November 29, 2003. ק Aristotle on Homosexuality as Brutishness Akin to Cannibalism. I still have to sort out what the Greeks and Romans thought of homosexuality. Sometimes it seems accepted as normal and good; other times it is called perverse or is punishable by death. Even a single author can illustrate both (e.g. Plato in The Symposium and The Laws). Here is what Aristotle has to say in Book VII, Section 5, of The Ethics.

These states are brutish, but (B) others arise as a result of disease (or, in some cases, of madness, as with the man who sacrificed and ate his mother, or with the slave who ate the liver of his fellow), and others are morbid states (C) resulting from custom, e.g. the habit of plucking out the hair or of gnawing the nails, or even coals or earth, and in addition to these paederasty; for these arise in some by nature and in others, as in those who have been the victims of lust from childhood, from habit.
...
... Of these characteristics it is possible to have some only at times, and not to be mastered by them. e.g. Phalaris may have restrained a desire to eat the flesh of a child or an appetite for unnatural sexual pleasure; but it is also possible to be mastered, not merely to have the feelings.

So it seems he regarded homosexuality as a perversion of the same sort as cannibalism.

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