aleathiel: (Default)
aleathiel ([personal profile] aleathiel) wrote2004-05-10 05:03 pm

(no subject)

Okay, just when I think studying archaic and classical Sparta can't get any weirder I get to marriage ceremonies:

They dressed the woman as a man and cut her hair and made her lie in wait in a darkened room for her husband. Nobody knows why, but one suggestion is that it was to make the husband feel more "at home" given that all his previous sexual encounters would have been homosexual.

On Argos brides even wore false beards.
ext_29560: (Default)

[identity profile] aleathiel.livejournal.com 2004-05-10 09:39 am (UTC)(link)
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I'm going to write an AU. Because basically Homer wrote about a Sparta that never existed. At the time in which he set the Illiad there was no such place: it only came into being two centuries before Homer himself. So I'm going to have to have a go at writing Paris in Sparta fairly soon.

I've got the versions of Homer, Ovid, Sophocles and Euripides to look at for the story and then Xenophon, Aristotle, Plutarch and Herodotus for the setting. Because there are so many things in Spartan society that don't fit with the Illiad: like the fact that there was no problem with adultery in Sparta, in fact it was encouraged when the husband was considerably older than the wife (cf Helen and Menelaus) because a younger man's "noble seed" was more likely to produce healthy children. In fact it was the husband himself who introduced persective 'fathers' to his wife.

I'm just too busy to write it yet.
ext_29560: (Default)

[identity profile] aleathiel.livejournal.com 2004-05-10 09:51 am (UTC)(link)
And I really should have used this icon.

And that was supposed to read "prospective fathers".