“Ukraine’s intelligence service says it thwarted a Russian plot to blackmail a local teenage girl into blowing up a police building by threatening to make public intimate pictures on her phone.”
“Ukraine’s intelligence service says it thwarted a Russian plot to blackmail a local teenage girl into blowing up a police building by threatening to make public intimate pictures on her phone.”
Eh, it was more complicated even in Christendom before 1800 or so. And conversely, lots of other cultures had sexual taboos, even very rigid ones. The Aztecs liked to impale homosexuals, for example.
Sometimes I wonder what mistranslations affect our understanding of ancient civilizations 🤔
All the chroniclers are dirty liars (or at least repeating dirty liars) anyway, so probably very little. If a word of Herodotus gets mistranslated, it would hardly be noticeable between all the crazy stories about monopeds and African tribes ruled by whoever is the hottest. He’d still be seen as a useful source on Achaemenid Persia.
If you’re referring to the impalement, one can only imagine it was supposed to be poetic, at least for male victims. It wasn’t just them, either; Christianity has a pretty typical ancient semitic view on same-sex activity, for example. I went with the Aztecs because it seemed like we were moving towards the whole “unspoiled progressive pre-Columbian America” thing, and unlike, say, medieval England there was a very specific documented punishment involved.
Was it impalement or “impalement” 🫣
Aztecs, the homoimpalers