Athenian pederasty

Athenian pederasty entailed 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 initially 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 to pursue a boy to love, tolerating up to 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 was fiercely competitive.

In Athens, as elsewhere, pederastic relationships had their beginnings among the aristocracy, but in time the practice was picked up by others sections of the population. With the advent of democracy, whose role models were the lovers and tyrant slayers Harmodius and Aristogiton, "access to gymnastic and sympotic culture widened, so the concomitant pederastic emotions and relationships may also have become more widely admired and imitated."

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 first appear about 560 BCE, a year after the pederastic tyrant Peisistratus seized power in Athens. Their production ceased around 470 BCE, after which they either went out of fashion or were replaced with vases of precious metal which have not survived. The iconography attests to the dominant status of pederasty in Athenian social life. On the strict red-figure vases, Eros only appears in scenes that show the interaction of men and adolescent boys. Kroll reports that ceramic depictions of individuals labeled as beautiful include only thirty of women and girls, καλή, but five hundred and twenty eight of boys, καλός.

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.

In Athens the practice of pederasty was more freely constructed than the more formal Cretan and Spartan types. Men courted boys at the gymnasia or the palaestrae, at symposia, 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.

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