Boy love in ancient Athens

Boy love (pederasty) in Athens was a formal bond between an adult man, outside his immediate family, and an adolescent boy, 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.

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 him noticed. At the same time, the boy and his family were expected to put up resistance and not give in too easily. Boys who succumbed too readily were looked down upon. As a result, the quest for a desirable eromenos was fiercely competitive.

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.". In Athens, the lover was known as the erastes, and his young partner as the eromenos or paidika.

A great deal of modern knowledge about Athenian boy love 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 BC after which they either went out of fashion or were replaced with vases of precious metal which have not survived. While formerly the age of the depicted youths were thought of to be in the range from 12 to 14, they are now believed to range in age from 14 to 18.

Practice

The Athenian tradition of boy love was more freely constructed than the more formal Cretan and Spartan tradition. Men courted boys at the palaestra (wrestling school), the gymnasia (the school where competitors in the public games received their training as well as a place for socializing and engaging in intellectual pursuits), 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, known as pedagogos, to escort the boy in his travels.

The erotic and sexual aspect of the relationship, usually consisting of embracing, fondling and intercrural sex, ended when the youth reached adulthood, and evolved into a lifelong friendship. Intercrural sex, also known as interfemoral sex, is a type of non-penetrative sex, in which one partner places his penis between the other partner's thighs. Penetrative sex was considered demeaning to the receiving partner.

A modern line of thought holds that the young boys did not reciprocate the love and desire of the older one and that the relationship was based on a sexual domination of the younger by the older.

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 they came to adulthood. One surviving piece of Greek speech, documents a legal case, against Timarchos, in which Aeschines pleads to enforce precisely that law against his opponent.

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 any man under forty who trespassed onto school grounds with death.

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.

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 encourages the Athenians to "gaze day after day on the p ower of the city and become her erastai (lovers).

Morals

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.". While it was expected that during courtship the lover would offer his boy small gifts (typically fighting cocks or edible delicacies), giving or receiving money or substantial gifts was considered disreputable in Athens and many other places, if not all. Apparently the boy could also send gifts to his man. An anecdote describes the jealous rage of Xanthippe, Socrates' wife, who destroys a cake sent by Alcibiades, seeing it as a "present sent by an eromenos to his erastes to reinforce his passion."

Late fifth century Athenians began to question the sexual aspect of the relationship. Plato 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

Though the love of boys was freely practiced by the aristocracy, it remained a source of mirth for the common people, and a topic that often was used by the comedians. In a parody of Ganymede riding on the back of Zeus in eagle form in “Peace”, Aristophones has his character ride to Olympus on the back of a dung beetle, a pun on anal sex.

Famous lovers

Aechines Louvre - Paris	Alcibiades Replica of a Greek original of the 4th century BC	Aristides
Demosthenes Braccio Nuovo, Vatican Rome	Harmodius and Aristogiton Museio Archeologico - Napoli	Solon
Sophocles	Themistocles Museo Ostiense - Ostia	Zephyros and Hyakinthos Attic red-figure vase 480 BC Museum of Fine Arts Boston