This piece is quite long, and may take me a couple of days to complete.
Ancient Pederasty
An Introduction
Andrew Lear
Introduction
The word “pederasty” comes down to us from ancient Greek paiderastia, a compound of pais (boy) and a derivative of eran (to love), meaning “love of boys.” It refers to the ancient Greek custom of erotic relations between an adult man, referred to as the erastēs (lover; plural erastai), and an adolescent boy or youth, referred to as the erōmenos (beloved; plural erōmenoi) or paidika (boyish things, neuter plural). Pederasty (in this sense) was an important focus of cultural attention in ancient Greece, as is shown by both art and literature. There is also historical evidence, including graffiti praising handsome boys and speeches from trials involving pederastic relations. Pederasty was regarded by Greeks (Herodotus 1.135) and by non-Greeks alike (Williams 2010, 68–9) as a hallmark of Greek culture. Evidence also indicates that it was not only tolerated but the object of considerable social esteem. Approval was, however, not always unmixed: at times pederasty was viewed with concern (“problematized,” as Foucault put it), and possibly with disapproval by certain social groups.
This chapter will discuss the main sources of evidence in roughly chronological order and will consider some of the principal questions they raise: when the custom originated; when it ended; where it was practiced; who was supposed to participate; what elements, erotic and non-erotic, their relations were supposed to include; and the limits of social approval. These issues are uncertain because, although relatively abundant, our evidence is scattered over time and place, often fragmentary, frequently without context, and biased in various, often elusive ways.
Sources of Evidence
Homer and prehistory
Greeks of later periods generally believed that the Iliadic heroes Achilles and Patroklos were a pederastic couple.1 Modern scholars generally regard this as anachronistic. 2 Some, however, believe that Greek pederasty developed out of erotic relations between soldiers and that Achilles and Patroklos represent the custom’s prehistory.3 Others believe that there were adolescent initiation rites involving pederastic sex in prehistoric Greece.4 Pederastic relations are central to a number of myths, which some argue follow the pattern of initiatory cult.5 The most widely represented of these myths is that of Zeus and Ganymede;6 another example is the story of Poseidon and Pelops (Pindar, Olympian Odes 1.36–88).
There is in fact some archaeological evidence for initiation rituals involving pederasty in the eighth–seventh centuries. Several sculptures excavated at a sanctuary in Kato Syme in Crete may represent initiator/initiand couples. One is particularly convincing: it is a double statuette representing two largely nude ithyphallic male figures, an adult and a boy, holding hands (Figure 7.1). There is also a group of inscriptions on the island of Thera, a Spartan settlement, behind the remains of the temple of Apollo Karneios, several of which refer to penetrative sex between males. There has been much debate over whether these inscriptions record sacral relations or obscene boasts.7 One, however (IG 12.3 537a), reads: “By Apollo Delphinios, Krimon here penetrated the son of Bathykles and the brother of [illegible name].” There are no Greek parallels for the invocation of a deity in an obscene boast; thus the initiatory explanation is more plausible.
Figure 7.1 Double statuette of an adult/youth couple from Kato Syme, Crete, geometric period. Source: photo from Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Athens, neg. no. 2000/18.
Our information about Sparta is scanty, and much of it derives from Athenian sources. Several sources indicate, however, that pederasty played a role in the Spartan education system for boys (Xen. Lac. 2.12–14, Plu. Lyc. 17–18, and Aelian 3.10; Cartledge 1981, 19–23), which many have seen as constituting a multi-year initiation system (Brelich 1969, 29, 113). We have even less information about Crete, but a fragment from the historian Ephoros (70F 149 FGrH, preserved at Strabo 10.4.21) describes a ritual involving pederastic relations. Although only especially selected boys took part (rather than all the boys of a certain age class), the ritual has many hallmarks of initiation. The boys underwent a stylized kidnapping, after which they spent a period outside the community, hunting or learning to hunt in the company of their kidnappers/lovers, to then return to the community, where there was a ceremony at which they received a series of prescribed gifts—a drinking cup, a bull, and a military outfit—that some have seen as symbolizing their changed status as men ready to drink at the sumposion, sacrifice, and fight in war.8 All of this evidence is from the classical period or later. Nonetheless many have connected it with the evidence from Thera and argued that Greek pederasty originated in initiation rituals. The fact that our evidence for such rituals comes from Sparta and Crete has led to several different theories. Some argue that pederasty developed in these two culturally linked, conservative Dorian centers and spread from there.9 Others (Bremmer 1980, Sergent 1986b, 7–39 and 1986a) claim, on the basis of scattered reports of pederastic practices in Germanic tribes (see for instance Ammianus Marcellinus 31.9.5), that pederastic initiation rituals were a widespread Indo-European practice, for which Sparta and Crete merely happen to give us our clearest evidence.
Lyric and elegiac poetry
The poetry of the late archaic period provides abundant evidence for pederasty and the high value attached to it at this time. Indeed, there must originally have been much more pederastic poetry. As an example, our sources (e.g. Horace, Ode 1.32.10–12) indicate that Alcaeus was one of the main pederastic poets. Yet nothing remains of his pederastic output but a few minuscule fragments (306 A Fr. 77; 366, 368). Nonetheless, there remain poems or fragments by Solon, Mimnermus, Alcaeus, Ibycus, Theognis (and/or the tradition called the Theognidea), Anacreon, Simonides, Pindar, and Bacchylides (as well as poetry by Alcman and Sappho referring to possibly analogous female–female relations).10 Of these, the most abundant sources are the Theognidea, Anacreon, and Pindar.
Book 2 of the Theognidea in particular contains a number of seemingly complete pederastic poems (of which a few also appear in Book 1, e.g. 253–4, 993–5). These tend to conflate pederastic relationships with the political–pedagogical man/youth relationship typical of the entire corpus. The poet is simultaneously teacher and erastēs, and the values he teaches—in particular loyalty—are toujours déjà both political and erotic (see 1271–2, 1311–18; Donlan 1985, 224, Edmunds 1988, 84–5). Even in those poems that strongly emphasize erotic themes, the key vocabulary associated with the political–pedagogical themes appears (Lear 2011). The Theognidea contain the earliest references to many themes that occur throughout the history of the custom: the superiority of boys over women (1365–6), the connection between pederasty and the gymnasium (1335), the time-limitedness of pederastic relationships, which end when the erōmenos develops secondary hair (1327).
There are elegies by other authors embedded in the Theognidea. These (in particular two attributed elsewhere to the Athenian legislator Solon: 719–28 = Solon 24 and 1253–4 = Solon 23) view pederasty in a different way. They treat the erōmenos as a sex object, on a par with luxury goods and women. This is more like the pederasty of Anacreon than like that of the Theognidea. Anacreon’s (or his poetic persona’s) relations with his erōmenoi focus on charm, attraction, and seduction/rejection, without any reference to education or politics. Yet his persona does not represent a “bad” or a comic erastēs: instead he practices pederasty in conformity with a different set of ideals, which involve withdrawal from the political world and protection of the self against overwhelming passion (Elegy 2 West; see Lear 2008).
Little remains of Pindar’s sympotic poetry, but we have one fragment (Fr. 123) of a pederastic poem implying that pederastic desire is common to most men or that those who do not feel it are inferior (or possibly both these things). Pindar also expresses nostalgia for the gentlemanly pederasty of the earlier lyric poets (Isthmian Odes 2.1–5). His choral poems in praise of athletic victors also confirm (as does Ibycus 282: see Nicholson 2000) that addressing a youth as the object of pederastic desire and/or comparing him to famous pederastic love objects such as Ganymede (Olympian Odes 10.99–106) could function as a mode of public flattery in this period. The story of Poseidon’s love for Pelops at Olympian Ode 1.36–88 also indicates that Pindar regarded pederasty with high approval: he claims to tell it in order to put the gods in a better light than does the traditional story of Tantalos and Pelops.
Athenian vase painting
Little remains of Greek wall painting; one of the few intact examples is the Tomb of the Diver, which contains a pederastic courtship scene set at the sumposion. By contrast, tens of thousands of painted clay pots have survived better. Athenian pots of the sixth to the fourth centuries in particular provide a great deal of evidence for pederasty. There are approximately 1,000 known pederastic scenes (Lear and Cantarella 2008, xvii), as well as countless painted inscriptions (called kalos inscriptions, from kalos, “beautiful”) praising the beauty of boys (see Lissarrague 1999).
Vase painting has played a key role in scholarship on Greek pederasty. Already in 1937 a book was published in English on kalos inscriptions (Robinson and Fluck 1937), and in 1947 the great vase scholar John Beazley published a list of black figure scenes, dividing them into three scene types (Beazley 1947, 198–223).
Figure 7.2 Amphora by the Phrynos Painter. “Up and down” scene. Source: Martin-von-Wagner
Museum der Universität Würzburg, 241. Photo: Karl Oehrlein.
Beazley distinguished two principal types of courtship scene, “up-and-down” and courting-gift scenes. Figure 7.2 is an up-and-down scene. A bearded erastēs courts his beardless erōmenos. He touches the erōmenos’ chin (by reaching up) and his genitals (by reaching down). Figure 7.3 is a courting-gift scene: the erastēs holds behind him his gift, a hare (the commonest type of gift in such scenes).
Beazley’s third scene type shows a kind of sex that scholars call “intercrural inter-course,” in which the erastēs inserts his erect penis between the erōmenos’ thighs. In Figure 7.4, the erastēs has bent his knees and placed his head on his upright erōmenos’ shoulder; we can see the base of his penis as it penetrates the youth’s thighs.
Up-and-down and intercrural scenes were common only in the sixth century; courting- gift scenes are the most common scene type at all times and were produced until the early fourth century. In the fifth century another pederastic scene type, the scene of Zeus and Ganymede, was common. 11 Figure 7.5 is a typical one: Zeus seizes the naked Ganymede as other boys flee in terror. Many pederastic scenes contain a kalos inscription. For example, in Figure 7.6a the words Hippodamas kalos (“Hippodamas is beautiful”) are inscribed to the left of the couple. There is, however, not necessarily any narrative connection to the scene, as such inscriptions appear in non-pederastic scenes as well; when they do, they imitate a real-life custom of writing kalos graffiti on walls, trees, and so on.12 There are almost 900 remaining vase inscriptions with a boy’s name, as well as countless generic inscriptions reading merely ho pais kalos (“the boy is beautiful”).
Figure 7.3 Kylix by Douris. Courting-gift scene. Source: Martin-von-Wagner Museum der
Universität Würzburg, 482. Photo: Karl Oehrlein.
Vase painting is often more explicit about sex than textual sources, and it is tempting to treat it as direct evidence for sexual practices. For example, many scholars have considered intercrural scenes as proof that the Greeks actually practiced intercrural intercourse. Vase painting is, however, not documentary photography, but an artistic genre; through a language of repeated elements, it presents a certain vision or version of practices, just as literary genres do. In general, it presents a highly idealized vision of elite males and their activities. In this light, it is best to ask why vase painters preferred to represent intercrural rather than anal intercourse. 13 The answer is probably that the former allowed them to portray the erōmenos as upright and uninvolved in the sex act: this corresponds to Greek ideals—as does, for instance, the portrayal of men with under-sized genitalia, which symbolize self-restraint—a characteristic further emphasized by the non-erect state of almost all erōmenoi’s genitalia, even in scenes where this is clearly unrealistic, as in Figure 7.2.
The main interpretations of vase painting’s vision of pederasty have both focused on the association between pederasty and the hunt. Koch-Harnack (1983, 90–7) argued that the elements of hunt iconography (principally gifts of game animals, as in Figure 7.3) emphasize a view of pederasty as pedagogical: the erastēs, a hunter, gives the erōmenos game animals, so that he will learn to hunt by chasing them. Schnapp (1997, 255), 14 on the other hand, suggests that the game animal symbolizes the erōmenos himself, who is a prey for the erastēs.
Figure 7.4 Lekythos by the Taleides Painter. Scene of intercrural intercourse. Source: Princeton
University Art Museum, y-1986.53.
I have argued elsewhere against both of these views (Lear and Cantarella 2008, 72–89). There are only a few vases that suggest a pedagogical scenario of the type Koch-Harnack envisions. Furthermore, erastai in vase painting give erōmenoi many different gifts. Some of these (such as lyres) could be considered pedagogical; others (such as flowers) cannot. Vase painting makes no distinction between the categories. In Figure 7.6b, for instance, there are three parallel couples. In each the erastēs shows his erōmenos a gift, which ranges from a possibly pedagogical hare to a non-pedagogical flower or sprig (in the right-hand couple).
