Education and Pederasty in Ancient Greece

The role and value of homosexuality in and to classical Mediterranean culture and society has only recently received significant study. Modern American society generally regards homosexuality as, at best, an intriguing subculture that often provides stock for humorists and satirists, or, at worst, a menacing counterculture that at times threatens impressionable adolescents with irreparable harm. Yet, homosexuality has not always been an aspect of "others." Ancient Greeks acknowledged homosexuality as an important tool in boys’ education. They institutionalized and regulated its practices within their law codes. True, opinions about it varied, but few aspects of any culture have ever stood without debate, both popular and forensic. Their homosexuality, almost universally intergenerational, resembled what modern societies call pederasty rather than homosexuality between adults. ¹   It was an anomalous experiment in the education of youth.
Fathers of the middle classes and higher sent their sons to schools to learn mathematics and literacy using the alphabet adopted from Phoenicians by the middle of the ninth century BC. Students 12 and older also studied poetry, drama, music, history (after Herodotus [484 – 425 BC] and Thucydides [460 – 400 BC]) and athletics, which they practiced in the nude. Athletics included wrestling, foot races, the running long jump, javelin and discus throwing, and performance on hanging rings and parallel bars. ²   Most boys in general eagerly trained in athletics in hopes of attaining competitive levels for the Olympic games. If they could not win or compete in athletics, they may still have hoped for one of the prizes awarded for physical beauty. ³
At first, students learned athleticism outdoors at a dromos (an outdoor track for athletic performances). Later, schools and academies (for "advanced" education in philosophy) built separate buildings, a gymnasium ("place to be nude"), dedicated to athletics, or a palaistra, a separate wrestling school. They also constructed viewing stands. Spectators came to watch not only regular games of competition, but also the actual training of pubescent youth and adolescents in the course of their daily education. Because women taught domestic duties to their daughters at home, viewing stands held only men, gymnasia and dromoi only nude boys. Schoolmasters cautioned naked students sitting trackside at dromoi to keep one leg forward to lessen the temptation to spectators and to smooth the sand when they stood up in order to obliterate the impression their genitals may have left. Furthermore, after their lessons in athletics concluded, boys did not wash below their navels, ⁴   for spectators also had access to dressing rooms, and the sight of boys washing their pubic areas would have tormented guests overbearingly. Continuing in their recognition of the appeal of young naked boys, gymnasia and palaistrae named one boy their most beautiful.
Ancient Greece had unofficial and unwritten rules enforcing decorous behavior at dromoi or in gymnasia and especially for relationships that at times started there, much as modern society has rules for how teenage sons of socialites must "court and spark" their romantic interests. ⁵   Spectators normally came from the leisured moneyed class, young sons of leading citizens, for the working classes could scarcely afford the necessary leisure time. Occasionally one of those young scions of the social elite might take a favor to a particular boy in training. The young man might approach the boy after classes ended for the day, or he might send an intermediary to give his name and a message to the boy.
If the boy initially expressed no interest in meeting and getting to know the man, then the man could "stalk" the boy, at first discreetly and silently following him from a respectful distance, gradually getting closer to him to beg him for favors. Whatever the man did, though, he must not touch the boy without the boy’s invitation or approval or, at the least, his acquiescence. Touching made the man liable to hubris, arrogant disregard of the law that led a person to mistreat another for his own satisfaction or to increase his status among his peers and betters (those of higher social class than himself). Hubris was a capital crime, and even the slightest touching of an unwilling boy opened a man to the charge. Cases of hubris brought to trial, of course, usually involved far more than slight touching.

On the other hand, if the boy showed an interest in returning the young man’s attention, the two started a friendship. The young man in such a relationship took the responsibility to teach the boy things that schools did not teach—moral rectitude, citizenship, patriotism to the polis, honesty, integrity, courage, etc. The friendship made the boy the eromenos of the man, who was the erastes (crudely, "lover-boy" and "boy-lover," respectively) of the boy. Thereafter, they could appear in public and at social affairs as a pair.
