LogFAQs > #978694360

I'm going to repost a post I made in another dead thread:

As I said on my original post what survived to us in the modern-day stems from the upper crust of society, what the Hellenes referred to as the "leisure class". These were leisured gentlemen who didn't have to work for a living instead relying on the blood and sweat of enslaved people to maintain their lifestyle, ideally, they would use this free time to better themselves for the defense and management of their communities. Reading them and believing they represent the general opinion of people back than is like people 2,000 years into the future believing Elon Musk represents the opinion of modern people. Sadly we can't really assume to much on how the average person felt about these types of relationships.

We have to put it in context, pederasty was an aristocratic institution which is the class writers belonged to so it can make it seem like it was more common than it actually was. These relationship were arranged by families and involved eromenos, young boys, starting from the age of 12 to the age of 17 and erastes, older men. This is what the Roman era poet Straton of Sardis writes:

I delight in the prime of a boy of twelve, but one of thirteen is much more desirable. He who is fourteen is a still sweeter flower of the Loves, and one who is just beginning his fifteenth year is yet more delightful. The sixteenth year is that of the gods, and as for the seventeenth it is not for me, but for Zeus, to seek it. But if one has a desire for those still older, he no longer plays, but now seeks And answering him back.

And it appear that these types of relationships to continue past the age of 17 were looked down upon, as well as having relationship with a boy below the age of 12, from Straton:

That an immature boy should do despite to his insensible age carries more disgrace to the friend who tempts him than to himself, and for a grown-up youth to submit to sodomy, his season for which is past, is twice as disgraceful to him who consents as it is to his tempter. But there is a time, Moiris, when it is no longer unseemly in the one, and not yet so in the other, as is the case with you and me at present.

These mentor relationships had a sexual component to them that involved the sexual abuse of children, according to Xenophon the Athenian who sent his own sons through the agoge this wasn't happening in Sparta, and ideally involved intercrural sex rather than penetration. These types of relationships were also meant to end once the eromenos reached the age of 17, and as seen by what Straton wrote and the case of Pausanias and Agathon it was looked down if they persisted.

These men were also expected to marry and have children of their own as well. And as I posted above the act of penetration was seen as shameful for a man because it was perceived that it put him in the role of a woman. It's not really progressivism, our modern perception of what is "gay" doesn't neatly map into the past. A man could engage in homosexual sex as long as he wasn't the one being submissive with an enslaved man or a prostitute while also being married to a woman and having children of his own, this was not perceived as being either "gay" nor "bisexual". Likewise relationships between men were acceptable to an extend.

Some additional notes, the abuse and rape of children wasn't just limited to boys but also girls since girls around the same age range of boys would be forced to marry men usually in their 30s. Macedonian kings, much like neighboring Illyrian and Thracian kings, practiced polygamy while the Greeks did not.