The other theory misunderstands the symbolic nature of gifts. The ring that a man gives his wife does not symbolize his view of her or of her role, but rather the relationship he is offering her. Surely the erastēs’ gifts have a similar purpose, rather than serving to diminish the person whom he is courting. The contrast between mortal courtship scenes and Ganymede scenes, furthermore, emphasizes the fact that mortals do not seize their erōmenoi: they might want to seize them, but, lacking Zeus’ powers, they need to court them instead.
It is also the case that elements from hunt scenes are no more common in pederastic iconography than elements of athletic scenes. In Figure 7.2, for instance, both figures have oversized thighs and chests that identify them as athletes. They also wear wreaths, which may identify them as athletic victors, in particular the wreath hanging from the erastēs’ presumably victorious arm. Pederastic scenes almost all contain elements connecting them to athletics, the hunt, or the sumposion, and generally more than one of the three. The interpretation of vase painting’s vision of pederasty must involve a connection to all three rather than to one alone; along with pederasty, the three form an indissoluble nexus of esteemed elite activities.
Figure 7.5 Pelike by Hermonax. Zeus seizes Ganymede. Source: Antikenmuseum Basel und
Sammlung Ludwig, BS 483. Photo: Claire Niggli.
A companion to Greek and Roman sexualities, Chapter 7: Ancient Pederasty
A companion to Greek and Roman sexualities, Chapter 7: Ancient Pederasty
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Harmodios and Aristogeiton
Harmodios and Aristogeiton were a pederastic couple who assassinated the tyrant Hippias’ brother Hipparchos at the Panathenaic festival in 514 BCE. As both Herodotus (5.55, 6.123) and Thucydides (1.20, 6.52–60) emphasize, they did not bring an end to the tyranny. Nonetheless, they were regarded by later Athenians as liberators, and, when pederasty was praised, they were almost invariably cited (Pl. Smp. 182C, Aeschin. 1.132, Ath. 13.602a). They were the object of adulation—private, civic, and religious. They received cult worship as heroes; their descendants received free meals from the city; and they were praised in song at sumposia (see Carmina popularia 893–6 PMG). A double statue of them was erected in the agora early in the democracy. When the Persians captured Athens in 480, they took the statues to Susa as booty, but the Athenians responded by erecting a new pair, executed by the sculptors Kritias and Nesiotes, which is known to us from an extant Roman copy (Figure 7.7).15 It would be hard to overemphasize the importance of these statues in Athenian life. They stood in the agora, where every voter passed them on his way to the Pnyx, as a model of the quintessential Athenian action: tyrant-slaying. They appeared on Athena’s shield on many Panathenaic prize vessels, and Harmodios’ slashing gesture influenced the portrayal of Theseus, Athens’ founding hero (Taylor 1991, 78–139). For our purposes, what is interesting is that their portrayal emphasizes the pederastic nature of their bond: the mere fact of their unusual double portrayal underlines it, as does their clear division into bearded erastēs and beardless erōmenos (Stewart 1997 70–5).
Figure 7.6a Kylix by Makron. Interior. Note kalos inscription along left-hand rim. Source: Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek München, 2655.
Figure 7.6b Kylix by Makron. Exterior. Parallel courting gift scenes. Source: Staatliche Antiken- sammlungen und Glyptothek München, 2655.
Figure 7.7 Plaster reconstruction of the Tyrrannicides. Statue-group by Kritios and Nesiotes. Rome, Museo dei Gessi. Photo: DAI–Rome (neg. no. 84.331).
The Athenian theater
The evidence for pederasty in the archaic period is from and/or about a variety of places in the Greek world. We have more evidence for the classical period; nonetheless, except for a few references to Sparta’s educational system or the Theban Sacred Band (the mid-fourth-century crack regiment that was stationed in erastēs/erōmenos order and famously died to a man, fighting Phillip of Macedon at Chaeronea),16 these are almost exclusively from or about Athens. Though rich and powerful, Athens was not necessarily typical of ancient Greek culture, in which each city had its own customs, cults, and so on. Thus these sources, discussed in the next three sections, represent an extraordinarily strong set of evidence—but one with significant limitations.
The record of classical Athenian culture is also of course incomplete. There were for instance tragedies on pederastic themes, but we have only very slight fragments from them. Two fragments of the Myrmidons (Frr. 135 and 136 Radt) make clear that Aeschylus portrayed Achilles and Patroklos as a pederastic couple. Even less remains from Sophocles. There are a few references in Euripides’ extant plays (see Poole 1990); in particular, the fragments of the Chrysippus present Laios’ rape of Chrysippos as the origin of pederasty (see Hubbard 2006). The argument has been made that the shift from the Myrmidons to the Chrysippus demonstrates a drop in pederasty’s social esteem. This is plausible, although erotic passion is often destructive in Euripides regardless of the lovers’ gender.
Comedy presents more evidence:17 if we consider Aristophanes’ extant nine complete comedies, pederasty is an important theme in the Knights (Equites) and in the agōn of the Clouds (Nubes) (889–1104) and puts in minor appearances elsewhere.18 Aristophanes portrays the custom in a coarser, less idealistic way than archaic sources do, although it is hard to say whether this is due to a change in society or to a difference in genre. At Peace (Pax) 724 it is clear that Zeus’ sexual relations with Ganymede are anal; erōmenoi are called venal at Wealth (Ploutos) 149–59; and the erastai portrayed at Wasps (Vespes) 1025–8 are concerned only with their own ego gratification and not with the reputations/futures of their erōmenoi. At Clouds (Nubes) 973–83 the character Better Argument’s rhetoric of pedagogical pederasty is portrayed as hypocritical.
Yet pederastic desire is nonetheless characteristic of Aristophanes’ comic heroes, as for instance of the old democrat Philokleon in the Wasps (578) and of Peisetairos in the Birds (Aves) (137–42). Finally, it is characteristic of Demos himself (a character whose name makes him a personification of the “People”). When Demos (portrayed as an old man) is restored to his youth at the end of the Knights, he is given “a well-hung boy,” for him to use “as a folding-stool” (1384–7). Pederasty is also associated with the past—always the better time in Aristophanes. Demos responds to the gift of the boy by saying: “Happy me! I’m getting back to the good old days!” And, while Better Argument’s pederastic desires are the subject of mockery, his opponent’s new education is the ultimate subject of the play’s attack.
The mockery of pederasty in Aristophanes’ comedies is, furthermore, relatively mild by comparison with the vitriol employed there against the new-fangled politicians, thinkers, and poets—people such as Kleon, Socrates, and Agathon—who are the comedies’ principal targets. Hubbard (1998, 53) suggests that Aristophanes views pederasty as a kind of formative training for these adult degenerates. Yet such a connection is never made explicit in the extant comedies. Instead, when in the Knights we hear about the youth of a degenerate, the Sausage-Seller, he was not an elite erōmenos, but rather a lower-class prostitute (1242). In short, Aristophanes mocks elite pederasty, but without the intense bitterness he deploys on other topics.
Socrates and his followers
We know Socrates’ ideas only through the writings of his followers, principally the philosopher Plato and the general and historian Xenophon. Pederasty is an important theme in Socratic discourse, but the two authors’ accounts of Socrates’ views differ sharply: Xenophon’s “Socrates” condemns consummated pederasty without qualification (Smp. 8.32–3, Mem. 1.2.29–30), while Plato (at least in his middle works) treats pederasty as superior to the love of women (Pl. Smp. 208E–9E), and even consummated pederasty as a second-best option, below only philosophical love (Pl. Phdr. 256A–D).
It is furthermore uncertain whether the authors are using “Socrates” (as they so often do) as a spokesman for their own viewpoints. On this point, their work suggests some distance between their own views and those of “Socrates.” There is a marked disjunction between the views attributed to Socrates in works of Plato’s middle period such as the Symposium and the Phaedrus, where Socrates remains the main character (as he is in the early dialogues), and the views attributed to the main character in Plato’s last work, the Laws: there, at 835E–42E, the Athenian says that he would ban from the ideal city all sex except procreative sex within marriage. Xenophon, on the other hand, represents Socrates’ views as more akin to those of the Athenian in Plato’s Laws, yet he portrays himself (or his past self) as interested in kissing beautiful boys (Mem. 1.3.11); furthermore, in his historical works, where Socrates does not appear, Xenophon generally treats pederasty more sympathetically (e.g. Xen. Cyn. 12.20 and An. 7.4.7–11; see
Hindley 1994).
Thus it is probably impossible to ascribe a consistent view of pederasty to Socrates, Plato, or Xenophon on the basis of the evidence we have. There is, however, a common ground between the authors’ conflicting accounts, and perhaps we may at least regard this as plausibly historical. Pederastic attractions and courtship are part and parcel of the elite Athenian settings in which both authors show Socrates discoursing: we see a discussion of the relative attractions of boys at the gym (Pl. Chrm. 153D–4B), songs sung in praise of a boy (Pl. Ly. 204D), a youth joking about the many propositions he has received from his fellow symposiasts (Xen. Smp. 4.10). Although the two authors differ on the degree of Socrates’ criticism, both portray him as participating in the ambient pederastic discourse for ironic, pedagogical purposes. Plato’s Socrates often portrays himself as erotically attracted to a boy (see e.g. Chrm. 155D, Smp. 216D–19C) only to use his supposed attraction to engage the boy in philosophical discussion; Xenophon’s Socrates also plays at pederasty (Smp. 8.3–6). Pederasty is also a topic of debate in this world more generally: this is particularly so in Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, where several different perspectives on the custom are given, from the idealizing to the critical, but a multi-sided discussion is also implicit in Xenophon’s Symposium (see particularly 8.32-4).
In Plato’s Symposium, for instance, Phaidros’ opening speech (178A–80B) takes an unquestioningly idealistic/idealizing view of pederasty as leading to heroic courage in both the erastēs and the erōmenos — in other words, as ethically educative. In the next speech, however, Pausanias casts doubts over the reasons for the idealization of the custom by dividing pederasty into a heavenly type, which revolves around the love of the soul, and a vulgar type, characteristic of men who are concerned with the body rather than the soul and (consequently) desire women as well as boys (180C–5C). Plato’s Lysias (Phdr. 230E–4C) and Xenophon’s Socrates take these criticisms further. Indeed, one could even see Plato’s Socrates’ famous ladder of love in Diotima’s speech (Smp. 201D–12C) as a contribution to this debate, as it proposes a pederasty purified of personal desire.
Thus both authors portray the Athenian intellectual elite as idealizing pederasty but questioning this idealization. For this reason, despite the many glowing words about pederasty that they contain, the Socratics’ writings are among the principal texts (along with the pseudo-Demosthenic Eroticus) that led to Dover’s and Foucault’s understanding of pederasty as a subject of ethical debate in ancient Greece—what Foucault (1985, 191–2) called its “problematization.”
Court cases
Aside from comedy and philosophy, we also have evidence for classical Athenian views of pederasty from courtroom speeches. These were preserved as examples of rhetorical style, so we often lack historical information about the cases themselves; nonetheless they were at least intended to persuade a jury, and therefore they must at least represent an attempt at mirroring (or manipulating) public opinion.
There are references to pederasty in a number of extant speeches (e.g. Isaeus 10.25, Aeschin. 3.162). Two in particular focus largely on pederastic relations: Lysias 3 (Against Simon),19 and Aeschines 1 (Against Timarchos). Lysias 3 is a case about a violent struggle over a youth loved by both the prosecutor and the defendant; it is spoken by the unnamed defendant, who has been accused of assault. The youth’s status (slave or free person) is uncertain; both litigants claim to have had a contractual erotic relationship with him. Our lack of contextual knowledge makes the speech’s veracity impossible to assess, but the defendant’s assumptions give us interesting information about social attitudes: for instance, he treats fights over a youth of this type as analogous to fights over a hetaira (female courtesan) (43); and he treats being in love, including love of the pederastic variety, as a positive characteristic (44). On the other hand, he stresses that he is/was ashamed of being involved in this kind of struggle—and of being in love at an advanced age (whatever that may be).
We are better informed about Aeschines 1. In this speech, Aeschines accuses a man named Timarchos of having been a prostitute in his youth; under Athenian law, he would, if convicted, be deprived of the right to speak in the Assembly, in other words to participate in the government of the polis. The arguments presented by Aeschines are, to a modern mind, obvious attempts at manipulating the jury’s prejudices with little evidentiary basis. We know, however, from Demosthenes that they were successful (Dem. 19.257 and 284), so they must have reflected audience prejudice somewhat accurately. Aeschines says (1.132) that the defense will argue that Timarchos was not a prostitute but a respectable erōmenos. In his rebuttal of this argument, he distinguishes between Timarchos’ behavior and that of an erōmenos, constructing as he does so a kind of ethical system for pederastic relations, divided (as it is in Pausanias’ speech in Plato’s Symposium) into a good option (which he terms at 1.136 dikaios erōs “legitimate love”) and a bad option (prostitution). As a result, Dover made this speech the centerpiece of his Greek Homosexuality, and it has remained a key text for all studies in this area since that time.