The root "eros" of both words, "erastes" and "eromenos," referred to love that can have a satisfied resolution. "Lust" comes closer than "love" to how the ancient Greeks understood eros, neither mutual nor requited. Carnal knowledge satisfied eros of this kind. Eros also applied to, for instance, desire for victory, power, money, or returning home from travels or a sojourn. Philos, on the other hand, signified intellectual love, as for art or knowledge—philosopher—or a mutual respect between or among people, as within a close-knit family or a group of friends. Philos could be mutual and requited. ⁶   The love an erastes (plural erastai) felt for his eromenos (plural eromenoi) usually started as one-sided eros when he first saw the beautiful, naked boy, but at times, it developed into mutual philos after the pedagogical process had begun.
After a time of teaching his eromenos, an erastes offered the boy a gift. Exotic birds and plants were the most popular kinds of gifts, for they were rare and wondrous, expensive imports from distant foreign lands like equatorial Africa or India. Like the massive amount of available leisure time, the expense of the gift prohibited young men from lower economic classes from pursuing boys in the manner of the more financially capable. An eromenos might not accept a gift if it were not sufficiently rare or expensive.
A potential erastes was normally 20 to 30 years old: contemporary society regarded anyone older than that and still pursuing boys as odd or eccentric, and censured and ridiculed him, but older men did not suffer legal threats or consequences. Society expected older men to turn their amorous efforts to fulfilling their civic duties of siring children in marriage to young ladies, who were, however, by contemporary mores, in their middle teens (late teens in Sparta). Wives, therefore, felt little competition from young boys for their husband’s attention. Nonetheless, older men on occasion continued their pursuit of young boys. Laws did apply to slaves and non-citizens of a polis, though, forbidding them to take roles of either erastai or eromenoi at any age.
If an eromenos accepted a gift, his erastes could initiate sexual relations with him. Not desiring to engage in sexual relations, then, provided the eromenos another reason not to accept a gift. Initiating such a relationship, the erastes commonly started by standing in front of his eromenos, who was also standing, and lightly used his fingers to stimulate the genitals of the boy underneath his tunic, which hung to just above his knees. A little wine could break down the reluctance of a hesitant boy. If the eromenos were receptive, he may have removed his tunic once he had become fully aroused, or he may have only pulled up the lower hem. The erastes had the same options, and then he took a seat in a chair. The eromenos straddled his lap, facing him. A vial of oil would already be at hand on a nearby side table. Greeks so strongly accepted pederasty that sometimes boys would have their own vial of oil, carrying it on a thong around their neck or at their waist to advertise their availability to a potential erastes. Moreover, Greek warriors, necessarily drawn from the social classes that could afford the expense of their own arms, eagerly sought boy captives as well as women and girls in the chronic warfare of archaic and classical Greece. ⁷   Captive boys could scarcely qualify as eromenoi, though, since they obviously did not come from the citizenry of the captor’s polis, but a soldier’s lust often takes precedence over thoughts of relationships, then as now.
Other than straddling the lap of his erastes, an eromenos might lie down with him on a couch or sofa. Reclining positions were common at symposia, elaborate feasts that often featured intellectual philosophical or political discussions. Only the wealthy could afford to sponsor or to attend symposia; their eromenoi attended as honored guests. Erastai enjoyed showing them off or displaying them at such events. Often the host of a symposium organized the boys into competitions of singing, dancing, recitation of poetry or some such similar contest. Additionally, a beauty contest frequently concluded the evening, all of the boys participating in the nude and demonstrating how limber or lithe they were or striking poses to show off their muscular development. Sometimes the host divided the contestants into age classes, for a younger eromenos could scarcely compete against older boys in those kinds of events. Almost everywhere, though, symposia could have additional entertainment of nude dancing and singing women, who did not, however, dine with the guests.

