![Love giftMan presents a cut of meat to a youth with a hoop, in an allusion to boy love.[1] Athenian red-figure vase, ca. 460 BCE](/wikimir/images/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dc/Love_gift_-_Calyx_krater_Aegisthos_painter_ca_460_BCE.jpg/300px-Love_gift_-_Calyx_krater_Aegisthos_painter_ca_460_BCE.jpg) Love gift Man presents a cut of meat to a youth with a hoop, in an allusion to boy love. [1] Athenian red-figure vase, ca. 460 BCE Pederasty in Athens was a formal bond between an adult man and an adolescent boy outside his immediate family, consisting of loving and often sexual relations. As an erotic and educational custom it was employed by the upper class as a means of teaching the young and conveying to them important cultural values, such as bravery and restraint. Ganymede rolling a hoop and bearing aloft a cockerel - a love gift from Zeus (in pursuit, on obverse of vase). ...
A view of the Acropolis of Athens during the Ottoman period, showing the buildings which were removed at the time of independence The history of Athens is the longest of any city in Europe: Athens has been almost continuously inhabited for at least 3,000 years. ...
Athenian society generally encouraged the erastes to pursue a boy to love, tolerating excesses like sleeping on the youth's stoop and otherwise going to great lengths to make himself noticed. At the same time, the boy and his family were expected to put up resistance and not give in too easily, and boys who succumbed too readily were looked down upon. As a result, the quest for a desirable eromenos was fiercely competitive.[2]
History
The founder of this Athenian tradition was said to be the lawgiver Solon, who also composed poetry praising the love of boys. One fragment survives, in which he praises a "boy in the lovely flower of youth, desiring his thighs and sweet mouth."[3] In Athens, the lover was known as the erastes, and his young partner as the eromenos or paidika.. Solon Solon (Greek: Σόλων, ca. ...
A great deal of modern knowledge about Athenian pederastic practices has been derived from ceramic paintings on vases depicting various forms and aspects of the relationship. These vases were produced largely between 550 and 470 BCE, after which they either went out of fashion or were replaced with vases of precious metal, which have not survived.[4] Krater (mixing bowl), 6th century BC, National Archaeological Museum, Athens The pottery of ancient Greece is one of the most tangible and iconic elements of ancient Greek art. ...
While John Boardman in his studies postulated the age of the depicted youths to range from 12 to 14, they are now believed to range in age from 14 to 18.[5]
Practice Men courted boys at the palaestra, the gymnasium, at the baths and on the streets of the city. Fathers wanting to protect their sons from unwanted advances provided them with a slave guard, titled "pedagogos," to escort the boy in his travels. Pompeii palaestra seen from the top of the stadium wall. ...
The gymnasium of the Greeks originally functioned as the school where competitors in the public games received their training, and was so named from the circumstance that these competitors exercised naked (gymnos). ...
Public bathing has a long history. ...
Law A number of laws addressed the issue of relations between men and boys. None but citizens could engage free boys in pederastic relationships. The boys, on the other hand, were forbidden from selling their favors, on pain of losing most of their rights as citizens once come to adulthood. One surviving piece of Greek oratory documents a legal case, Against Timarchos, in which Aeschines pleads to enforce precisely that law against his opponent. Oratory is the art of eloquent speech. ...
Aeschines (389 - 314 BC), Greek statesman and one of the ten Attic orators, was born at Athens. ...
In order to prevent teachers from taking advantage of their charges, a law was passed forbidding them from opening their schools before dawn or staying open past sunset. Likewise, there was a law threatening with death any man under forty who trespassed onto school grounds.
- See [1] on the protection of Athenian boys against unlawful acts.
Politics Pederastic couples were traditionally credited with standing up against tyrants. In Athens, Harmodius and his erastes, Aristogeiton, were credited (perhaps symbolically) with the overthrow of the tyrant Hippias and the establishment of the democracy. Cratinus and Aristodemus were another pair of pederastic heroes. They sacrificed their lives to propitiate offended deities when a plague had fallen on Athens. Statue of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Naples. ...
Hippias can also refer to a son of Pisistratus and a tyrant of Athens. ...
The role of erastes was so far valued by the Athenians that even Pericles, a man who seems to have abstained from relationships with boys and loved women deeply, used the model of the erastes as an example for Athenians to follow in their relationship with their own city. In a funeral speech ascribed to him by Thucydides he exhorts the Athenians to "gaze day after day on the power of the city and become her erastai (lovers)."[6] Pericles (ca. ...