Aeschines 1 makes a number of aspects of the ancient Greek sexual imaginary clear. It is for instance clear that, while anal intercourse was not illegal, it was viewed negatively enough—and closely enough associated with prostitution—for the accusation (even if not explicit) of participating in it to be damaging if it was believed; the penetrated partner was considered effeminate (111, 131), as in Aristophanes. It is also clear that Timarchos (or even the bogeyman made out of him) was not a homosexual in the modern sense: at 107, for instance, Aeschines says that, when he was an official in the colony of Andros, he was renowned for his relations with citizen wives.20 At times, one might even think that his sexual relations were purely mercenary: thus at 75 Aeschines says that he used the money he earned as a prostitute to keep “flute-girls and the most expensive courtesans.” Yet this does not seem to be the point. Instead part of what is so disgraceful about Timarchos is that he not only was penetrated anally but desired it: at 41, for instance, Aeschines refers to “the acts that Misgolas was eager to perform, and Timarchos to have done to him.” The thing that unites Timarchos’ various disgraceful activities is his lack of self-control: he was (42) “a slave to the most disgraceful pleasures” (my emphasis), and these include not only female prostitutes, but gluttony and dice.
The division between all this and “legitimate eros” is also clear. Aeschines needs to establish it in order to defend himself against the defense’s strategy of calling his prosecution an offense against the tradition of idealizing pederasty (132). The defense will also, he says, bring into evidence his own pederastic activities and the pederastic poetry that he has written. It will claim that he is a bad erastēs, and he must reclaim the pederastic high ground. To this end, he discusses Achilles and Patroklos’ relationship at some length (141–50) and (in a move that seems surprising to a modern reader) lists respectable Athenian erōmenoi, past and present (155–7), to contrast them—or their reputations—with Timarchos.21
Thus the high status of pederasty in Athenian culture is confirmed. Yet the case also makes clear how risky an activity pederasty was for the all-important reputation of the participants. A relationship that seemed respectable to some people might be regarded as disreputable—or even as prostitution—by others, and the penalties for engaging in pederasty in a way that was deemed disreputable by many could be enormous. How true this was in earlier periods or in cities other than Athens is uncertain, but this text and its historical context confirm that pederasty was highly “problematized” in classical Athens.
Harmodios and Aristogeiton were a pederastic couple who assassinated the tyrant Hippias’ brother Hipparchos at the Panathenaic festival in 514 BCE. As both Herodotus (5.55, 6.123) and Thucydides (1.20, 6.52–60) emphasize, they did not bring an end to the tyranny. Nonetheless, they were regarded by later Athenians as liberators, and, when pederasty was praised, they were almost invariably cited (Pl. Smp. 182C, Aeschin. 1.132, Ath. 13.602a). They were the object of adulation—private, civic, and religious. They received cult worship as heroes; their descendants received free meals from the city; and they were praised in song at sumposia (see Carmina popularia 893–6 PMG). A double statue of them was erected in the agora early in the democracy. When the Persians captured Athens in 480, they took the statues to Susa as booty, but the Athenians responded by erecting a new pair, executed by the sculptors Kritias and Nesiotes, which is known to us from an extant Roman copy (Figure 7.7).15 It would be hard to overemphasize the importance of these statues in Athenian life. They stood in the agora, where every voter passed them on his way to the Pnyx, as a model of the quintessential Athenian action: tyrant-slaying. They appeared on Athena’s shield on many Panathenaic prize vessels, and Harmodios’ slashing gesture influenced the portrayal of Theseus, Athens’ founding hero (Taylor 1991, 78–139). For our purposes, what is interesting is that their portrayal emphasizes the pederastic nature of their bond: the mere fact of their unusual double portrayal underlines it, as does their clear division into bearded erastēs and beardless erōmenos (Stewart 1997 70–5).
Figure 7.6a Kylix by Makron. Interior. Note kalos inscription along left-hand rim. Source: Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek München, 2655.
Figure 7.6b Kylix by Makron. Exterior. Parallel courting gift scenes. Source: Staatliche Antiken- sammlungen und Glyptothek München, 2655.
Figure 7.7 Plaster reconstruction of the Tyrrannicides. Statue-group by Kritios and Nesiotes. Rome, Museo dei Gessi. Photo: DAI–Rome (neg. no. 84.331).
The Athenian theater
The evidence for pederasty in the archaic period is from and/or about a variety of places in the Greek world. We have more evidence for the classical period; nonetheless, except for a few references to Sparta’s educational system or the Theban Sacred Band (the mid-fourth-century crack regiment that was stationed in erastēs/erōmenos order and famously died to a man, fighting Phillip of Macedon at Chaeronea),16 these are almost exclusively from or about Athens. Though rich and powerful, Athens was not necessarily typical of ancient Greek culture, in which each city had its own customs, cults, and so on. Thus these sources, discussed in the next three sections, represent an extraordinarily strong set of evidence—but one with significant limitations.
The record of classical Athenian culture is also of course incomplete. There were for instance tragedies on pederastic themes, but we have only very slight fragments from them. Two fragments of the Myrmidons (Frr. 135 and 136 Radt) make clear that Aeschylus portrayed Achilles and Patroklos as a pederastic couple. Even less remains from Sophocles. There are a few references in Euripides’ extant plays (see Poole 1990); in particular, the fragments of the Chrysippus present Laios’ rape of Chrysippos as the origin of pederasty (see Hubbard 2006). The argument has been made that the shift from the Myrmidons to the Chrysippus demonstrates a drop in pederasty’s social esteem. This is plausible, although erotic passion is often destructive in Euripides regardless of the lovers’ gender.
Comedy presents more evidence:17 if we consider Aristophanes’ extant nine complete comedies, pederasty is an important theme in the Knights (Equites) and in the agōn of the Clouds (Nubes) (889–1104) and puts in minor appearances elsewhere.18 Aristophanes portrays the custom in a coarser, less idealistic way than archaic sources do, although it is hard to say whether this is due to a change in society or to a difference in genre. At Peace (Pax) 724 it is clear that Zeus’ sexual relations with Ganymede are anal; erōmenoi are called venal at Wealth (Ploutos) 149–59; and the erastai portrayed at Wasps (Vespes) 1025–8 are concerned only with their own ego gratification and not with the reputations/futures of their erōmenoi. At Clouds (Nubes) 973–83 the character Better Argument’s rhetoric of pedagogical pederasty is portrayed as hypocritical.
Yet pederastic desire is nonetheless characteristic of Aristophanes’ comic heroes, as for instance of the old democrat Philokleon in the Wasps (578) and of Peisetairos in the Birds (Aves) (137–42). Finally, it is characteristic of Demos himself (a character whose name makes him a personification of the “People”). When Demos (portrayed as an old man) is restored to his youth at the end of the Knights, he is given “a well-hung boy,” for him to use “as a folding-stool” (1384–7). Pederasty is also associated with the past—always the better time in Aristophanes. Demos responds to the gift of the boy by saying: “Happy me! I’m getting back to the good old days!” And, while Better Argument’s pederastic desires are the subject of mockery, his opponent’s new education is the ultimate subject of the play’s attack.
The mockery of pederasty in Aristophanes’ comedies is, furthermore, relatively mild by comparison with the vitriol employed there against the new-fangled politicians, thinkers, and poets—people such as Kleon, Socrates, and Agathon—who are the comedies’ principal targets. Hubbard (1998, 53) suggests that Aristophanes views pederasty as a kind of formative training for these adult degenerates. Yet such a connection is never made explicit in the extant comedies. Instead, when in the Knights we hear about the youth of a degenerate, the Sausage-Seller, he was not an elite erōmenos, but rather a lower-class prostitute (1242). In short, Aristophanes mocks elite pederasty, but without the intense bitterness he deploys on other topics.
Socrates and his followers
We know Socrates’ ideas only through the writings of his followers, principally the philosopher Plato and the general and historian Xenophon. Pederasty is an important theme in Socratic discourse, but the two authors’ accounts of Socrates’ views differ sharply: Xenophon’s “Socrates” condemns consummated pederasty without qualification (Smp. 8.32–3, Mem. 1.2.29–30), while Plato (at least in his middle works) treats pederasty as superior to the love of women (Pl. Smp. 208E–9E), and even consummated pederasty as a second-best option, below only philosophical love (Pl. Phdr. 256A–D).
It is furthermore uncertain whether the authors are using “Socrates” (as they so often do) as a spokesman for their own viewpoints. On this point, their work suggests some distance between their own views and those of “Socrates.” There is a marked disjunction between the views attributed to Socrates in works of Plato’s middle period such as the Symposium and the Phaedrus, where Socrates remains the main character (as he is in the early dialogues), and the views attributed to the main character in Plato’s last work, the Laws: there, at 835E–42E, the Athenian says that he would ban from the ideal city all sex except procreative sex within marriage. Xenophon, on the other hand, represents Socrates’ views as more akin to those of the Athenian in Plato’s Laws, yet he portrays himself (or his past self) as interested in kissing beautiful boys (Mem. 1.3.11); furthermore, in his historical works, where Socrates does not appear, Xenophon generally treats pederasty more sympathetically (e.g. Xen. Cyn. 12.20 and An. 7.4.7–11; see
Hindley 1994).
Thus it is probably impossible to ascribe a consistent view of pederasty to Socrates, Plato, or Xenophon on the basis of the evidence we have. There is, however, a common ground between the authors’ conflicting accounts, and perhaps we may at least regard this as plausibly historical. Pederastic attractions and courtship are part and parcel of the elite Athenian settings in which both authors show Socrates discoursing: we see a discussion of the relative attractions of boys at the gym (Pl. Chrm. 153D–4B), songs sung in praise of a boy (Pl. Ly. 204D), a youth joking about the many propositions he has received from his fellow symposiasts (Xen. Smp. 4.10). Although the two authors differ on the degree of Socrates’ criticism, both portray him as participating in the ambient pederastic discourse for ironic, pedagogical purposes. Plato’s Socrates often portrays himself as erotically attracted to a boy (see e.g. Chrm. 155D, Smp. 216D–19C) only to use his supposed attraction to engage the boy in philosophical discussion; Xenophon’s Socrates also plays at pederasty (Smp. 8.3–6). Pederasty is also a topic of debate in this world more generally: this is particularly so in Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, where several different perspectives on the custom are given, from the idealizing to the critical, but a multi-sided discussion is also implicit in Xenophon’s Symposium (see particularly 8.32-4).
In Plato’s Symposium, for instance, Phaidros’ opening speech (178A–80B) takes an unquestioningly idealistic/idealizing view of pederasty as leading to heroic courage in both the erastēs and the erōmenos — in other words, as ethically educative. In the next speech, however, Pausanias casts doubts over the reasons for the idealization of the custom by dividing pederasty into a heavenly type, which revolves around the love of the soul, and a vulgar type, characteristic of men who are concerned with the body rather than the soul and (consequently) desire women as well as boys (180C–5C). Plato’s Lysias (Phdr. 230E–4C) and Xenophon’s Socrates take these criticisms further. Indeed, one could even see Plato’s Socrates’ famous ladder of love in Diotima’s speech (Smp. 201D–12C) as a contribution to this debate, as it proposes a pederasty purified of personal desire.
Thus both authors portray the Athenian intellectual elite as idealizing pederasty but questioning this idealization. For this reason, despite the many glowing words about pederasty that they contain, the Socratics’ writings are among the principal texts (along with the pseudo-Demosthenic Eroticus) that led to Dover’s and Foucault’s understanding of pederasty as a subject of ethical debate in ancient Greece—what Foucault (1985, 191–2) called its “problematization.”
Court cases
Aside from comedy and philosophy, we also have evidence for classical Athenian views of pederasty from courtroom speeches. These were preserved as examples of rhetorical style, so we often lack historical information about the cases themselves; nonetheless they were at least intended to persuade a jury, and therefore they must at least represent an attempt at mirroring (or manipulating) public opinion.
There are references to pederasty in a number of extant speeches (e.g. Isaeus 10.25, Aeschin. 3.162). Two in particular focus largely on pederastic relations: Lysias 3 (Against Simon),19 and Aeschines 1 (Against Timarchos). Lysias 3 is a case about a violent struggle over a youth loved by both the prosecutor and the defendant; it is spoken by the unnamed defendant, who has been accused of assault. The youth’s status (slave or free person) is uncertain; both litigants claim to have had a contractual erotic relationship with him. Our lack of contextual knowledge makes the speech’s veracity impossible to assess, but the defendant’s assumptions give us interesting information about social attitudes: for instance, he treats fights over a youth of this type as analogous to fights over a hetaira (female courtesan) (43); and he treats being in love, including love of the pederastic variety, as a positive characteristic (44). On the other hand, he stresses that he is/was ashamed of being involved in this kind of struggle—and of being in love at an advanced age (whatever that may be).