If an eromenos did not want his erastes to penetrate him, an additional popular option presented itself. The erastes could engage his eromenos in intercrural intercourse, whereby the man slid between the boy’s thighs in contact with his scrotum and perineum. Jewish boys seemed to favor this option, for their religion had stricter prohibitions against male-male penetration than did the various pagan Greek pseudo-religious cults. ⁸   Other than Jews, younger boys frequently found intercrural intercourse more acceptable and less frightening than penetration because of the greater difference in size between themselves and a mature young man. Greeks disfavored pederastic oral sex, though, regarding that particular practice suitable only for heterosexual encounters. Homosexual oral sex found expression among barbaric tribes in the wooded mountainous wilds to the north of Greece, seldom in pedagogical pederastic relationships. Likewise, pederastic pairs rarely indulged in mutual masturbation. No instance of erastai using any methods to bring eromenoi to climax appears in either the visual or the literary sources, but it is inconceivable that they did not.
Nothing compelled an eromenos to grant sexual favors to his erastes. The relationship may have remained unconsummated, either intercrually or by penetration. The absence of such an expected and even assumed element, though, demanded that an eromenos neither deny it nor falsely acknowledge it. Denial made him appear ungrateful to his erastes; false acknowledgement made him a liar. Ingratitude and lying, both anathema to the ancient Greeks, would more than undo the gains and benefits he would have obtained. (One "Oh, drat!" cancels ten "Attaboys!") On the other hand, his necessary careful circumspection when he discussed his relationship earned yet further honor for himself, and thereby for his erastes as well for having such an honorable eromenos, as frustrated as the erastes may have been. However, the eromenos would have to have something else of great value to offer his erastes for the relationship to endure. Great athletic skill sufficed.
Many pottery shards illustrate these pederastic practices. ⁹   Scenes include: young men watching nude athletic competitions; flirting between young men and boys; attempted seduction both rejected and successful; ¹⁰   offerings of gifts both refused and accepted; erastai stimulating the genitals of their eromenoi with their fingers; and intercrural intercourse. The pottery does not show penetration of eromenoi by erastai, but only of coeval pubescent boys, nor does it commonly show kissing, for custom reserved that for fathers and sons, brothers, and close friends, ¹¹   except in Megara, which held pederastic kissing contests at the Diocleia, its annual spring festival. Pederastic kissing scenes would indicate that the pair had already formed a pedagogical relationship with mutual philos. Scholars disagree about why pottery should avoid illustrating intergenerational kissing and penetration but remain within the realm of pursuit and courtship. Speculation assumes that the Greeks considered illustrations of penetration too coarse for dinnerware, drawing a fine line between acceptability (intercrural intercourse) and crudeness (penetration), much as modern erotically illustrated coffee mugs, for example, might show a female pin-up in the nude but not engaging in any kind of explicit sexual act.
Illustrated pottery reflected pursuit and courtship, but pederastic relationships went far beyond those aspects. Having an erastes brought honor and prestige to an eromenos, and the higher the social status of the erastes, the greater the honor and prestige. The father of a pubescent boy, though, might have various feelings about the possibilities of his son becoming an eromenos, depending in part on the social class of the family. Always the provenance of the upper classes, pederasty generally received less enthusiastic endorsement from the middle and lower classes. A caring middle-class father deeply concerned with his son’s education and socialization and fearful of potential erastai approaching him might instruct his son, "Don’t talk to strangers. Come straight home from school." A middle-class boy’s peer group also discouraged its members from falling prey to an erastes. Upper-class fathers, however, rarely exhibited that attitude, for many of them had, in their own youth, served as eromenoi to erastai, or, if not, envied their schoolmates who had. Either way, an upper-class father would more than likely encourage his son, but not to let an erastes catch him disgracefully quickly and never with gifts or promises of money or political influence, a major temptation for sons of nobles and archons. Evading capture increased a boy’s worth: the more difficult the pursuit, the greater the value of the prize. An eventual difficult capture also enhanced the status of a victorious erastes among his rivals for the eromenos. Therefore, playing "hard to get" but eventually succumbing created a "win-win" situation for both an eromenos and his erastes.