Bust of Thucydides residing in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto Thucydides (between 460 and 455 BC–circa 400 BC, Greek Θουκυδίδης, ThoukudÃdês) was an ancient Greek historian, and the author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, which recounts the 5th century BC war between Sparta and Athens. ...
Morals - Main article: Philosophy of pederasty
It was proper for the lover to respect the authority of the boy's father. According to Xenophon, "Nothing [of what concerns the boy] is kept hidden from the father, by a noble lover."[7] While it was expected that during courtship the lover would offer his boy small gifts, typically fighting cocks or edible delicacies, offering - and receiving – money or substantial gifts was considered disreputable in Athens and many other places, if not all. Xenophon (In Greek , c. ...
Late fifth century thought in Athens began to question the sexual aspect of the relationship. Plato, using the literary device of Socratic speeches, laid out an ethical hierarchy setting the highest value on erotic love relationships between men and boys which stopped short of physical consummation, followed by relations which were both loving and sexual. Relations which were sexual but not loving were considered profane and not beneficial. However, Foucault's declaration that pederasty was "problematized" in Greek culture, "the object of a special — and especially intense — moral preoccupation" focusing on concern with the chastity and restraint of the eromenos is now thought to hold true only of Classical Athenian texts. Plato ( Greek: Πλάτων, PlátÅn, wide, broad-shouldered) (c. ...
Though the love of boys was freely practiced by the aristocracy, it remained a source of mirth for the common people, and a topic lampooned by the comedians. Aristophanes, in Peace, in a parody of Ganymede riding on the back of Zeus in eagle form, has his character ride to Olympus on the back of a dung beetle, a scatological pun on anal sex. Bust of Aristophanes Aristophanes (c. ...
Famous lovers Solon Solon (Greek: Σόλων, ca. ...
Aeschines (389 - 314 BC), Greek statesman and one of the ten Attic orators, was born at Athens. ...
A Roman bust. ...
Themistocles (ca. ...
Aristides (530 BC–468 BC) was an Athenian statesman, nicknamed the Just. He was the son of Lysimachus, and a member of a family of moderate fortune. ...
Critias, 460-403 BC, was the uncle of Plato, leading member of the Thirty Tyrants, and one of the most violent. ...
Alcibiades Alcibiades Cleiniou Scambonides (also Alkibiades) (ancient Greek: Αλκιβιαδες Κλεινιου Σκαμβωνιδες)¹ (c. ...
Bust of the Greek orator Demosthenes, Louvre museum, Paris, France. ...
Demetrius Phalereus ( - died approximately 280 BC) was an Athenian orator and one of the first Peripatetics. ...
Notes - ^ Antike Welten: Meisterwerke griechischer Malerei as dem Kunsthistorischen Museum Wien, 1997, pp.110-111
- ^ Yates, Velvet Lenore, "Anterastai: Competition in Eros and Politics in Classical Athens" in Arethusa Volume 38, Number 1, Winter 2005, pp. 33-47
- ^ Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae
- ^ William Armstrong Percy III, "Reconsiderations about Greek Homosexualities," in Same–Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West, Binghamton, 2005; pp.30-31
- ^ Percy, 2005, p.54
- ^ S. S. Monoson, "Citizen as Erastes: Erotic Imagery and the Idea of Reciprocity in the Periclean Funeral Oration," Political Theory 22 pp.253-76, 1994
- ^ Xenophon, Symposium
See also Image File history File links Commons-logo. ...
The Wikimedia Commons (also called Commons or Wikicommons) is a repository of free content images, sound and other multimedia files. ...
A view of the Acropolis of Athens during the Ottoman period, showing the buildings which were removed at the time of independence The history of Athens is the longest of any city in Europe: Athens has been almost continuously inhabited for at least 3,000 years. ...
The term pederasty embraces a wide range of erotic relations between adult males and adolescent boys. ...
Pederastic courtship scene Athenian black-figure amphora, 5th c. ...
Whitman & Duckett Over the course of history there have been a number of recorded love affairs between older men and adolescent boys. ...
Achilles and Patroclus The factual accuracy of this article is disputed. ...
Religious narrative has included stories interpreted by many as accounts of same-sex love and sexuality. ...
Tomb of the Diver The topic of pederasty was the subject of extensive analysis in the Greek philosophical schools as well as in later writings of antiquity. ...
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