We are better informed about Aeschines 1. In this speech, Aeschines accuses a man named Timarchos of having been a prostitute in his youth; under Athenian law, he would, if convicted, be deprived of the right to speak in the Assembly, in other words to participate in the government of the polis. The arguments presented by Aeschines are, to a modern mind, obvious attempts at manipulating the jury’s prejudices with little evidentiary basis. We know, however, from Demosthenes that they were successful (Dem. 19.257 and 284), so they must have reflected audience prejudice somewhat accurately. Aeschines says (1.132) that the defense will argue that Timarchos was not a prostitute but a respectable erōmenos. In his rebuttal of this argument, he distinguishes between Timarchos’ behavior and that of an erōmenos, constructing as he does so a kind of ethical system for pederastic relations, divided (as it is in Pausanias’ speech in Plato’s Symposium) into a good option (which he terms at 1.136 dikaios erōs “legitimate love”) and a bad option (prostitution). As a result, Dover made this speech the centerpiece of his Greek Homosexuality, and it has remained a key text for all studies in this area since that time.
Aeschines 1 makes a number of aspects of the ancient Greek sexual imaginary clear. It is for instance clear that, while anal intercourse was not illegal, it was viewed negatively enough—and closely enough associated with prostitution—for the accusation (even if not explicit) of participating in it to be damaging if it was believed; the penetrated partner was considered effeminate (111, 131), as in Aristophanes. It is also clear that Timarchos (or even the bogeyman made out of him) was not a homosexual in the modern sense: at 107, for instance, Aeschines says that, when he was an official in the colony of Andros, he was renowned for his relations with citizen wives.20 At times, one might even think that his sexual relations were purely mercenary: thus at 75 Aeschines says that he used the money he earned as a prostitute to keep “flute-girls and the most expensive courtesans.” Yet this does not seem to be the point. Instead part of what is so disgraceful about Timarchos is that he not only was penetrated anally but desired it: at 41, for instance, Aeschines refers to “the acts that Misgolas was eager to perform, and Timarchos to have done to him.” The thing that unites Timarchos’ various disgraceful activities is his lack of self-control: he was (42) “a slave to the most disgraceful pleasures” (my emphasis), and these include not only female prostitutes, but gluttony and dice.
The division between all this and “legitimate eros” is also clear. Aeschines needs to establish it in order to defend himself against the defense’s strategy of calling his prosecution an offense against the tradition of idealizing pederasty (132). The defense will also, he says, bring into evidence his own pederastic activities and the pederastic poetry that he has written. It will claim that he is a bad erastēs, and he must reclaim the pederastic high ground. To this end, he discusses Achilles and Patroklos’ relationship at some length (141–50) and (in a move that seems surprising to a modern reader) lists respectable Athenian erōmenoi, past and present (155–7), to contrast them—or their reputations—with Timarchos.21
Thus the high status of pederasty in Athenian culture is confirmed. Yet the case also makes clear how risky an activity pederasty was for the all-important reputation of the participants. A relationship that seemed respectable to some people might be regarded as disreputable—or even as prostitution—by others, and the penalties for engaging in pederasty in a way that was deemed disreputable by many could be enormous. How true this was in earlier periods or in cities other than Athens is uncertain, but this text and its historical context confirm that pederasty was highly “problematized” in classical Athens.
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Re: A companion to Greek and Roman sexualities, Chapter 7: Ancient Pederasty
Hellenistic and imperial sources
Little attention is paid in scholarship on this topic to Hellenistic and imperial sources of evidence. These are substantial, but we often lack contextual information; indeed in a number of cases we do not know where the authors were from, or even what century they lived in. Many, furthermore, reuse archaic or classical material (or both) in ways that make it hard for us to assess their relationship to their own social reality.
Poetry is an important source for the Hellenistic period. Pederasty is an important theme in two of the three most important Hellenistic poets, Callimachus and Theocritus. It remains important in Hellenistic epigram; Book 12 of the Palatine Anthology consists of pederastic poetry, and much of it is Hellenistic. There are changes in the views on or versions of pederasty presented in the poetry of this period. Theocritus, for instance, seems to take erotic reciprocity between erastēs and erōmenos for granted (12.10, 15, 29.32), while in archaic and classical sources only the erastēs is depicted as feeling erotic desire (see for example Pl. Phdr. 255A). Many themes from earlier pederastic poetry persist, however: for instance, AP 12.30–3 and 39–40 concerns boys whose attractions vanish with the appearance of body hair.
Many philosophers of the Hellenistic period wrote books on erōs, and we have references (principally in Diogenes Laertius and Athenaeus)22 to their pederastic views and practices. For instance, Stoics are said to have kept their erōmenoi until the age of 28 (Ath. 13.563E). Another interesting source is the third-century BCE gymnastic law of the Thracian city of Beroea (SEG 27.261, Side B, 13–15), in which young men are forbidden to talk with the boys in the gymnasium, presumably to prevent seduction
Finally, it seems important to mention that Alexander the Great, although non-Greek, had some relationship with pederasty. Stories about his father Phillip’s court (Diod. Sic. 16.93–4) indicate that some kind of man–youth sexual relations were practiced there—although without Athenian idealization. Alexander is said to have had an erotic relationship with his coeval Hephaistion, which he took pains to connect to the legend of Achilles and Patroklos (Ael. VH 7.8, 12.7).
Pederasty appears in the work of many Greek authors of the imperial and late antique periods: in Plutarch, Strato the epigrammatist, the Greek novelists, Athenaeus, Philostratus, and Lucian, among others.23 As in Hellenistic sources in general, there is considerable continuity from earlier periods: in Lucian, for instance, as in Plato, pederasty is declared to be superior (Am. 50), as it is the kind of love appropriate to the wise.24 Love for women and married love has, however, risen in status. In fact three imperial works (Plu. Amat. 750A–2B, Ach. Tat. 2.35–8, Luc. Am. 19–51) stage debates between enthusiasts of the two kinds of love, and in Plutarch’s Eroticus (also known as Amatorius) heterosexual marital love seems to win the day, both in the discussion and in the surrounding plot. Strato’s epigrams, furthermore, perhaps under the influence of Roman poetry, sexual practices, or both, present a very different pederasty from that of the archaic and classical poets: Strato writes of anal sex (never intercrural) (AP 12.240, 243, 245), of sex with slave boys (12.211) or prostitutes (12.237, 239), or even of sex with youths with secondary hair (12.10, 178)
Rome
Sex with adolescent males was among the socially approved sexual options for a Roman man.25 On the whole, however, a Roman man’s sexual relations with adolescent males were restricted to slaves and prostitutes. Sex with a free-born Roman youth, like sex with a freeborn Roman woman other than one’s wife, would have constituted the crime of stuprum—a broad category of forbidden sexual behavior (Williams 2010, 103–36). As a result, pederastic relations of the kind idealized by the Greeks, involving a mentoring relationship between males of similar social levels, had no place in Roman sexual–social ethics.
A few Roman authors comment on the Greek practice of pederasty; these hover between disapprobation and a neutral recognition of pederasty as a foreign custom. Ennius was presumably referring to pederasty when he said that “nudity among citizens is the beginning of shamefulness” (Fr. 407), and Cicero quotes him at Tusculan Disputations 4.70; Nepos (Praef. 4) also accuses Greek youths of promiscuity in their role as erōmenoi and points out in the preface to his collection of biographies that the Greek customs he describes would be considered disgraceful in Rome (Praef. 5). Both authors, however, also comment on pederasty in a seemingly neutral way. Nepos (Alc. 2.2) says of Alcibiades simply that, “at the beginning of his adolescence, he was loved by many men, according to the Greek custom [more Graecorum],” and Cicero (Tusc. 4.70) says, without editorial comment, that “this practice seems to me to have originated in the Greeks’ gymnasia, where such love affairs are freely permitted.”
Erotic relations following the conventions of Greek pederasty also make several surprising appearances in Roman poetry. Several of the bucolic figures in Virgil’s Eclogues are in love with youths. Although these figures are shepherds or goatherds and therefore not the kind of elite urban citizens with whom Greek pederasty is generally associated, their homoerotic relationships take place between males of similar social status and involve pedagogical elements. For instance, Menalcas at Eclogue 3.74–5 helps Amyntas with his hunting (and gives him courting-gifts at Ecl. 3.70–1). Virgil expresses no disapprobation of these relationships; indeed he makes no sharp distinction between his bucolics’ pederastic loves and heterosexual ones, which they also express (Ecl. 3.66–7, 78–9).
Pederasty plays a role in the Aeneid as well. Aeneas’ relationship with the youth Pallas is not explicitly erotic, but Virgil emphasizes parallels between it and the hero’s relationship with Dido (Putnam 1995: 33–41). There is also an explicitly pederastic couple on the Trojan side, Nisus and Euryalus. Virgil leaves this pair’s showy heroism open to criticism: they demonstrate courage by volunteering for a dangerous and important mission but fail to accomplish it because they waste their time on a bloodthirsty rampage of plundering (9.176–445). Nonetheless their death embodies the tradition of pederastic heroism: Nisus, the erastēs, expires on the breast of his erōmenos, having sacrificed his life to protect and avenge him (9.438–45). Virgil makes much of this moment, apostrophizing the couple as a “fortunate pair” (fortunati ambo) and dedicating his art to maintaining their eternal fame (9.446–9).
It is not clear what if any connection Virgil intends between these characters’ sexual lives and those of contemporary Romans. The bucolic figures in the Eclogues live at a mythical remove from reality, and the Aeneid concerns myth, or at least the distant past; the characters are also as connected to their Greek literary models as to any Italian reality. Yet, as some of the Eclogues make clear, these bucolics live in Italy—and the Aeneid’s Trojans are important ancestors of the Roman people.
Catullus and Tibullus, on the other hand, portray themselves (or their poetic personae) as loving and courting Roman youths of elite status in the context of contemporary late republican/early imperial Rome. Catullus gives his boy-love a seemingly elite name, Iuventius (Catullus 24, 48, 81, 99), and portrays him as free to choose among his suitors; Tibullus in 1.4 receives advice from the god Priapus about courting boys who engage in such paradigmatically elite activities as riding (1.4.11) and hunting (1.4.49–50).26 It is not surprising for Catullus’ persona to violate Roman sexual ethics: one of the other main topics of his poetry is his love for Lesbia, a married Roman woman (Catullus 83.1). There is, however, no similar excuse for Tibullus. Greek pederasty clearly had some power over the imagination of Roman poets, if not over their and their contemporaries’ personal habits as well.
Questions of Interpretation
Given the complicated evidentiary record, it is unsurprising that there is much scholarly debate about Greek pederasty. This is also undoubtedly the case because it is unclear to what extent one can map the modern concept of “homosexuality” onto Greek pederasty. The debate between those who believe that one can (generally called “essentialists”) and those who believe one cannot (generally called “social constructionists”) is covered in Chapters 1 and 3. In what follows I will consider, more simply, some questions about the parameters of Greek pederasty as our sources of evidence portray it. As stated above, these parameters are: when the custom originated; when it ended (as an approved custom); where pederasty was practiced; who was supposed to participate in it, in terms of class and age; what elements, erotic and non-erotic, their relations were supposed to include; and the limits of social approval.
