[romaaeterna]

Didn't this man direct the movie with the child rape mattress and the unfeigned consumption of dog feces?

He didn't become respectable. His mental illness became mainstream.

I wish I knew how this happened. Maybe the mechanism was a combination of internet porn and the destruction of real life social spaces. Maybe it's something else. But people should perhaps spend some small fraction of the time that they spend freaking out about the weather, and use it to freak out just a little about how we are going to survive the next 50 years as a civilization with a functioning social and political system.

[tomlockwood]

Did you know in Rome they didn't really have a rigid conception of heterosexuality? There were really only active, and passive partners in the sexual act. That was the distinction that mattered, and Hadrian was just seen as having "Greek taste". Also romans shat in public prolifically, as seen in the many pieces of graffiti warning people against doing it near shopfronts and people's homes. People shouldn't romanticise what they don't understand :)

[romaaeterna]

Where did that comment come from? Greeks and Romans? Is it because of my username? I'm afraid that it was chosen because it's the name of a popular beginner's Latin textbook, not for misplaced Romanticism.

However, I will say that reading the classics in their original Greek and Latin has added a lot of sanity to my life, and I would recommend it to anyone. Your own conception of Greek and Roman sexuality is highly romanticized, and would fall away with a course of general reading.

This is not to say that I would hold the ancients forward as examples of "sane" societies. Generally the opposite, in fact. General societal sanity is a post-Enlightenment condition.

[tomlockwood]

> Your own conception of Greek and Roman sexuality is highly romanticized, and would fall away with a course of general reading.

What do you think I'm romanticising? Can you mention a specific point? Also I didn't mention the actual aspects of Greek sexuality - just how Romans viewed Greeks. If you want to discuss Greek sexuality I'm happy to. You wanna discuss Phaedrus or The Republic, or the Sacred Band, or something else? Would be lovely to revisit postgrad.

Waters is indeed a very sane post-Enlightenment thinker, steeped in and derived from the sanity of the civilisation he is a product of.

[romaaeterna]

> You wanna discuss Phaedrus or The Republic, or the Sacred Band, or something else?

Sure. How much Plato have you read in Greek? What do you think, for example, he means by ὑπηρετεῖν when applied to χαρισάμενα παιδικά?

> Waters is indeed...steeped in and derived from...

This makes me suspect what the answer to "How much Plato have you read in Greek?" was, and exactly how much that postgrad degree was worth.

[tomlockwood]

So you can't say what I'm romanticising. Understood.