My point was to illustrate that even though the moon is the closest thing to us in space the distances are still vast compared to the sizes of the planets themselves. The Earth and moon are often depicted as being practically on top of each other, but the distance between them is two orders of magnitude greater than the size of either body. Like I said the distance is so big that you could fit all the planets in the solar system between the Earth and the moon (though as someone pointed out, only at apogee). Of course, since the moon is the closest thing to us, other distances are going to be much more impressive, but the fact that you could drop a great big giant thing like Jupiter in between the Earth and the moon and for it not even to be a tight fit I found really helped me to get a sense of the distance.

“Half the distance to the moon” makes it seem like this is a very close approach, and in relative terms it is.

But the distance between Earth and the moon is still mind-bogglingly huge. So big, that you could fit all the other planets in the solar system end-to-end between Earth and the moon and still have space to spare

I apologise, I mistook the meaning of your original comment

I think the point I'm most trying to argue against is casting these relationships using our modern conceptions of sexuality. I don't think it's right to talk about gay or straight people, or to cast their relationships in these terms, in a society that did not think about sexuality in these terms

While you paint a somewhat convincing narrative I’m not sure it holds up. For one thing it wasn’t just Ancient Greece that had this different view on sexuality, it was present throughout Rome as well and seems to have been the dominant perspective for hundreds of years (until after the spread of Christianity).

The idea really seems to have been rooted in concepts of masculinity. We see in Roman culture that a free man is expected to dominate his wife and his slaves (and that would involve sex) and not to be dominated himself. No one in Roman society seems to have considered it odd for a man to have sex with his male slaves, and we even see cases where Roman emperors are notably distraught when a favoured male slave dies and build memorials for them. We would certainly understand these relationships as being in love, and the Romans don’t seem to have considered them odd.

What we do see constantly though is Roman men being shamed for being the “bottom” in a relationship. Julius Caesar for example was rumoured to have had such a relationship with Nicomedes of Bithynia, and though he denied it, the rumours dogged him all his life, with his political enemies calling him “Queen of Bithynia”.

I think the real takeaway from the Roman situation is that human sexuality is very complex, and while defining people by the gender they prefer is one way to define sexuality, it is not the only way. While there were undoubtedly plenty of people in the Roman world who we would identify as straight or gay, equally there were many people who wouldn’t fit neatly into our modern categories for sexuality, and who instead adhered to the ideas of dominance/passivity that were prevalent in their own culture. If you took a Roman from the Imperial period forward to the modern world, they would probably understand a lot of the questions we are dealing with around immigration and economic inequality. However they would probably find our modern ideas of sexual identity quite puzzling.

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