There are, as I stated earlier, a number of different theories about the origins of Greek pederasty. Some argue that it is a custom inherited from the Greeks’ Indo-European ancestors.27 The evidence for this view, however, is poor: its adherents adduce parallels from a few Germanic tribes, but, to establish an Indo-European provenance, it would be necessary to show that pederasty was practiced far more widely among Indo-European peoples. The associated, but more widely held theory that pederasty derives from initiation rites involving pederastic sex is more plausible, in that there are a few pieces of evidence for initiation rites or analogous practices involving pederasty in the Greek world. Some scholars (in particular Sergent 1986b) adduce as evidence for this theory myths that have the structure of initiation rites and contain pederastic elements. Myth, however, is mutable and is not probative in this regard: it is possible that the pederastic elements were added into the myths in historic times. Furthermore, evidence such as the Kato Syme statuettes (Figure 7.1), although it may suggest the existence of an initiation rite involving pederasty, does not prove that pederasty derived from initiation rites; here Ancient Pederasty: An Introduction 119 too pederasty could have arisen separately and been added to preexisting rites (as seems likely to have occurred in Melanesia).28
It is, however, equally untrue that the absence of explicit references to pederasty in the Homeric epics proves that pederasty was neither practiced nor valued in Greece of the eighth century or earlier. On the whole, it is most prudent to accept that we do not know when pederasty originated as a social practice. The Kato Syme statuettes imply that it was practiced, at least on Crete, as early as the eighth or seventh centuries BCE, but there is no solid evidence for or against it being practiced earlier
The date at which the custom vanished as a custom is a little easier to establish, although the causes are a matter of dispute. Several scholars have argued that late antique sexual morality was similar to Christian morality and that thus the changes in sexual practice in late antiquity must be ascribed to a more general trend in sexual morality rather than to Christianity. The evidence for this generally comes from philosophical texts and medical writings that follow the line established in Plato’s Laws.29 There are, however, large differences between ancient pagan ascetic ideas and the Christian view of sex as sinful (see Foucault 1986, 237–40 and Gaca 2003). Moreover, it is difficult to know how influential such theoretical writing was in people’s private lives, and the texts mentioned in my discussion of the imperial period testify that pederasty, if less dominant than in the archaic or classical periods, still occupied an important place in the sexual imaginary of the Greek world in the third century CE. On the other hand, a series of imperial edicts imposed ever more severe limitations on male–male love, starting with (repeated) laws banning male prostitution and ending with laws banning all male–male sex.30 Cantarella (1992, 186) makes the convincing argument that these represent a serial attempt to impose Christian sexual morality ever more completely. The culmination of this trend, for our purposes, was reached in 528/9, when under Justinian’s explicitly Christian laws two bishops were punished by being deposed, castrated, and paraded through Constantinople for being pederasts (Theophanes, Chronographia, anno mundi 6021). This is the first time when pederasty is treated as a crime in our sources of evidence. It thus represents, for lack of further evidence, at least a symbolic end to the period in which pederasty was an allowed and generally esteemed practice and the beginning of a period in which it was seen as part of a broader category of male–male sex that was judged criminal on religious grounds.
Where pederasty was practiced is an even simpler question. There is evidence for pederasty from an astonishing range of Greek places and times, from eighth-century BCE Crete to fifth-century BCE Paestum to third-century BCE Alexandria to second-century CE Boeotia, and so on. The Greeks seem to have believed that pederasty was practiced differently in different places; it was also thought to have begun in different places at different times. On the whole, however, for every place and time in ancient Greek history for which we have evidence about sexual practices, there is evidence for the practice of pederasty. Thus it seems best to assume that it was practiced throughout the Greek world throughout its history (with the possible exception of some undefined early period)
Our evidence for the next two questions—who was supposed to participate in pederastic relations and what these relations were supposed to consist of—is abundant, although mainly from and for classical Athens. However, it must be stressed that our knowledge here is of what was supposed to be done. Our sources give us an idealized image of pederastic relations. Authors such as Plato and Aeschines also give us at times the reverse of the coin, that is, an image of non-ideal pederasty or non-pederastic male–male sexual relations. In comedy we also see the pederastic ideal through a mocking eye. No text, however, tries to give us a detailed account of an actual relationship, or the life of an actual erastēs or erōmenos. We have evidence for ideals and for the cultural “opposites” of ideals. These may at times hint at realities, but that is the most we can hope for. Many portrayals of pederastic relations place them in the world of the social elite, in the gymnasium, at the sumposion, and at the hunt. Red figure vase painting emphasizes the leisureliness of pederastic courtship by portraying the erastēs generally leaning on his walking-stick (see Figures 7.3 and 7.6a); Plato’s Pausanias’ censure of boys who do not take their time choosing whether to accept an erastēs (Pl. Smp. 184A) would also seem to favor erastai who had abundant time for courtship. No source however tells us that middling or poorer Athenians did not also practice pederasty.31 Indeed Thucydides (6.54) tells us that Aristogeiton was a mesos politēs (middling citizen), and Xenophon’s Isomachos, at Oeconomicus 12.14–15, says that one should not choose as a farm bailiff a man who is excessively in love with his erōmenos. The Greek prejudice against paid work suggests that most farm bailiffs were of lower class origin. It also seems (Shapiro 2000, Lear and Cantarella 2008, 168–70) that, in the late archaic period, certain vase painters—paradigmatically lower class men (Pl. R. 420D–1A)—participated, if perhaps jokingly, in the cult of the youths whose kalos inscriptions they painted. Thus, while pederasty is identified with the elite, it is uncertain that it was restricted to it; our lack of evidence for non-elite lives makes certainty on this point difficult to achieve.
About age, our sources are even less precise than about social class. It has often been stated that erastai were generally young men, and some scholars seem to believe that Greek men gave pederasty up when they married. Yet there is little evidence for these propositions. Mature men frequently appear as erastai in Greek stories without a whiff of censure. When Socrates for instance—a mature, married man returning from battle—visits the gymnasium at the beginning of the Charmides, it is assumed that he will find the same boys or youths attractive as the young men do; and he does (Pl. Chrm. 153D–5D). Similarly Ion of Chios reports as an example of Sophocles’ cleverness his method of stealing a kiss from a serving boy while acting as general on campaign (Ath. 13.603e–4d).
As for the age of erōmenoi, the only two sources of evidence that explicitly mention their ages place them between the threshold of puberty and advanced adolescence: Plutarch (Lyc. 17) says that in Sparta boys began to have erastai at the age of 12,32 and the poet Strato (AP 12.4) praises boys as ever more attractive from 12 to 17—but puts 18-year-olds off limits, as mature men. These sources are late, but it is unlikely that they represent a wholesale change from earlier periods, particularly as many earlier sources imply analogous practices and views. Davidson (2007, 68–98) argues that it was proper to love boys only after they turned 18, but the sources imply the opposite: that 18 was a notional upper limit (no matter how porous this limit may have been in actuality).33 Many sources portray precisely the boys that Davidson claims were off-limits—those in the age-class of paides, under 18—as the principal objects of attraction. This is true of Lysis in Plato’s Lysis, who is classed as a pais; the objects of Better Argument’s attraction are schoolboys, and therefore certainly paides. Davidson (2007, 80) cites Pausanias in Plato’s Symposium (181C–2A), who says that there ought to be a law against loving boys before there is down on their chins. Yet by claiming that there ought to be a law, Pausanias makes clear that there was none; indeed the implication is that what he objects to is common practice. He is, furthermore, the lover of an adult erōmenos, the playwright Agathon, and his views on this point seem intended in part as special pleading for his own unusual love life. Upsetting as it may be for modern sensibilities, Greek erōmenoi seem to have been of the age of modern highschoolers; if Davidson (2007, 80–1) is right in claiming that Greek boys matured physically later than modern boys, they may often have been pre-pubescent, as indeed many vase paintings suggest.34
Recent scholarship (as Davidson rightly complains, 2007, 101–21) has been obsessed with figuring out what pederastic couples did in bed. This is undoubtedly in part a reaction to the reticence of our sources. These are both euphemistic (referring only to the erōmenos “gratifying” the erastēs) and stingy with information. Plato’s Phaedrus, while highly metaphorical, provides one of the most explicit descriptions of pederastic love-making when it refers to the lovers “grasping, kissing, and lying down with” each other (255B–C). Yet even this, of course, does not refer explicitly to any form of genital contact. Even Aristophanes, so free with his jibes about anal intercourse between adult men, refers to it only once in a specifically pederastic context, in an oblique joke about Zeus and Ganymede (Pax 724). Vase painting is more explicit. Up-and-down scenes show erastai fondling their erōmenoi’s genitals (though without causing excitement); this is also mentioned as a desideratum in Aristophanes (Av. 137–42). There are also scenes in vase painting of intercrural intercourse, and these allow us to understand the references to boys’ thighs in Greek poetry (Solon 25, Anacreon 407, Aeschylus Fr. Radt 136) as indirect references to a form of intercourse. Finally, there are two pederastic vase paintings showing anal intercourse, as well as a few scenes in which an erastēs’ interest in an erōmenos’ buttocks is portrayed more indirectly (Lear and Cantarella 2008, 115–19).
What does this tell us about actual sex? It does seem that pederastic relations were consummated, at least at times; but it is uncertain how. Intercrural intercourse seems to have been practiced and regarded as acceptable; anal intercourse seems likely also to have been practiced but to have been regarded as unmentionable, except for comic purposes. Erōmenoi were not thought of as being sexually excited, and therefore their modes of achieving orgasm are unrecorded. This may in part reflect the early age of many erōmenoi; since, however, erōmenoi were apparently not always presexual, some of this attitude is clearly due to a conventional reticence.
Before passing on to the non-sexual side of pederastic relationships, it seems necessary to devote a few words to the common theory that the Greeks placed great emphasis, in their view of sexual activity, on the division between active penetrators and passive objects of penetration.35 Davidson (1997, 167–82) and Hubbard (1998, 55–9) have each provided a long-needed rebuttal of this view. With respect to pederasty, the Greeks did not regard penetrative sex positively in relation to either participant; there is no text in which a man who has penetrated a boy is portrayed positively. Boys were certainly not supposed to allow (or be known to allow) themselves to be penetrated, but the possibility is not often raised. In those sources that criticize boys for poor behavior as erōmenoi, the emphasis is instead on “gratifying” their lovers too easily and for venal reasons (see for example Pl. Smp. 184A–B, Xen. Smp. 8.21). Aeschines 1 does imply that Timarchos allowed himself to be penetrated, but it does so in the framework of a charge of prostitution, and certainly Aeschines does not hold up Timarchos’ lovers for praise.
After several paragraphs about the sexual side of pederastic relationships, it is important to place the strongest emphasis on the fact that sex occupies only a small portion of Greek discourse about pederasty. Desire and courtship are the commonest theme(s) in both literary and visual representations. Pederasty’s connections with other valorized activities and attitudes (athletics, hunting, the sumposion; self-restraint, bravery) are constantly emphasized. Its supposed role in educating boys, that is, in training them in these activities and attitudes and more simply in fostering the erōmenos’ interests, is also a key theme. We see this in practice in the Theognidea; we hear it praised in Phaidros’, Pausa- nias’, and Socrates’/Diotima’s speeches in Plato’s Symposium (178A–80B, 180C–5C, 201D–12C); we hear it attacked in Lysias’ speech in Plato’s Phaedrus (230E–34C) and mocked in the agōn of Aristophanes’ Clouds (889–1104). Thus, if we do not get explicit information about sexual practices from our sources for Greek pederasty, it is not only because they are reticent about sex, but because their emphasis lies elsewhere, on other aspects and associations of the custom.
Finally, it should be clear from the foregoing that different sources represent pederasty very differently. There is a long tradition, from the Theognidea to Lucian, of texts that represent the custom in a highly idealistic or idealizing way. Other sources, such as Aristophanes’ comedies and the first two speeches in Plato’s Phaedrus (230E–4C, 237A–41D), cast doubt on this idealizing view; others, such as the third speech in the Phaedrus (243E–57B), attempt to reformulate the custom, generally by suggesting that it would be better without consummation. This kind of debate is also reflected in the organization of Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, where multiple perspectives on pederasty are offered within each work. Moreover, some of these perspectives, in and of themselves, reify the complexity of social views of this custom: Pausanias in the Symposium (183D) emblematically portrays the custom not as good or bad, but as complex, good when practiced correctly and bad when practiced incorrectly. Aeschines 1, finally, suggests that this complex view was widely shared and also that the lines between good and bad pederasty were uncertain: one person’s good pederasty could be another person’s bad.
It is this complex ethical debate that led Foucault to the view that pederasty was “problematized” in Greek culture. His view is undoubtedly correct as regards classical Athens. Such scholars as Shapiro (1981 and 2000, 21) and Hubbard (1998 and 2000b, 7–11) have, however, argued that attitudes toward pederasty shift toward the negative under the democracy in Athens. This would, of course, imply that they were more uniformly positive in earlier times. In my own work I continue this trend by arguing that the “problematization” of pederasty in classical Athens represents, like so much else in the period of authors like Aristophanes and Plato, a reversal of the values of archaic Greece. Hubbard has argued that the increasing problematization in fifth-century Athens derives from popular hostility to the custom: as the dēmos became more powerful, pederasty, as an aristocratic custom, lost prestige. As an alternative (or additional) explanation, I suggest that the increasing professionalization of education (for the elite) brought in by the Sophists in the late fifth century weakened the association between pederasty and pedagogy and thus undercut the idealization of the custom.36
In any case, it must be remembered that “problematization” is not condemnation. In general, views of pederasty range from the positive to the ambiguous; wholly negative views (as perhaps in Plato’s Laws) are very rare. Finally, one should bear in mind that, as far as we know, pederasty continued as an esteemed practice in the Greek world for another seven centuries after Aristophanes and Plato.
Little attention is paid in scholarship on this topic to Hellenistic and imperial sources of evidence. These are substantial, but we often lack contextual information; indeed in a number of cases we do not know where the authors were from, or even what century they lived in. Many, furthermore, reuse archaic or classical material (or both) in ways that make it hard for us to assess their relationship to their own social reality.