In addition to pedagogical pederastic relationships, boy prostitution concerned lawmakers because it thrived in Greek port poleis as much as did traditional prostitution. ¹²   Prostitution practiced by a youth, though not in itself a crime, debarred the person when grown from participating in the Assembly and deprived him of certain other rights of citizenship. No prosecution ensued solely because a boy prostituted himself, but if he as a man attempted to exercise any of the rights that he had forbidden himself, then his liability lay not in his boyhood prostitution, but in the attempted exercise of renounced rights. Prostitution immoralized a boy, and therefore the man he would become, and rendered him unfit to benefit from certain citizens’ privileges that relied on high personal integrity. The Greeks feared that once a person, even as a boy, received payment to perform certain acts that he might not otherwise perform, then that characterized him and defined him for life. They wanted no man in their assemblies who might sell his influence or his vote the way he had sold his body years before. However, the receipt of a gift by an eromenos did not mark him as a prostitute, for he was thereby bonding with an erastes and presumably disallowed other men from enjoying him, unlike a prostitute. He retained his honor and integrity and all rights of citizenship.
To avoid looking like a prostitute, whose clients expected at least to feign emotion if they did not genuinely feel it, an eromenos could exhibit no pleasure or satisfaction when he allowed his erastes to take favors from him, nor could an eromenos initiate sexual relations with his erastes. Scenes on pottery shards corroborate the lack of emotion and enthusiasm: they look thoroughly bored as they yield to their erastai in return for their gifts. In the Greek mind, love flowed out of the eyes; avoiding eye contact to forestall philos while the erastes satisfied his raw eros, eromenoi in pottery scenes gaze heavenward or over the shoulders of their erastai. Their continued relationship would either promote or smother phlos. Alternatively, as the erastes did what he did, the eromenos could pray to Aphrodite, the goddess of physical love, thanking her for her gift of physical beauty and gladly considering that he was obliging his duty to her rather than to his erastes. Finally, if philos did not develop, then an eromenos could acquire additional erastai or even form a heterosexual relationship. Erastai of the same eromenos could find themselves in jealous and sometimes bloody and even maiming or mortal competition. Without mutual philos, pederastic relationships faced the prospect of dissolving once the eromenos could grow a beard, the traditional indicator that a boy has attained manhood; with mutual philos, the relationship could last, even if non-sexually, for as long as a lifetime. Actually, the sexual aspect of relationships rarely did continue, because the Greeks considered a mature adult in a passive homosexual role as weak and effeminate, dishonorable character traits in a society that praised virility. Hence, the discouragement of homosexual oral sex.
Because society also praised physical beauty in youth, a pederastic relationship assured an eromenos that he possessed at least that value, for his physical beauty initially attracted his erastes in the first place. For this reason, pederasty benefited a boy by enhancing his self-esteem, always a tricky issue in adolescents. His proven attractiveness also passed glory to his father, who took pride in a son worthy of such notice, much as a modern father takes pride in a son’s awards for athletic or even academic achievements. Values an erastes gained included patience if his pursuit eventually succeeded, admiration from a grateful eromenos, and maybe even requited philos. If his pursuit never ended successfully, then at least he still gained his peers’ compassion, another Greek value, for having tried and failed in an honorable pursuit. The father of an eromenos satisfied himself that his son had a worthy role model to guide and to teach him, thereby molding another good citizen.
A major ingredient of good citizenship, that of good soldiery, thrived in a pederastic relationship with philos. The mutual bond between them incited an erastes to "show off" in acts of heroism for his admiring eromenos to emulate. For this reason, military commanders often posted erastai and eromenoi old enough to be subject to military duty ¹³   side-by-side. When eromenoi reached that age, their erastai frequently bought their military garb for them.
