So I've been reading about how ancient civilisations like the Greeks, Romans, Japanese etc. tolerated male homosexual relations and as far as I know, MSM is disproportionately more likely to transmit HIV/AIDs according to Wikipedia (WSW suffers from the problem too but it's more indirect). So did anyone from this civilisations recognise this problem and if so, how did they respond to it?
HIV as we know it did not even exist until relatively recently. The strain of the virus that causes it didn’t emerge until the 1920s, and the first known sample of the disease only goes back to 1959, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. HIV originally came from primates; doctors still aren’t entirely sure how it started spreading to humans but the most plausible scenario is bushmeat (meat coming from the primates) hunters or vendors being bitten or cut while hunting or butchering an infected animal. So, no, ancient peoples wouldn’t have known about HIV because it didn’t exist in their time. It’s a pretty new disease.