Poetry is an important source for the Hellenistic period. Pederasty is an important theme in two of the three most important Hellenistic poets, Callimachus and Theocritus. It remains important in Hellenistic epigram; Book 12 of the Palatine Anthology consists of pederastic poetry, and much of it is Hellenistic. There are changes in the views on or versions of pederasty presented in the poetry of this period. Theocritus, for instance, seems to take erotic reciprocity between erastēs and erōmenos for granted (12.10, 15, 29.32), while in archaic and classical sources only the erastēs is depicted as feeling erotic desire (see for example Pl. Phdr. 255A). Many themes from earlier pederastic poetry persist, however: for instance, AP 12.30–3 and 39–40 concerns boys whose attractions vanish with the appearance of body hair.
Many philosophers of the Hellenistic period wrote books on erōs, and we have references (principally in Diogenes Laertius and Athenaeus)22 to their pederastic views and practices. For instance, Stoics are said to have kept their erōmenoi until the age of 28 (Ath. 13.563E). Another interesting source is the third-century BCE gymnastic law of the Thracian city of Beroea (SEG 27.261, Side B, 13–15), in which young men are forbidden to talk with the boys in the gymnasium, presumably to prevent seduction
Finally, it seems important to mention that Alexander the Great, although non-Greek, had some relationship with pederasty. Stories about his father Phillip’s court (Diod. Sic. 16.93–4) indicate that some kind of man–youth sexual relations were practiced there—although without Athenian idealization. Alexander is said to have had an erotic relationship with his coeval Hephaistion, which he took pains to connect to the legend of Achilles and Patroklos (Ael. VH 7.8, 12.7).
Pederasty appears in the work of many Greek authors of the imperial and late antique periods: in Plutarch, Strato the epigrammatist, the Greek novelists, Athenaeus, Philostratus, and Lucian, among others.23 As in Hellenistic sources in general, there is considerable continuity from earlier periods: in Lucian, for instance, as in Plato, pederasty is declared to be superior (Am. 50), as it is the kind of love appropriate to the wise.24 Love for women and married love has, however, risen in status. In fact three imperial works (Plu. Amat. 750A–2B, Ach. Tat. 2.35–8, Luc. Am. 19–51) stage debates between enthusiasts of the two kinds of love, and in Plutarch’s Eroticus (also known as Amatorius) heterosexual marital love seems to win the day, both in the discussion and in the surrounding plot. Strato’s epigrams, furthermore, perhaps under the influence of Roman poetry, sexual practices, or both, present a very different pederasty from that of the archaic and classical poets: Strato writes of anal sex (never intercrural) (AP 12.240, 243, 245), of sex with slave boys (12.211) or prostitutes (12.237, 239), or even of sex with youths with secondary hair (12.10, 178)
Rome
Sex with adolescent males was among the socially approved sexual options for a Roman man.25 On the whole, however, a Roman man’s sexual relations with adolescent males were restricted to slaves and prostitutes. Sex with a free-born Roman youth, like sex with a freeborn Roman woman other than one’s wife, would have constituted the crime of stuprum—a broad category of forbidden sexual behavior (Williams 2010, 103–36). As a result, pederastic relations of the kind idealized by the Greeks, involving a mentoring relationship between males of similar social levels, had no place in Roman sexual–social ethics.
A few Roman authors comment on the Greek practice of pederasty; these hover between disapprobation and a neutral recognition of pederasty as a foreign custom. Ennius was presumably referring to pederasty when he said that “nudity among citizens is the beginning of shamefulness” (Fr. 407), and Cicero quotes him at Tusculan Disputations 4.70; Nepos (Praef. 4) also accuses Greek youths of promiscuity in their role as erōmenoi and points out in the preface to his collection of biographies that the Greek customs he describes would be considered disgraceful in Rome (Praef. 5). Both authors, however, also comment on pederasty in a seemingly neutral way. Nepos (Alc. 2.2) says of Alcibiades simply that, “at the beginning of his adolescence, he was loved by many men, according to the Greek custom [more Graecorum],” and Cicero (Tusc. 4.70) says, without editorial comment, that “this practice seems to me to have originated in the Greeks’ gymnasia, where such love affairs are freely permitted.”
Erotic relations following the conventions of Greek pederasty also make several surprising appearances in Roman poetry. Several of the bucolic figures in Virgil’s Eclogues are in love with youths. Although these figures are shepherds or goatherds and therefore not the kind of elite urban citizens with whom Greek pederasty is generally associated, their homoerotic relationships take place between males of similar social status and involve pedagogical elements. For instance, Menalcas at Eclogue 3.74–5 helps Amyntas with his hunting (and gives him courting-gifts at Ecl. 3.70–1). Virgil expresses no disapprobation of these relationships; indeed he makes no sharp distinction between his bucolics’ pederastic loves and heterosexual ones, which they also express (Ecl. 3.66–7, 78–9).
Pederasty plays a role in the Aeneid as well. Aeneas’ relationship with the youth Pallas is not explicitly erotic, but Virgil emphasizes parallels between it and the hero’s relationship with Dido (Putnam 1995: 33–41). There is also an explicitly pederastic couple on the Trojan side, Nisus and Euryalus. Virgil leaves this pair’s showy heroism open to criticism: they demonstrate courage by volunteering for a dangerous and important mission but fail to accomplish it because they waste their time on a bloodthirsty rampage of plundering (9.176–445). Nonetheless their death embodies the tradition of pederastic heroism: Nisus, the erastēs, expires on the breast of his erōmenos, having sacrificed his life to protect and avenge him (9.438–45). Virgil makes much of this moment, apostrophizing the couple as a “fortunate pair” (fortunati ambo) and dedicating his art to maintaining their eternal fame (9.446–9).
It is not clear what if any connection Virgil intends between these characters’ sexual lives and those of contemporary Romans. The bucolic figures in the Eclogues live at a mythical remove from reality, and the Aeneid concerns myth, or at least the distant past; the characters are also as connected to their Greek literary models as to any Italian reality. Yet, as some of the Eclogues make clear, these bucolics live in Italy—and the Aeneid’s Trojans are important ancestors of the Roman people.
Catullus and Tibullus, on the other hand, portray themselves (or their poetic personae) as loving and courting Roman youths of elite status in the context of contemporary late republican/early imperial Rome. Catullus gives his boy-love a seemingly elite name, Iuventius (Catullus 24, 48, 81, 99), and portrays him as free to choose among his suitors; Tibullus in 1.4 receives advice from the god Priapus about courting boys who engage in such paradigmatically elite activities as riding (1.4.11) and hunting (1.4.49–50).26 It is not surprising for Catullus’ persona to violate Roman sexual ethics: one of the other main topics of his poetry is his love for Lesbia, a married Roman woman (Catullus 83.1). There is, however, no similar excuse for Tibullus. Greek pederasty clearly had some power over the imagination of Roman poets, if not over their and their contemporaries’ personal habits as well.
Questions of Interpretation
Given the complicated evidentiary record, it is unsurprising that there is much scholarly debate about Greek pederasty. This is also undoubtedly the case because it is unclear to what extent one can map the modern concept of “homosexuality” onto Greek pederasty. The debate between those who believe that one can (generally called “essentialists”) and those who believe one cannot (generally called “social constructionists”) is covered in Chapters 1 and 3. In what follows I will consider, more simply, some questions about the parameters of Greek pederasty as our sources of evidence portray it. As stated above, these parameters are: when the custom originated; when it ended (as an approved custom); where pederasty was practiced; who was supposed to participate in it, in terms of class and age; what elements, erotic and non-erotic, their relations were supposed to include; and the limits of social approval.
There are, as I stated earlier, a number of different theories about the origins of Greek pederasty. Some argue that it is a custom inherited from the Greeks’ Indo-European ancestors.27 The evidence for this view, however, is poor: its adherents adduce parallels from a few Germanic tribes, but, to establish an Indo-European provenance, it would be necessary to show that pederasty was practiced far more widely among Indo-European peoples. The associated, but more widely held theory that pederasty derives from initiation rites involving pederastic sex is more plausible, in that there are a few pieces of evidence for initiation rites or analogous practices involving pederasty in the Greek world. Some scholars (in particular Sergent 1986b) adduce as evidence for this theory myths that have the structure of initiation rites and contain pederastic elements. Myth, however, is mutable and is not probative in this regard: it is possible that the pederastic elements were added into the myths in historic times. Furthermore, evidence such as the Kato Syme statuettes (Figure 7.1), although it may suggest the existence of an initiation rite involving pederasty, does not prove that pederasty derived from initiation rites; here Ancient Pederasty: An Introduction 119 too pederasty could have arisen separately and been added to preexisting rites (as seems likely to have occurred in Melanesia).28
It is, however, equally untrue that the absence of explicit references to pederasty in the Homeric epics proves that pederasty was neither practiced nor valued in Greece of the eighth century or earlier. On the whole, it is most prudent to accept that we do not know when pederasty originated as a social practice. The Kato Syme statuettes imply that it was practiced, at least on Crete, as early as the eighth or seventh centuries BCE, but there is no solid evidence for or against it being practiced earlier
The date at which the custom vanished as a custom is a little easier to establish, although the causes are a matter of dispute. Several scholars have argued that late antique sexual morality was similar to Christian morality and that thus the changes in sexual practice in late antiquity must be ascribed to a more general trend in sexual morality rather than to Christianity. The evidence for this generally comes from philosophical texts and medical writings that follow the line established in Plato’s Laws.29 There are, however, large differences between ancient pagan ascetic ideas and the Christian view of sex as sinful (see Foucault 1986, 237–40 and Gaca 2003). Moreover, it is difficult to know how influential such theoretical writing was in people’s private lives, and the texts mentioned in my discussion of the imperial period testify that pederasty, if less dominant than in the archaic or classical periods, still occupied an important place in the sexual imaginary of the Greek world in the third century CE. On the other hand, a series of imperial edicts imposed ever more severe limitations on male–male love, starting with (repeated) laws banning male prostitution and ending with laws banning all male–male sex.30 Cantarella (1992, 186) makes the convincing argument that these represent a serial attempt to impose Christian sexual morality ever more completely. The culmination of this trend, for our purposes, was reached in 528/9, when under Justinian’s explicitly Christian laws two bishops were punished by being deposed, castrated, and paraded through Constantinople for being pederasts (Theophanes, Chronographia, anno mundi 6021). This is the first time when pederasty is treated as a crime in our sources of evidence. It thus represents, for lack of further evidence, at least a symbolic end to the period in which pederasty was an allowed and generally esteemed practice and the beginning of a period in which it was seen as part of a broader category of male–male sex that was judged criminal on religious grounds.
Where pederasty was practiced is an even simpler question. There is evidence for pederasty from an astonishing range of Greek places and times, from eighth-century BCE Crete to fifth-century BCE Paestum to third-century BCE Alexandria to second-century CE Boeotia, and so on. The Greeks seem to have believed that pederasty was practiced differently in different places; it was also thought to have begun in different places at different times. On the whole, however, for every place and time in ancient Greek history for which we have evidence about sexual practices, there is evidence for the practice of pederasty. Thus it seems best to assume that it was practiced throughout the Greek world throughout its history (with the possible exception of some undefined early period)
Our evidence for the next two questions—who was supposed to participate in pederastic relations and what these relations were supposed to consist of—is abundant, although mainly from and for classical Athens. However, it must be stressed that our knowledge here is of what was supposed to be done. Our sources give us an idealized image of pederastic relations. Authors such as Plato and Aeschines also give us at times the reverse of the coin, that is, an image of non-ideal pederasty or non-pederastic male–male sexual relations. In comedy we also see the pederastic ideal through a mocking eye. No text, however, tries to give us a detailed account of an actual relationship, or the life of an actual erastēs or erōmenos. We have evidence for ideals and for the cultural “opposites” of ideals. These may at times hint at realities, but that is the most we can hope for. Many portrayals of pederastic relations place them in the world of the social elite, in the gymnasium, at the sumposion, and at the hunt. Red figure vase painting emphasizes the leisureliness of pederastic courtship by portraying the erastēs generally leaning on his walking-stick (see Figures 7.3 and 7.6a); Plato’s Pausanias’ censure of boys who do not take their time choosing whether to accept an erastēs (Pl. Smp. 184A) would also seem to favor erastai who had abundant time for courtship. No source however tells us that middling or poorer Athenians did not also practice pederasty.31 Indeed Thucydides (6.54) tells us that Aristogeiton was a mesos politēs (middling citizen), and Xenophon’s Isomachos, at Oeconomicus 12.14–15, says that one should not choose as a farm bailiff a man who is excessively in love with his erōmenos. The Greek prejudice against paid work suggests that most farm bailiffs were of lower class origin. It also seems (Shapiro 2000, Lear and Cantarella 2008, 168–70) that, in the late archaic period, certain vase painters—paradigmatically lower class men (Pl. R. 420D–1A)—participated, if perhaps jokingly, in the cult of the youths whose kalos inscriptions they painted. Thus, while pederasty is identified with the elite, it is uncertain that it was restricted to it; our lack of evidence for non-elite lives makes certainty on this point difficult to achieve.