Nude athletic training and the pursuit of boys by young men originated in Crete in the eighth century BC. The population was exploding because of improved agricultural techniques, an ameliorating climate, an increasing acquired immunity to local diseases, and marriage to young girls capable of bearing children for many years. In addition to large portions of the population emigrating to found colonies in the western Mediterranean and the Black Seas, a series of laws designed to slow population growth caused as an unforeseen side effect the rise of overt pederasty. The relaxation of the proscription of intergenerational sex followed, for it eased the burden of delaying marriage and procreation by a young man for 10 to 20 years.
Aristocratic knights in Crete by law had to split their land holdings more or less equally among all of their sons. With the growing population, the size of many estates had shrunk to such an extent that they could no longer support a knight in the manner required of the landed aristocracy. Thus, new laws forbade marriage to men under 30 and segregated women and girls from male company. Men thereby came to dominate Cretan society. In such a society, natural male instincts came to the fore at an age of maximum sexual appetite, and yet the law forbade satisfaction of that appetite. Late marriages and the segregation of women starved young sexually eager men. Few adult males submitted to effeminate passive homosexual roles; ¹⁴   they mostly wanted to express their newly developed sexuality in roles of dominance befitting the Greek ideal of manhood. Thus, schoolboys emerged as the most logical choice for them. The emerging pubescent sexuality of schoolboys aroused within themselves wonder and curiosity that knowledgeable young men could exploit to the satisfaction of the needs and wants of both the young men and the schoolboys.
However those needs screamed for expression, overt pederasty had not yet attained social acceptance. Therefore, from the Spartan model of ritual abducting girls for the purpose of marriage, a custom evolved within a couple of generations, ¹⁵   according to the sources, of ritually abducting schoolboys; the custom quickly developed strict procedural rules with the sanction of laws. A young knight talked to the father of a schoolboy whom he wished to abduct. The father arranged a time and place for the knight to encounter his son, who remained ignorant of the scheme. The father also arranged for his son’s friends, neighbors and relatives to be nearby to his son at the appointed time. The boy’s friends defended and protected him when the knight showed up. This protection would only be nominal if the father agreed to the abduction—that is, if the knight had sufficient social status and wealth and a good reputation. Otherwise, it would be a genuine attempt to prevent the abduction, in which case a street brawl could erupt between, on the one side, the knight and his cohorts, if he’d brought any, and the schoolboy and his friends on the other side. If the father genuinely wanted to prevent the abduction, he would choose friends for his son capable of challenging the knight’s coterie. Hiding his son would have declared the boy’s unworthiness, and no father would want to admit that his son did not possess the necessary qualities for a knight to desire him. On the other hand, if the father felt the knight lacked the necessary qualities to take care of his son, then he had an option to try to prevent the abduction. Before the action reached the point of nominal or genuine defense, the schoolboy, familiar with the customs of Crete, knew what was happening and knew that he must allow the knight to carry him away. A boy’s own reluctance prevented the ritual from proceeding, for the law forbade the knight to mistreat him at any time.
If the abduction succeeded, then the knight indeed had an obligation to take care of the schoolboy. The two went together to a site in the wilderness and stayed there for two months. The knight satisfied his sexual appetite, ¹⁶   but he also had an obligation to continue the boy’s education in general, including instilling Greek ideals as already described, and to teach him to hunt in particular. After two months, the knight and the boy returned to the polis, where the knight ritually presented gifts to the boy in an elaborate public festival. The gifts had to include at least three specific items: military garb for the boy’s role as a defender of the polis, an ox for his role as provider, and a drinking cup for his role as an initiated member of the male society. Normally, many more gifts followed. Only then, after the man presented his gifts, could the boy choose to accept or to reject the knight. If he rejected him, he kept no gifts, but only retained the benefits, some of them questionable, of his two-month wilderness experience. If he accepted him, then the knight became his erastes and the boy became the knight’s eromenos. Moreover, the bond between the two created alliances between their respective families just as arranged marriages often did.
