Same-Sex Timeline

The Roman poet Horace AD 8 AD ​ Ovid had completed  Metamorphoses  by this time.   Includes Jove’s yearning  for Ganymede, and Orpheus’s love for Thracian men. The poet Horace died.  He is supposed to have a thousand passions for both  boys & girls.  His friend and patron Maecenas died a few months earlier and is reputed to  have loved Horace “more than my own bowels.” 26      Tiberius retires to Capri, where stories of sexual excess including same-sex became  rife.  He is supposed to have trained young boys to lick and nibble him underwater.   c40  Philo of Alexandria criticises the sexual underworld of his time by evokin g Hellenistic practices of the past: “They accustomed those who were by nature men to submit to  play the part of women, and saddled them with the formidable curse of a female  disease.”   c.55 ​ Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians – appears to include a prohibition on ped...

Justinian - detail from a mosaic     508           King Clovis I of the Franks is baptised.  He confessed to same-sex relations. 521      ​ Justinian puts to death Bishop Isiah of Rhodes & Bishop Alexander of Diospolis for            seducing younger men.   533 ​      Justinian declared all  same-sex  acts were to be punished by bu rning & castration            under the injunction of divine law. c.550 ​    Columba curses Findchán and Áid’s “carnal love.”             ​    Procopius  claimed that the Heruli people [Danish islanders] had a system in which               boys had intercourse with men until they went through a man l y rite of passage and               became men....