About age, our sources are even less precise than about social class. It has often been stated that erastai were generally young men, and some scholars seem to believe that Greek men gave pederasty up when they married. Yet there is little evidence for these propositions. Mature men frequently appear as erastai in Greek stories without a whiff of censure. When Socrates for instance—a mature, married man returning from battle—visits the gymnasium at the beginning of the Charmides, it is assumed that he will find the same boys or youths attractive as the young men do; and he does (Pl. Chrm. 153D–5D). Similarly Ion of Chios reports as an example of Sophocles’ cleverness his method of stealing a kiss from a serving boy while acting as general on campaign (Ath. 13.603e–4d).
As for the age of erōmenoi, the only two sources of evidence that explicitly mention their ages place them between the threshold of puberty and advanced adolescence: Plutarch (Lyc. 17) says that in Sparta boys began to have erastai at the age of 12,32 and the poet Strato (AP 12.4) praises boys as ever more attractive from 12 to 17—but puts 18-year-olds off limits, as mature men. These sources are late, but it is unlikely that they represent a wholesale change from earlier periods, particularly as many earlier sources imply analogous practices and views. Davidson (2007, 68–98) argues that it was proper to love boys only after they turned 18, but the sources imply the opposite: that 18 was a notional upper limit (no matter how porous this limit may have been in actuality).33 Many sources portray precisely the boys that Davidson claims were off-limits—those in the age-class of paides, under 18—as the principal objects of attraction. This is true of Lysis in Plato’s Lysis, who is classed as a pais; the objects of Better Argument’s attraction are schoolboys, and therefore certainly paides. Davidson (2007, 80) cites Pausanias in Plato’s Symposium (181C–2A), who says that there ought to be a law against loving boys before there is down on their chins. Yet by claiming that there ought to be a law, Pausanias makes clear that there was none; indeed the implication is that what he objects to is common practice. He is, furthermore, the lover of an adult erōmenos, the playwright Agathon, and his views on this point seem intended in part as special pleading for his own unusual love life. Upsetting as it may be for modern sensibilities, Greek erōmenoi seem to have been of the age of modern highschoolers; if Davidson (2007, 80–1) is right in claiming that Greek boys matured physically later than modern boys, they may often have been pre-pubescent, as indeed many vase paintings suggest.34
Recent scholarship (as Davidson rightly complains, 2007, 101–21) has been obsessed with figuring out what pederastic couples did in bed. This is undoubtedly in part a reaction to the reticence of our sources. These are both euphemistic (referring only to the erōmenos “gratifying” the erastēs) and stingy with information. Plato’s Phaedrus, while highly metaphorical, provides one of the most explicit descriptions of pederastic love-making when it refers to the lovers “grasping, kissing, and lying down with” each other (255B–C). Yet even this, of course, does not refer explicitly to any form of genital contact. Even Aristophanes, so free with his jibes about anal intercourse between adult men, refers to it only once in a specifically pederastic context, in an oblique joke about Zeus and Ganymede (Pax 724). Vase painting is more explicit. Up-and-down scenes show erastai fondling their erōmenoi’s genitals (though without causing excitement); this is also mentioned as a desideratum in Aristophanes (Av. 137–42). There are also scenes in vase painting of intercrural intercourse, and these allow us to understand the references to boys’ thighs in Greek poetry (Solon 25, Anacreon 407, Aeschylus Fr. Radt 136) as indirect references to a form of intercourse. Finally, there are two pederastic vase paintings showing anal intercourse, as well as a few scenes in which an erastēs’ interest in an erōmenos’ buttocks is portrayed more indirectly (Lear and Cantarella 2008, 115–19).
What does this tell us about actual sex? It does seem that pederastic relations were consummated, at least at times; but it is uncertain how. Intercrural intercourse seems to have been practiced and regarded as acceptable; anal intercourse seems likely also to have been practiced but to have been regarded as unmentionable, except for comic purposes. Erōmenoi were not thought of as being sexually excited, and therefore their modes of achieving orgasm are unrecorded. This may in part reflect the early age of many erōmenoi; since, however, erōmenoi were apparently not always presexual, some of this attitude is clearly due to a conventional reticence.
Before passing on to the non-sexual side of pederastic relationships, it seems necessary to devote a few words to the common theory that the Greeks placed great emphasis, in their view of sexual activity, on the division between active penetrators and passive objects of penetration.35 Davidson (1997, 167–82) and Hubbard (1998, 55–9) have each provided a long-needed rebuttal of this view. With respect to pederasty, the Greeks did not regard penetrative sex positively in relation to either participant; there is no text in which a man who has penetrated a boy is portrayed positively. Boys were certainly not supposed to allow (or be known to allow) themselves to be penetrated, but the possibility is not often raised. In those sources that criticize boys for poor behavior as erōmenoi, the emphasis is instead on “gratifying” their lovers too easily and for venal reasons (see for example Pl. Smp. 184A–B, Xen. Smp. 8.21). Aeschines 1 does imply that Timarchos allowed himself to be penetrated, but it does so in the framework of a charge of prostitution, and certainly Aeschines does not hold up Timarchos’ lovers for praise.
After several paragraphs about the sexual side of pederastic relationships, it is important to place the strongest emphasis on the fact that sex occupies only a small portion of Greek discourse about pederasty. Desire and courtship are the commonest theme(s) in both literary and visual representations. Pederasty’s connections with other valorized activities and attitudes (athletics, hunting, the sumposion; self-restraint, bravery) are constantly emphasized. Its supposed role in educating boys, that is, in training them in these activities and attitudes and more simply in fostering the erōmenos’ interests, is also a key theme. We see this in practice in the Theognidea; we hear it praised in Phaidros’, Pausa- nias’, and Socrates’/Diotima’s speeches in Plato’s Symposium (178A–80B, 180C–5C, 201D–12C); we hear it attacked in Lysias’ speech in Plato’s Phaedrus (230E–34C) and mocked in the agōn of Aristophanes’ Clouds (889–1104). Thus, if we do not get explicit information about sexual practices from our sources for Greek pederasty, it is not only because they are reticent about sex, but because their emphasis lies elsewhere, on other aspects and associations of the custom.
Finally, it should be clear from the foregoing that different sources represent pederasty very differently. There is a long tradition, from the Theognidea to Lucian, of texts that represent the custom in a highly idealistic or idealizing way. Other sources, such as Aristophanes’ comedies and the first two speeches in Plato’s Phaedrus (230E–4C, 237A–41D), cast doubt on this idealizing view; others, such as the third speech in the Phaedrus (243E–57B), attempt to reformulate the custom, generally by suggesting that it would be better without consummation. This kind of debate is also reflected in the organization of Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, where multiple perspectives on pederasty are offered within each work. Moreover, some of these perspectives, in and of themselves, reify the complexity of social views of this custom: Pausanias in the Symposium (183D) emblematically portrays the custom not as good or bad, but as complex, good when practiced correctly and bad when practiced incorrectly. Aeschines 1, finally, suggests that this complex view was widely shared and also that the lines between good and bad pederasty were uncertain: one person’s good pederasty could be another person’s bad.
It is this complex ethical debate that led Foucault to the view that pederasty was “problematized” in Greek culture. His view is undoubtedly correct as regards classical Athens. Such scholars as Shapiro (1981 and 2000, 21) and Hubbard (1998 and 2000b, 7–11) have, however, argued that attitudes toward pederasty shift toward the negative under the democracy in Athens. This would, of course, imply that they were more uniformly positive in earlier times. In my own work I continue this trend by arguing that the “problematization” of pederasty in classical Athens represents, like so much else in the period of authors like Aristophanes and Plato, a reversal of the values of archaic Greece. Hubbard has argued that the increasing problematization in fifth-century Athens derives from popular hostility to the custom: as the dēmos became more powerful, pederasty, as an aristocratic custom, lost prestige. As an alternative (or additional) explanation, I suggest that the increasing professionalization of education (for the elite) brought in by the Sophists in the late fifth century weakened the association between pederasty and pedagogy and thus undercut the idealization of the custom.36
In any case, it must be remembered that “problematization” is not condemnation. In general, views of pederasty range from the positive to the ambiguous; wholly negative views (as perhaps in Plato’s Laws) are very rare. Finally, one should bear in mind that, as far as we know, pederasty continued as an esteemed practice in the Greek world for another seven centuries after Aristophanes and Plato.
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Re: A companion to Greek and Roman sexualities, Chapter 7: Ancient Pederasty
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
Although Greek pederasty was already a subject of study for German scholars in the eighteenth century, English-language scholarship largely avoided the topic until the late 1970s. This changed with the appearance of Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality in 1978 (Dover 1989) and, shortly thereafter, of Foucault 1985, which presents a closely related though more theoretical view. Though these authors have come under attack in recent years, their work remains fundamental: among their other merits, Dover was the first to suggest that the study of the sexual customs of this distant culture could be done without subjecting them to moral judgment in modern western terms. Dover and Foucault are jointly responsible for current scholarship’s focus on the Greeks’ complex ethical system regarding sex, and the homoerotic in particular. Foucault summed this complexity up by terming Greek pederasty “problematized.” For a time a kind of Dover–Foucauldian orthodoxy dominated studies of pederasty, being sustained by such works as Halperin (1990), which focuses on the importance of sex roles (active versus passive) in Greek sexual ethics. There have always been, however, critical voices: David Cohen (1991) argues, for instance, that Dover and Foucault overstated the degree of consensus in Athenian society, while authors such as Bernard Sergent (1986a, 1986b) focus on the idea that Greek pederasty originated in tribal initiation rites. If this were the custom’s point of origin, this would tend to lend more credence to the ancient Greeks’ claims about its pedagogical role than Halperin and others concede. Criticism has intensified in recent years. James Davidson 1997 (and less cogently 2007) and Hubbard 1998 argue that Dover, Foucault, and Halperin overstate the importance of anal penetration in Greek categorizations of sex and desire; Davidson also argues that these authors overstate the importance of sex in the custom more generally. Lear and Cantarella 2008 argue that the visual evidence has received inadequate attention and has been interpreted in an unsophisticated manner; in the current article I argue that Dover and Foucault’s theories account better for classical Athenian evidence than for earlier or non-Athenian evidence. Dover 1989 still provides the best general overview of this topic in English, however; nonetheless it is best to read his work in conjunction with Hubbard 2003, a sourcebook presenting a diverse group of sources, from the beginning of antiquity to the end. Cantarella 1992 was the first to make a clear distinction between Greek and Roman sexual ethics (which much earlier work confused). Williams 2010 presents a broad account of Roman homosexual practices and shows them to be very different from Greek customs.
NOTES
1 See Chapter 8.
2 See Dover 1988, 130 and Patzer 1982, 94–8, for once in agreement.
3 See for instance Ogden 1996.
4 This idea, which relies on ethnographic parallels with tribes in Melanesia, was first voiced by Bethe in 1907. See also Jeanmaire 1939, Brelich 1969, Bremmer 1980, Patzer 1982, and Sergent 1986a and 1986b; and, for counter-arguments, Dover 1988 and Percy 1996, 17.
5 See Sergent 1986a and Dover 1988, 126–8 for a skeptical response.
6 This myth appears already at Iliad 20.232–5 and thereafter remains an important motif throughout classical literature and art (see for instance Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 202–6, Theognis 1345–50). See below on Ganymede in vase painting.
7 See Patzer 1982, 85–7 and Cantarella 1992, 7 for the initiatory interpretation and Dover 1988, 126 and 1989, 123 for the obscene.
8 See n. 4, and Dodd 2000 for further questions about Ephoros’ reliability and the relationship of this ritual to initiation.
9 See for instance Percy 1996, 59–71.
10 See Solon 23, 24, and 25; Mimnermus 1.9; Alcaeus 306A Fr. 77; 366, 388; Ibycus 282.41–6; 282A Frr. 8.7 and 16.10; 282C Fr. 27; and 288; Simonides 22 West; and Bacchylides 10.42–3.
11 For catalogues and discussion, see Kaempf-Dimitriadou 1979 and Arafat 1990, 66–76. For a sculptural version, see the polychrome terracotta akroterion, Olympia T 2/T 2A/Tc 1049.
12 See references at Ar. Ach. 142–4 and V. 97–9; for archaeological evidence from Athens, see IG 1 3 1402, 1403, 1404 bis, 1404 ter, 1405, 1405 bis and 1406.
