've already established the vocabulary isn't associated with intelligence. The language doesn't matter.

Is the old dude trying to find the young dude's dick with a magnifying glass?

You might want to paste that into google translate lol.

In Greek times, the smaller the dick, the better.

A flaccid dick was a sign of control and self-restraint while the big ones were a often a sign of tension and the need for control. Its the reason why most sculptures and drawings show a member on the smaller end while enemies or creatures that of half man half animal displayed a large ferocious erect dick.

You shrink spun you that, huh?

but yeah that's a major pet peeve of mine is that we have all these people who insist that we know exactly what alexander the great looked like because of this

and there's legit reason to be skeptical of basically everything we have of him because the earliest we have of anything is several centuries after the fact - the only contemporary thing says "king of kings" not alexander where we're just like "duh that's him ldo"

and the archaelogical evidence is scant, not one of the battle sites has been found despite exhaustive searching and most of the cities he founded can't be found and those which can be found have ruins predating his era

again, not saying he's not real in the slightest, just that we know dogshit all about him and the sources we rely upon insert dionysus and hercules in as real historical characters - for all we know he's an amalgamation of various greeks who briefly conquered asia

Oh no… Alcibiades was blond? That’s a shame :(

No want, ty anyway

Fair play to rickroll. I hadn't put what he wrote into google translate.

i tried putting it in google translate myself and am sorely disappointed by the lack of nuance it gave to the opening remark

this would have been a better translation

any sources for this? wiki talks as if he was a definitive being who did real ****, but wiki is often FOS, so this could be a fun rabbit hole

You sure about that?

Yes, and by 1970 BC it was widely accepted in many areas in Mesopotamia.

my best advice is to read arrian - he is the original autist who starts up his work with a lengthy passage about his methodologies and motivations

all the works on alexander preceding him are lost to history - but that doesn't matter to much because arrian is very clear that they all tell very different versions of events

he tells us in his introduction that he's tired of all the confusion over who alexander was and what he did so he decided to read all the works and piece together his own version based upon them where he'd pick and choose the parts from each text that he thought was the most legit - so his version is just a frankenstory

he also makes it very clear that you need to accept that alexander was a god, otherwise none of what he accomplished could possibly make any sense, and no, he's not speaking rhetorically, he means it, he regularly calls back to dionysus and hercules not as mythological characters but as actual historical figures as they too were greeks who had conquered asia - because there's countless greek tales of greeks conquering asia - so there's a long history of these kinds of stories, and we can easily dismiss hercules and dionysus as not real given they are introduced as gods and children of gods but now suddenly alexander gets all this "nuh uh he's 100% legit because he was born a prince god, not just a god"

and lastly, arrian is very clear that he feels that it is his duty as a greek to write this book to better glorify the greeks

he also says that whenever he was unsure of who's version of events to follow, he defaulted to ptolemy, his reason being that since that guy was a king, he was therefore more honorable than the other writers

so you can see where we're getting already and that's just from the introduction

alexander was a super popular folktale for all of history, there's even versions of his father being a wizard who turned into a dragon to bang his mom

here's a medieval depiction of that story

now most of the real crazy stuff on him is from the medieval period but you get the idea, he's always been a central focus in fantasy and mythology as even the "good sources" we have regularly talk about physically impossible things, they'll suppose to know exact details of intimate conversations by a campfire and yet can't even specify when a major event occured so they are fast and loose with the timelines - further reinforcing it's very much a tale based on how cinematic it would be not as one to document history

there's tales of him going underwater

he has very much been treated as a comic book character throughout the vast majority of history, it was only the roman period where he was taken very seriously and then again in the 19th century when brits had so much wealth and free time they found themselves drawn to the classics to kill their idle hours

the earliest concrete stuff that we have on him is at least 300 years after his death, yes there are many coins with alexander the great but they are all from later generations, as with any artwork, documents, etc - there's some contemporary stuff that's been linked to him but it's all circumstantial, ie there is a babylonian inscription and an egyptian one attributed to him but it's also very much a choose your own adventure kind of circumstantial evidence that wouldn't even hold up as well as the evidence provided by a 9/11 truther

as you can see it's very much of a "oh they must be talking about alexander here where they use vague pronouns"

anything that does mention him by name is fleeting and all discovered during the 19th century, a time when archaeology was done by wealthy hobbyist and forgeries were common because it just takes one bad apple to want to come home with a big discovery to brag about at their garden parties

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priene_inscription_of_Alexander_the_Great

en

Priene inscription of Alexander the Great - Wikipedia

now i'm not saying the above is a forgery, just noting that anything found by victorian era brits should be given a little bit of scrutiny - afterall they "found" troy 3 separate times because each time someone "found it" someone else later found another set of ruins which better fit the description - ie they were setting out with a goal in mind and gosh darn it they were going to find what they set out for - the current accepted version of troy by the way has literally zero evidence supporting it is indeed troy other than it has ruins which fit a plausible timeline

i obviously think he was real - but there's nothing we can attribute to him with any actual certainty

my best guess is he was part of a series of greeks who conquered as far as afghanistan (the evidence of greek dominated kingdoms is powerful, the evidence of alexander not so much), possibly over a period of several generations and he was perhaps the one who played the largest role and it just became easier as a storytelling device to attribute everything to him - our knowledge is quite scant, ie we know the greco-bactrian empire was part of the seleucid empire that broke off but we don't know when that happened, we can narrow it down to a range where we can guess it happened within a certain 10 year span but we really don't know any details about much of anything from that time and stuff like that was well over a generation after alexander had died

the most famous successor states of the seleucids and ptolemies have very little information and the earliest document found on it was from polybius who was contemporary but also wasn't writing until it'd been around for at least a century and a half

and importantly, polybius glossed over alexander the great, barely even mentions him despite that he was the entire reason for having these other hellenic kingdoms which existed during his time and which he focused a great deal upon - it just doesn't add up and feeds more credibility to the idea that alexander was blown up significantly by later writers

I barely recognise your name. Why would I assume you’re gay and doing a bit?