There is no doubt that this was a time of extreme homophobia, and we can trace a clear, though chronologically interrupted, path to the Germanic peoples of Tacitus’s time. He relates how men found guilty of homosexual acts were pressed into bogs and held down to drown under wicker hurdles. Archaeologists have found many male corpses from the Iron Age in the marshes of Germany and Denmark, often naked, sometimes bound, usually exhibiting various traumatic injuries: slashed throats, blunt-force cranial depressions, garottes around their necks. Some of these victims have been found in pairs and
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