13 See Lear and Cantarella 2008, 115–18 for the few pederastic scenes showing anal intercourse (and for the more numerous scenes indicating the erast¯es’ interest in anal sex more subtly).
14 See also Barringer 2001, 70–124.
15 For other statuary with pederastic implications, see Steiner 1998, 132–3 on victor statues and Stewart 1997, 80–2 on the Parthenon frieze.
16 See Plu. Pel. 18; also Leitao 2002, who argues against the band’s historicity.
17 See Hubbard 1998, 50–9.
18 In addition to the lines cited here, see for instance Ar. Ach. 263–5, V. 97–9 and Av. 705–8.
19 Speeches in Greek trials were often recited by the prosecutor or by the defendant, but written by a speech writer, here Lysias. Aeschines 1, by contrast, was delivered by its author.
20 Note also the reference at Dem. 19.283 to Timarchos’ children.
21 Hubbard 1998, 67–8 and 2008, especially 192–3, suggests that these sections may have been added when the speech was revised for publication, as they would please a more literate and elite audience. This is not impossible, but the distinction between “legitimate love” and prostitution is a focal theme not only in these passages but in the entire speech (see J. Shapiro 2010, 141–90).
22 See Buffi`ere 1980, 451–80 for references.
23 See for example Plu. Alc. 3.1–5.3, Pel. 18–19, Amat. passim; Strato in AP 12.1–11, 175–229,
234–55; Ach. Tat. 1.7–8, 12–14, 2.33–8, Longus 4.11–12, 16–21; Ath. 13.563c–565f,
601a–605d; Philostratus sophista, Epistulae (Love Letters) 7K, 27K; Lucian, Amores.
24 See, however, Goldhill 1995, 102–9 for this passage’s complicated ironies.
25 See Williams 2010, 15–66 for sources and discussion.
26 See also 1.8 and 1.9 for his love for a youth named Marathus.
27 See Bremmer 1980, Sergent 1986a and 1986b.
28 See Herdt 1984, 31–2, 48–54 and Dover 1988, 121–2.
29 Foucault 1986, 237 for instance lists Musonius, Plutarch, Soranus, and Rufus.
30 See Cantarella 1992, 173–86 for references.
31 See Fisher 1998 and 2000 for the idea that non-elite Athenians may have participated in the paradigmatically elite activities of athletics, the sumposion, and pederasty.
32 Davidson 2007, 27 claims that other Greeks found Spartan practice in this regard alarming, but, while the Athenians both joked about the Spartans having anal intercourse (Ar. Lys. 1174) and defended the Spartan version of pederasty as particularly chaste (Xen. Lac. 2.12–14), there is no other explicit reference in Greek literature to the early age of their er¯omenoi, so this assertion is dubious.
33 On this and on the evidence for age-equal male–male relations, see Chapter 8. It should be noted that age-equal relations among youths (in strong contrast to those among men) seem to have been regarded in the same light as pederasty (see Xen. Smp. 4.10–25, and many fifth- and fourth-century courtship scenes).
34 Davidson (2007, 444) claims that vase painting presents “cautionary images, images, in short, of anxiety,” yet he offers no iconographical evidence for this claim. Such evidence would indeed be hard to find, given the idealizing tendencies of pederastic iconography (Lear and Cantarella 2008, 23–105). In vase painting, the courtship of er¯omenoi portrayed as pre-pubescent and that of figures portrayed as adolescent is presented in strictly analogous and invariably idealizing ways.
35 This view, which ultimately derives from Dover’s work (see for instance 1989, 103), was formulated in influential ways by Foucault 1985, 215–25 and Halperin 1990, 29–36.
36 These arguments, which appear in Lear 2004, will be presented more extensively in a forthcoming volume.
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Bremmer, J. 1980. “An Enigmatic Indo-European Rite: Paederasty.” Arethusa 13: 279–98.
Buffi`ere, F. 1980. ´Eros adolescent: La p´ed´erastie dans la Gr`ece antique. Paris: Belles Lettres.
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Old Comedy.” In D. Harvey and J. Wilkins, eds., The Rivals of Aristophanes, 355–96. London:
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and Early Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goldhill, S. 1995. Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Halperin, D. 1990. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality. New York: Routledge.
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Although Greek pederasty was already a subject of study for German scholars in the eighteenth century, English-language scholarship largely avoided the topic until the late 1970s. This changed with the appearance of Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality in 1978 (Dover 1989) and, shortly thereafter, of Foucault 1985, which presents a closely related though more theoretical view. Though these authors have come under attack in recent years, their work remains fundamental: among their other merits, Dover was the first to suggest that the study of the sexual customs of this distant culture could be done without subjecting them to moral judgment in modern western terms. Dover and Foucault are jointly responsible for current scholarship’s focus on the Greeks’ complex ethical system regarding sex, and the homoerotic in particular. Foucault summed this complexity up by terming Greek pederasty “problematized.” For a time a kind of Dover–Foucauldian orthodoxy dominated studies of pederasty, being sustained by such works as Halperin (1990), which focuses on the importance of sex roles (active versus passive) in Greek sexual ethics. There have always been, however, critical voices: David Cohen (1991) argues, for instance, that Dover and Foucault overstated the degree of consensus in Athenian society, while authors such as Bernard Sergent (1986a, 1986b) focus on the idea that Greek pederasty originated in tribal initiation rites. If this were the custom’s point of origin, this would tend to lend more credence to the ancient Greeks’ claims about its pedagogical role than Halperin and others concede. Criticism has intensified in recent years. James Davidson 1997 (and less cogently 2007) and Hubbard 1998 argue that Dover, Foucault, and Halperin overstate the importance of anal penetration in Greek categorizations of sex and desire; Davidson also argues that these authors overstate the importance of sex in the custom more generally. Lear and Cantarella 2008 argue that the visual evidence has received inadequate attention and has been interpreted in an unsophisticated manner; in the current article I argue that Dover and Foucault’s theories account better for classical Athenian evidence than for earlier or non-Athenian evidence. Dover 1989 still provides the best general overview of this topic in English, however; nonetheless it is best to read his work in conjunction with Hubbard 2003, a sourcebook presenting a diverse group of sources, from the beginning of antiquity to the end. Cantarella 1992 was the first to make a clear distinction between Greek and Roman sexual ethics (which much earlier work confused). Williams 2010 presents a broad account of Roman homosexual practices and shows them to be very different from Greek customs.
NOTES
1 See Chapter 8.
2 See Dover 1988, 130 and Patzer 1982, 94–8, for once in agreement.
3 See for instance Ogden 1996.
4 This idea, which relies on ethnographic parallels with tribes in Melanesia, was first voiced by Bethe in 1907. See also Jeanmaire 1939, Brelich 1969, Bremmer 1980, Patzer 1982, and Sergent 1986a and 1986b; and, for counter-arguments, Dover 1988 and Percy 1996, 17.
5 See Sergent 1986a and Dover 1988, 126–8 for a skeptical response.
6 This myth appears already at Iliad 20.232–5 and thereafter remains an important motif throughout classical literature and art (see for instance Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 202–6, Theognis 1345–50). See below on Ganymede in vase painting.
7 See Patzer 1982, 85–7 and Cantarella 1992, 7 for the initiatory interpretation and Dover 1988, 126 and 1989, 123 for the obscene.
8 See n. 4, and Dodd 2000 for further questions about Ephoros’ reliability and the relationship of this ritual to initiation.
9 See for instance Percy 1996, 59–71.
10 See Solon 23, 24, and 25; Mimnermus 1.9; Alcaeus 306A Fr. 77; 366, 388; Ibycus 282.41–6; 282A Frr. 8.7 and 16.10; 282C Fr. 27; and 288; Simonides 22 West; and Bacchylides 10.42–3.
11 For catalogues and discussion, see Kaempf-Dimitriadou 1979 and Arafat 1990, 66–76. For a sculptural version, see the polychrome terracotta akroterion, Olympia T 2/T 2A/Tc 1049.
12 See references at Ar. Ach. 142–4 and V. 97–9; for archaeological evidence from Athens, see IG 1 3 1402, 1403, 1404 bis, 1404 ter, 1405, 1405 bis and 1406.
13 See Lear and Cantarella 2008, 115–18 for the few pederastic scenes showing anal intercourse (and for the more numerous scenes indicating the erast¯es’ interest in anal sex more subtly).
14 See also Barringer 2001, 70–124.
15 For other statuary with pederastic implications, see Steiner 1998, 132–3 on victor statues and Stewart 1997, 80–2 on the Parthenon frieze.
16 See Plu. Pel. 18; also Leitao 2002, who argues against the band’s historicity.
17 See Hubbard 1998, 50–9.
18 In addition to the lines cited here, see for instance Ar. Ach. 263–5, V. 97–9 and Av. 705–8.
19 Speeches in Greek trials were often recited by the prosecutor or by the defendant, but written by a speech writer, here Lysias. Aeschines 1, by contrast, was delivered by its author.
20 Note also the reference at Dem. 19.283 to Timarchos’ children.
21 Hubbard 1998, 67–8 and 2008, especially 192–3, suggests that these sections may have been added when the speech was revised for publication, as they would please a more literate and elite audience. This is not impossible, but the distinction between “legitimate love” and prostitution is a focal theme not only in these passages but in the entire speech (see J. Shapiro 2010, 141–90).
22 See Buffi`ere 1980, 451–80 for references.
23 See for example Plu. Alc. 3.1–5.3, Pel. 18–19, Amat. passim; Strato in AP 12.1–11, 175–229,
234–55; Ach. Tat. 1.7–8, 12–14, 2.33–8, Longus 4.11–12, 16–21; Ath. 13.563c–565f,
601a–605d; Philostratus sophista, Epistulae (Love Letters) 7K, 27K; Lucian, Amores.
24 See, however, Goldhill 1995, 102–9 for this passage’s complicated ironies.
25 See Williams 2010, 15–66 for sources and discussion.
26 See also 1.8 and 1.9 for his love for a youth named Marathus.
27 See Bremmer 1980, Sergent 1986a and 1986b.
28 See Herdt 1984, 31–2, 48–54 and Dover 1988, 121–2.
29 Foucault 1986, 237 for instance lists Musonius, Plutarch, Soranus, and Rufus.
30 See Cantarella 1992, 173–86 for references.
31 See Fisher 1998 and 2000 for the idea that non-elite Athenians may have participated in the paradigmatically elite activities of athletics, the sumposion, and pederasty.
32 Davidson 2007, 27 claims that other Greeks found Spartan practice in this regard alarming, but, while the Athenians both joked about the Spartans having anal intercourse (Ar. Lys. 1174) and defended the Spartan version of pederasty as particularly chaste (Xen. Lac. 2.12–14), there is no other explicit reference in Greek literature to the early age of their er¯omenoi, so this assertion is dubious.
33 On this and on the evidence for age-equal male–male relations, see Chapter 8. It should be noted that age-equal relations among youths (in strong contrast to those among men) seem to have been regarded in the same light as pederasty (see Xen. Smp. 4.10–25, and many fifth- and fourth-century courtship scenes).
34 Davidson (2007, 444) claims that vase painting presents “cautionary images, images, in short, of anxiety,” yet he offers no iconographical evidence for this claim. Such evidence would indeed be hard to find, given the idealizing tendencies of pederastic iconography (Lear and Cantarella 2008, 23–105). In vase painting, the courtship of er¯omenoi portrayed as pre-pubescent and that of figures portrayed as adolescent is presented in strictly analogous and invariably idealizing ways.
35 This view, which ultimately derives from Dover’s work (see for instance 1989, 103), was formulated in influential ways by Foucault 1985, 215–25 and Halperin 1990, 29–36.
36 These arguments, which appear in Lear 2004, will be presented more extensively in a forthcoming volume.
REFERENCES
Arafat, K. 1990. Classical Zeus. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Barringer, J. 2001. The Hunt in Ancient Greece. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Beazley, J. 1947. “Some Attic Vases in the Cyprus Museum.” PBA 1947: 195–247.
Brelich, A. 1969. Paides e parthenoi. Rome: Edizioni dell’ Ateneo (Incunabula Graeca 36).
Bremmer, J. 1980. “An Enigmatic Indo-European Rite: Paederasty.” Arethusa 13: 279–98.
Buffi`ere, F. 1980. ´Eros adolescent: La p´ed´erastie dans la Gr`ece antique. Paris: Belles Lettres.
Cantarella, E. 1992. Bisexuality in the Ancient World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Cartledge, P. 1981. “The Politics of Spartan Pederasty.” PCPS 201: 84–104.
Cohen, D. 1991. Law, Sexuality and Society: The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Davidson, J. 1997. Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. London:
Fontana Press.
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