Aristotle writes, (from your website excerpt) "Now the man who is defective in respect of resistance to the things which most men both resist and resist successfully is soft and effeminate; for effeminacy too is a kind of softness; such a man trails his cloak to avoid the pain of lifting it, and plays the invalid without thinking himself wretched, though the man he imitates is a wretched man."

Now, at 1 Cor. 6:9, St. Paul uses the term "malakos" which old bibles translate as "effeminate".

I translate "malakos" as "soft". It has NO sexual connotations as far as I can see in Aristotle and in the Bible. It is a character flaw, a vice.

Well, I wrote most of this article on Wikipedia.

But then modern trained people keep inserting this sentence in the article: "One of the most well-known ancient Greek words for effeminate was "kinaidos" (cinaedus in its Latinized form), a man "whose most salient feature was a supposedly 'feminine' love of being sexually penetrated by other men." (Winkler, 1990)"

This is NOT the classical meaning nor is it the meaning of "malakos" is it? I'm in an argument with people who pull up the Google definitions that one has to have femine traits or looks. But that is not the classical definition.

It almost seems that no one has any understanding of Vice or character traits.

I'm interested in what Aristotle and St. Paul mean by the word "malakos". St. Thomas Aquinas follows Aristotle's lead, yet when I post Aristotle's definition, about a man who refuses to carry his cloak properly--they automatically reject it.

Is there a need to keep the old definitions and do we let people rewrite definitions and what is the ethical Aristotelian sense of "malakos"?

Hello Wheeler! I'm afraid you are the cause of this confusion by translating μαλακία as effeminacy. An 'effeminate' person can indeed by a κίναιδος, but μαλακὸς refers to people who can not stand any hardship, being used to wealth and in general an "easy" life.

Chuckle...so much for Wikipedia.