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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Looking forward to the next Jordan Peterson lecture on how "the practice of regular nude exercise together in the gym enhanced group coherence among these men, extending bonds cemented in youth initiatory contexts forward throughout the lives of adult citizens." Clearly this is the origin story of idealistic Judeo-Christian manhood concepts, born from the crucible of Greco-Roman culture...

People of the messianic bent always want to hold up the mythical perfect past, but when you dig into the details, it's always problematic... See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Greece

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Is it? The article seemed to say that a big part of being nude was to foster homosexual relationships between adult men and young boys as a means of training those boys to take their rightful place as elite adult men who then in turn did the same thing to other young boys. That seems quite different than the “idealistic Judeo-Christian manhood concept”.

The article is quite clear that "vast swaths of people who lived in an ancient Greek city – women, local residents who were not born in Greece, foreigners, and poor men – were largely excluded from athletics".

And people of the revisionist bent consistently project the virtues of current age into introspection of the past

I'm no admirer of Jordan Peterson, but we don't have to speculate what the religious reaction to this nudity would have been. The Jews were there among the Greeks when all this was happening, and they didn't like it at all [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_nudity

One thing to also note is that the Jews would very much have stood out from pagan Greeks were they to run around naked, due to being circumcised.

Yeah, but Peterson is all about speculating and not about historical research. If you are interested in facts, you don't turn to people like him.

To quote TRON: Legacy

“nailed it.”

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