You can add the fact that they smelled like patchouli, to the orgies (many of them involving butt stuff), causing a contraceptive plant to go extinct from using so much of it, failing to invent soap, and walking around in sandals all the time, as reasons why they were nothing more than filthy hippies! Yeah, those macho guys that you idolize for conquering large chunks of Europe, fucking stank. And they were having hot gay sex whenever they could. Really need to see if someone's done a catalog of Roman authors talking about how much they enjoyed things like butt stuff and memeing that when the fascists start talking about how we're not "macho conquerers like the Romans!"
Sparta was part of what is now known as Greece and the Romans did copy the Greeks in other ways... So the OP makes sense...
The Romans also routinely smothered themselves head to toe in olive oil, which I think is cool as fuck
What? Perception of what traits and behaviors are and are not considered masculine changes over time? And things that manly men did centuries ago might get them labeled sissy queers in modern times? That can't be right!
Not cool. When exposed to sunlight, it makes your skin rot. Admittedly, once the crusted over yuk drops off, you’ll have baby fresh skin. Most people aren’t willing to put up with the rot.
Fun fact. Vikings were the original ‘soy boys’. So like we all do with UA’s mom we’ll work from both ends. The Persians first started removing the skins from almonds, grinding them down, drying the flour down and creating a paste which they sweetened and used on cookies, pastries and desserts. This spread to the Arabs who eventually conquered Sicily. Around that time a group of Vikings named the Normans went and conquered part of northern France (Normandy) and they settled down. And learned French and became Christian and shit. But at heart they were still Vikings so they got bored and decided to go conquer England, a couple other places and eventually Sicily. Where they learned about this sweetened almond paste. And then one of them realized that they could add a little more water and a little less sugar and have a decent milk substitute that they could use in their recipes on fast days (back then every Weds and Friday + a whole calendar of special ones) when they couldn’t consume meat or dairy products. From there it spread to all of Western Europe. So yeah, a thousand years ago fucking Vikings were the first to come up with plant based milk substitutes.
Oh! I forgot to add that it is important that it isn’t just random that it was the Normans that figured out how to get around fast days. Due to their homelands being dark half the year (exaggerating, roll with me) and even when there was light needing to cover their entire bodies with heavy furs to not die of hypothermia the Vikings were a SERIOUS milk culture. Gotta get that Vitamin D. Which is fine when you are pagan but now all of a sudden half to two thirds (depending on tradition/strictness) of the days of the year the majority of your recipes don’t work… Now that is a problem. Obviously in the middle of the Mediterranean it is a little warmer, there is a little more sunshine so you don’t need the Vitamin D but you still want some down home cooking. So you find a milk substitute that you can use in your recipes.
Despite the squeezing of udders that is not juice. Even though certain people on youtube call it cow boob juice it is milk. Milk comes from the nipples of animals. Juice comes from fruits and nuts when you grind them into pulp. If you juiced a nipple you would get blood and cellular protoplasm. This is because juicing involves the destruction of cells. There is no such thing as almond milk or soy milk. Almonds do not have nipples or mammary glands.
You have them confused with the Sacred Band of Thebes. Not that the Spartans were averse to butt stuffing...
The Romans had a unique way of looking at it. It was masculine to penetrate, period. It was feminine to be penetrated. So as long as you were the top you were still a manly man. Oh, and fun fact - as they've recovered more and more of Pompeii that was largely preserved due to the lava flows from Vesuvius, they've discovered a few things that they now see patterns of throughout ancient Roman cities. The majority of people lived in apartments. And those apartments didn't have kitchens. So the majority of people ate in fast food establishments throughout the city. They found over 100 in Pompeii already, some incredibly well preserved. Fast food culture goes back at least as far as the Romans. Bizarre.
LOL, sorry, I'm going to bow out. I'm guessing there's an Eric the Viking or some other joke in here that you are moving towards, but I'm not familiar with it and past this point I'm just going to make it weird.