Although there are still places and cultures where being a woman is a risky profession, little by little and with great difficulty, rights and freedoms have been equated with men. In ancient Greece, the cradle of democracy and Western civilization, women were ignored, valued only for their reproductive role and confined to the gynaeceum (part of the house reserved for women). This social exclusion of women made homosexuality among the Greeks a common and habitual practice. But this homosexuality, normally, did not occur between adult men but between an adult man (called erastes , the lover) and an adolescent boy (called eromenos , the beloved).
The most common form of sexual relations between men in Greece was paiderasty (combination of country , boy, and were , love, lover), from this term comes the word pederasty. As an example of "normality" in this type of relationship we have the words of Plato in the Banquet :
for the young man there is no greater happiness than a brave man who loves him, and for the man there is no greater happiness than a brave ephebe with whom he is in love
But the most striking case is that of Thebes, where an army made up of pairs of lovers was formed:«the lovers' regiment » also called «sacred battalion of Thebes«. It was made up of 150 pairs of lovers and constituted an elite formation that based its strength and power on the love between its members. According to Plutarch:
For men of the same tribe or family there is little value for one another when danger presses; but a battalion founded on friendship based on love will never be broken and is invincible; for lovers, ashamed of not being worthy in the sight of their loved ones, and loved ones in the sight of their lovers, willingly throw themselves into danger for the relief of one another.