By the middle of the seventh century, the attempts to curb population growth had succeeded. Crete no longer exported surplus population to found new colonies or even to settle in established colonies. Peace, law and order descended on the island until the middle of the sixth century, when Persians cut off trade to eastern cities that had proven so instrumental in reviving Cretan prosperity.
Cretan pederastic practices absent ritual abduction traveled first to Sparta, which had close commercial and political ties with the island. It had institutionalized them by the end of the Second Messenian War, whose dates are subject to dispute, the possible terminal years falling in 660, 630 or 615 BC. By tradition, the semi-legendary Lycurgas studied all of the Cretan customs and laws and brought the ones he considered desirable to Sparta. Spartans had been practicing pederasty for an uncertain number of a few generations before they codified it in their laws.
Rather than segregating its women and girls the way Crete did, Sparta segregated its young boys. From the age of seven, a boy lived in military barracks, deprived of his father’s authority. The oldest age group in the barracks, 25 – 30 years old, took responsibility for training the younger groups. In the third of four 6-year periods of a boy’s life (after the first when he lived with his family and the second when he initially went to live in the barracks), he lost all possessions except for a cloak (as opposed to a tunic) and largely lived off the countryside with a group of his age-mates, what the Spartans called his herd, under the leadership of someone from the next higher age group. Living off the land, herds terrorized, beat, robbed and at times even murdered helots (enslaved Messenians). Because the only meals a boy received in the barracks consisted of a gruel that could scarcely sustain a person for long, he learned to steal food. If anyone caught him stealing, though, he faced the lash, often in competition with other boys receiving the same punishment to determine who among them could withstand the longest and most severe lashing without complaint or displaying pain in their facial expressions. Rarely, such punishments resulted in the disciplinarian lashing a boy to death. In addition to his meager or doubtful diet, a boy could not wash himself except on a few special festival days. To make his training a little less unendurable, however, he could take a lover either from among his herd or from older boys to provide moral support. The barracks arrangement fostered such coeval and pederastic relationships. ¹⁷   The intentional plan counted on homosexual pairs of hoplites ¹⁸   standing more firmly shoulder-to-shoulder in their phalanx formation than would comrades less emotionally attached to one another.
Sparta did not stand alone in taking pederasty from Crete. By way of Cretan maritime trade and colonization, the practice spread to all of Greece and the islands of the Aegean Sea by the early sixth century, and thence to Pontus (the Black Sea coast of Anatolia [modern Turkey]), Magna Graecia (Greek colonies in coastal Italy), and the littorals of Sicily, southern France, eastern Spain and Northern Africa. Everywhere the justification fell on the same three reasons of population control, loyalty between military cohorts and, primarily, pedagogy. Practices varied from place to place, some poleis emphasizing pedagogy more than eros, other places, such as Boeotia, relying on its inherent camaraderie to bolster morale within their infantry phalanxes and hence the likelihood that they would hold formation in battle, and still others falling into debauched carnal exploitive worship of their youth, as in Thessaly and Thebes. Ritual abduction, though, went nowhere other than Corinth.
Athens, not yet then the military rival of Sparta, picked up pedagogical pederasty by the late seventh century BC. By that time, Athens or other poleis had already taken advantage of all of the desirable sites that leant themselves to colonization. Moreover, rivalry from Carthage and Etruria did not just limit the possibilities of emigration to western colonies to expand their territories, it also created a flow of people away from those colonies, and they mostly found refuge in cosmopolitan Athens. To Athens also came Ionians and Aeolians fleeing Persian military efforts in western Anatolia and the eastern Aegean Sea. Pederasty and exposure or abandonment of unwanted excess newborns remained the sole recourses for limiting population growth in Athens, as in many other poleis. Eventually, Athens won a threefold renown for its intelligentsia, the education of its youth into that intelligentsia, and its pederasty as the mechanism of that education. The "Greek Miracle" that centered in Athens used adolescence for the benefit of its adolescents. Its greatest glory came after the influx of talent from the entire Greek world. Solon (639 – 559 BC), famous for his economic and social reforms, included regulations of pederasty in his attempts to appease the increasingly disgruntled landowning hoplite class. ¹⁹   Afterwards, pederasty increased with the growing sophistication of Athenian society in the arts and sciences.
