....which the author of the Seventh Letter of Plato, offended at the traditional association of sex with a deity, calls "the slavish and ugly pleasure wrongly called aphrodisios ". p.29

..in the Greek society they tended to believe that one's moral character is formed in the main by the circumstances in which one lives: the wealthy man is tempted to arrogance and oppression, the poor man to robbery and fraud, the slave to cowardice and petty greed. p.28

Our own culture has its myths about the remote past, and one myth that dies hard is that the "invention" of sexual guilt, shame and fear by the christians destroyed a golden age of free, fearless and pagan sexuality. ....linguistic inhibition, then, was observably strengthened in the course of the classical period; and at least in some art-forms, inhibition extended also to content... pp.20-21

...Greek girls were segregated from boys and brought up at home in ignorance of the world outside the home... ..Married young, perhaps at fourteen, a girl exchanged confinement in her father's house for confinement in her husband's. ..greek laws were not lenient towards adultery, and moikheia, for which we have no suitable translation except "adultery", denoted not only the seduction of another man's wife, but also the seduction of his widowed mother, unmarried daughter, sister, niece, or any other woman whose legal guardian he was. ...while an adolescent boy who blushed at the mere idea of proximity to a woman was praised as sophron, 'right-minded'... pp. 21-22

Sexual intercourse was aphrodisia, "the things of Aphrodite"...sexual desire could be denoted by general words for desire, but the obsessive desire for a particular person was eros... Plato finds it philosophically necessary in Phaedrus and Symposium to treat eros a respons to beauty... Eros generates philia, 'love'; the same word can denote milder degrees of affection, just as "my philoi "can mean my friends or my inner-most family circle, according to context. pp.19-20

...why the Greeks of the Classical period accepted homosexual desire as normal is an easy question: they did so because previous generations had accepted it, and segregation of the sexes in adolescence fortified and sustained the acceptance and the practice. Money may have enabled the adolescent boy to have plenty of sexual intercourse with girls of alien or servile status, but it could not give him the satisfaction which can be pursued by his counterpart in a society which does not own slaves: the satisfaction of being welcomed for his own sake by a sexual partner of equal status. This is what the Greek boy was offered by homosexual relations. p.26

"At the beginning there were three sexes, not just the two sexes, the male and the female, as at present; there was a third kind that shared the characteristics of the other two, and whose name survives, even though the thing itself has disappeared. For at that time one was androgynous in form and shared its name with both the male and the female" Plato, Symposium

Living in a fragmented and predatory world, the inhabitants of a Greek city-state, who could never afford to take the survival of their community completely for granted, attached great importance to the qualities required of a soldier: not only to strength and speed, in which men are normally superior of women, but also to the endurance of hunger, thirst, pain, fatigue, discomfort and disagreeably hot or cold weather. The ability to resist and master the body's demands for nourishment and rest was normally regarded as belonging to the same moral category as the ability to resist sexual desire. p.24

Greek society was a slave-owning society, and a female slave was not in a position to refuse the sexual demands of her owner .. Large cities..also had a big population of resident aliens, and these included women who made a living as prostitutes, on short-term relations with a succession of clients, or as hetairai , who endeavoured to establish long-term relations with wealthy and agreeable men. ...gluttony, drunkenness and purchased sexual relations were classified together as "shameful pleasures".. ..a character in Menander says "No one is so parsimonious as not to make some sacrifice of his property to Eros".. The idea that one has a right to spend one's own money as one wishes (or a right to do anything which detracts from one's health and physical fitness) is not Greek, and would have seemed absurd to a Greek. He had only the rights which the law of his city explicitly gave him; no right was inalienable, and no claim superior to the city's. pp. 23-24