the ancient trappings I mean, but they color perspectives on the ancients today today

Sounds like a FoxNews-ish rewriting of history by real closet types who masturbate watching "300" and wish they could be like Emperor Caligula. Also they are so jealous of the beautiful Persian rugs.

lol. yeah the ancient greeks and macedonians etc. who came up with this stuff were already out of the closet

The Earth and Environmental Systems Podcast by Christian Shorey of the Colorado School of Mines not only goes through the history of the earth, but also the history of humans, in a pretty interesting way. I learned a lot, and if you are interested you might also. Be prepared to invest some time though.

I've seen those stereotypes, though usually it was the Romans being worried about, more than the Greeks. I also think a lot of it has come from the English historians projecting it onto the Romans, fueled by their own thoughts about their own empire.

that's a good point fleacircus, 'what the ancients thought' turns out to often be just what a subset of ancients filtered through their more modern translators/interpretors thought

I think it was an authentic ancient Greek/Hellenistic view. But I doubt it was objective: I expect the ancient Persians would have strongly disagreed.

The ancient Greeks were pretty sexist: it would have been pretty natural for them to insult their enemies as being womanly.

In terms of homosexuality, they drew a distinction between the active partner and the passive partner (usually translated "beloved"). The "beloved" was usually younger and often had a lower status. I don't think they really recognized the existence of a sexual partnership of equals: they thought in terms of a dominant partner and subordinate partner. In a heterosexual relationship, the woman was the subordinate; in a homosexual relationship one person would take on the subordinate role.

thx for the info TheophileEscargot. Another thing that makes me skeptical of this conceptualization is just that I don't think that Persia and the Mediterranean were all that far apart frankly, and not just in terms of geography but also in terms of their human minds. Obviously some of this is just my personal philosophy born of arbitrary personal experience but I don't really believe in 'West', 'East', etc etc and think that these distinctions can actually be obscuring instead of enlightening.

Fun fact: By emphasizing the division between citizen and slave, democracy may have been a factor in the unusual sophistication of Athenian slavery. Athenians were apparently the first Greeks to embrace chattel slavery - the market-flavored master-and-private-property concept we usually think of when we think of slavery. (Spartan slavery, by way of contrast, looked roughly like medieval serfdom, and the other polises seem to have primarily won their slaves at war instead of importing them from the barbarians.)

Meanwhile, the Achaemenids banned slavery (at least nominally) in accordance with the tenets of Zoroaster. If the Book of Ezra is any guide, a number of their emperors walked the talk as well.