Wherever it spread, local myths and legends morphed to reflect pederastic passions of gods and heroes. Thus, Zeus kidnapped Ganymede, significantly, in Crete, not to bear him his cup at mealtimes, but to rape him ritually. Achilles and Patroclus became more than mere compatriots—they became lovers. Heracles’ nephew and fellow-adventurer Iolaus acquired the additional role of his eromenos. King Minos took Theseus, who in turn took Pirithous. Making pederasty acceptable for their gods and heroes made it acceptable for lowly mortals. The dates of the emendments of the myths and legends, where discernable, give good indications when and where the practice received the local stamp of social approval. Neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey of Homer, for instance, alludes to nude athleticism or pederasty, indicating that Minoan Greeks (up to the twelfth century BC) did not know of those practices. By the end of the fifth century, only Ares among the major gods did not have an eromenos, and most legendary heroes had them as well. Poleis held annual festivals in commemoration of their own local hero who had brought them pederasty, and they populated their gymnasia with statues of prepubescent Eros, adolescent Hermes and mature Heracles, all in the nude, symbolizing friendship, eloquence and physical strength, respectively.
Just as the practice arose in the south and traveled northwards and outwards, so also it more rapidly faded from the beginning of the second century, until, by the close of that century, it existed in only a few outlying poleis in northern Greece. Pockets of the practice continued to exist into the second century AD, though, but the spread of Christianity after the unification of Greece into first the Macedonian and later the Roman empires eventually ended it everywhere. Obviating a citizen army within each polis reduced opportunities for pederastic pairs to fight fiercely side-by-side, so fewer men bonded with boys. Secondly, a drastic reduction in population had resulted not only from the chronic internecine warfare of the various Greek poleis and the leagues that they formed, but also from the massive emigration of talent from Greece into the territories that Alexander the Great (356 – 323 BC), the son of Philip II, had conquered, thereby hellenizing the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East and the later Roman Empire by way of the hellenized areas that it in turn conquered while still a republic. Finally, later, the only sex that Christianity condoned had procreation for its sole purpose, for the Christian church was anxious to increase its numbers. Hence, its homophobia rationalized on carefully selected passages from the Bible.
Long before the Christian fathers disparagingly condemned pederasty, Plato (427-347 BC) penned his and Socrates’ (469-399 BC) philosophic opinions. ²⁰   In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates condones pederasty when he acknowledges that praise and glory of beautiful boys make them conceited and hard to catch. In Protagoras, Socrates himself does not deny an implication that he pursues young boys. His dinner speech in praise of the god Eros centers on love of boys, whose beauty always excites him (Symposium). In Phaedrus, he vainly wishes that eromenoi would favor others than their own erastai so that he himself could indulge in pleasure with them. When he catches a glimpse of the upper inner thigh under the tunic of a boy sitting next to him at a dinner party, he suddenly loses his confidence to talk with him, as he’d been trying to do before they sat down to eat. However, in Symposium, he also says that he has formed his most ardent erastes relationship with his polis, Athens, implying erastai need not descend into sensual pleasure to bond with their eromenoi. He further describes himself as erastes of wisdom, forgoing carnal pederasty when opportunity comes his way in order not to corrupt his pursuit of the higher goal. Corruption results from enslavement of the soul to human passion, a lower goal than wisdom. ²¹   On the other hand, in Euthydemus, Socrates asserts that an eromenos does not corrupt his pursuit of wisdom by lying down with his erastes—i.e., a wise erastes abstains from sensual pleasure, but an eromenos uses it to seek wisdom.
Socrates can reconcile his response to youthful beauty and his pursuit of wisdom. His initial response starts him on a path in search of the form of Beauty. ²²   He must take that first step in order to pursue Beauty—even the longest journey starts with a single step. From the first beautiful body, he then proceeds to others until he can expand his search from beautiful bodies to beautiful practices, and thence to beautiful studies, and finally to Beauty itself, an aspect of Good. ²³   In the context of his discussions, he is always referring to young male beauty and a pederastic response to it. Such a response indicates a good soul in a man; erotic response to feminine beauty, on the other hand, indicates a good body, for that kind of response spawns children and continues the human race. A good soul, though, allows a man to overcome the restrictions of the body, however good.
As for an eromenos seeking wisdom, his gratitude overcomes his reasoning when he lies down with his erastes, but the good that the erastes has incubated within his eromenos does not lose its value. Their carnality merely places them at a lower Good than abstention would have. The longer they can remain chaste, the higher the Good they can attain.
Couching his philosophy in pederastic terms came naturally to Plato. Pederastic relationships characterized Greece of his day and all the famous love affairs; no one celebrated heterosexuality the way media watchers do now. As in Crete, in an all-male society that secluded women and girls and that scorned homosexuality between adults, pederastic relationships remained the only option available. The ethos developed for beautiful young boys to attract adult men irresistibly, and youths in turn gratefully admired adults who admired them. Hero- worshipping infused society on a global scale.
Plato’s student Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) had a much more modern attitude towards pederasty and wrote about it much less voluminously. According to him in his Nichomaean Ethics, some humans who have bad natures take pleasure in unnatural acts. Bad human nature can result from disease or habituation, ²⁴   as when eromenoi grow up to become erastai. He held a minority opinion on a ubiquitous practice.
Other than ancient Greece, few cultures have allowed the practice of the common human inclination of intergenerational sex. Few other natural universal human desires have been the objects of nearly universal cultural taboos. Where it is not taboo, it usually appears as merely an initiation rite of a boy into manhood, and the culture does not widely practice it beyond the one act. Thus, for example, various tribes in New Guinea either anally penetrate their pubescent boys or, since they have long since been weaned from mother’s milk, let them (or make them) drink "father’s milk." Yet, ancient Greece reached heights of civilization never attained before its rise. Its contributions to western civilization are innumerable: philosophy, democracy, art and architecture, music, drama, poetry, medicine, science, mathematics and geometry and astronomy, history, private property, the raising and ennobling of the human condition to one of a private person, and on and on and on. Many aspects of western civilization saw their first expression or the great heightening and development of them in ancient Greece. Boys steeped in the pederastic edifying company of young men were instrumental in creating that civilization.
All of that provides evidence that in modern society, intergenerational relationships per se do not necessarily harm a boy: the taboos themselves and the resulting investigations and questioning by his parents and doctors and lawyers, both prosecuting and defense, and psychologists and social workers do the harm. If a pubescent "victim" received honor, prestige and encomia instead of shame, embarrassment and guilt for what his culture forbids, then fewer resultant psychoses would pester him in his later life, as so often happens now. This is not to suggest that situations like, for example, the Catholic priests in Massachusetts should be considered for being condoned: the ancient Greeks would not have approved of that kind of lascivious behavior, but only long-term relationships with a single boy. Yet, a mentoring father-figure for a single boy, if physically loving to him, receives the same kind of punishment as does the sociopathic molester of multiple boys, if perhaps somewhat less severe, and that prospect is by no means a given. Perhaps, for as much as ancient Greece has enriched modern culture, its contributions are incomplete. Perhaps one further contribution—that of honorable pederastic pedagogical relationships—needs to be added to its heritage for the benefit of young victims as well as for the enrichment of modern society, much as they enriched classical Greek society.
Kyle
March 19, 2002

SOURCES
Dover, K.J., Greek Homosexuality (MJF Books, New York, 1989)
Percy III, William Armstrong, Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece (University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1996)
Additional material comes from lectures and discussion groups and various reference books and historical handbooks and surveys used for in-class participation.

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