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It has been suggested that Homosexuality in the militaries of ancient Greece be merged into this article. (Discuss)

Same-sex love was an integral part of civic life in ancient Greece from Classical times until the Roman era. Three general categories of such relationships can be drawn. Love between women can be traced back as far as the time of Sappho. Love between adult men was known, and though it was discouraged and ridiculed there are records of many such couples. The third, and best known category was love between adult men and adolescent boys, known as pederasty.

Sapphic love

Sappho, a poet from the island of Lesbos, was mistress of a school of girls and wrote love poems to many of her young students, with whom she often fell in love and who often reciprocated her feelings. She is thought to have written close to 12,000 lines of poetry on her love for other women. Of these, only about 600 lines have survived concerted efforts to obliterate her works. In general, the historical record of same-sex love between women is sparse. This is thought to be due at least in part to the dominant male role in writing and preserving historical documents.

Love between adult men

The Iliad

Many believe the first recorded appearance of such desire was in the Iliad (800 BC). The intentions of the Iliad have been a subject of much debate. An abundance of evidence exists that by the beginning of the Hellenistic era (480 BC) the Iliad’s heroes Achilles and Patroclus were icons of male homosexuality.

The closest word the ancient Greeks had for “homosexual” was “paiderastia” meaning “boy love”. It was a relationship between an older male and a young man around fourteen to twenty. The older man was called “erastes”, he was to educate, protect, love, and provide a role model for his lover. His lover was called “eromenos” whose reward for his lover lay in his beauty, youth, and promise.

With the Iliad the ancient Greeks had trouble designating which role to assign to Patroclus and Achilles. Aeschylus in the tragedy Myrmidons made Achilles the protector since he had avenged his love’s death even though the gods told him it would cost his own life. However Phaedrus asserts that Homer emphasized the beauty of Achilles which would qualify him not Patroclus as “eromenos”.

Plato wrote the Symposium about 385 BC, and by then an established tradition viewed Achilles and Patroclus lovers. However there was still debate on whether this was Homer’s intentions or misguided. Aeschylus who wrote a century earlier in his popular tragedy Myrmidons regarded the relationship sexual and stated it in explicit detail. He tells of Achilles visiting Patroclus’ dead body and criticizing him for letting himself be killed. In it Achilles speaks of a “devout union of the thighs”. This reading was the common view at the climax of the Hellenistic era, though it was not shared by all.

Evidence of this debate is found in a speech by an Athenian politician Aeschines at his trial in 345 BC. Aeschines in placing an emphasis on the importance of pederasty to the Greeks argues that though Homer does not state it explicitly educated people should be able to read between the lines. “Although (Homer) speaks in many places of Patroclus and Achilles, he hides their love and avoids giving a name to their friendship, thinking that the exceeding greatness of their affection is manifest to such of his hearers as are educated men.” Most ancient writers followed the thinking laid out by Aeschines.

The inquiry is of significant importance. Homer’s Iliad is the most important sources for Greek history prior to 600 BC when Greek literary texts became numerous. In it he does not use the terms “erastes” and “eromenos”, it has been argued that their relationship was not pederastic but rather egalitarian. In his Ionian culture it appears homosexuality had not taken on the form it later would in pederasty. However some scholars such as Bernard Sergent have argued that it had though it was not reflected in Homer. He asserts that ritualized man-boy relations were widely diffused through Europe from prehistoric times.

It is impossible to designate the roles found in the Iliad between Achilles and Patroclus along pederastic lines. Achilles is the most dominant. Among the warriors in the Trojan War he has the most fame. Patroclus performs duties such as cooking, and nursing yet is older than Achilles. Both also sleep with women.

Nonetheless the emotion between the two is obviously intense love. Achilles is tender to Patroclus contrasted to his arrogance to others. Typically warriors fought for personal fame or their city-state. But Achilles emphasizes his relationship with Patroclus above all else. He dreams that all Greeks would die so that he and Patroclus might gain the fame of conquering Troy alone. After Patroclus dies he agonizes touching his dead body, smearing himself with ash, and fasting. It was not until his desire for revenge to kill Hector who had killed Patroclus that he would fight again; fully aware that the gods warned him it would cost his life.

Attempts to edit the text were undertaken by Aritarchus of Samothrace in Alexandria around 200 BC. He has been called “the founder of scientific scholarship”. In his belief he thought that Homer did not intend the two to be lovers. However he did agree that the “we-two alone” passage did imply a love relation and argued it was a later interpolation. But the majority of ancient and modern historians have accepted the lines to be an original part. Therefore even a Greek who argued against such a view had to admit that these lines expressed a relationship.

Pederasty

The ancient Greeks, in the context of the pederastic city-states, were the first to describe, study, systematize, and establish pederasty as an institution. It was an important element in civil life, the military, philosophy and the arts.

Main article: Pederasty in ancient Greece

External links

• Pederasty and Pedagogy In Archaic Greece

References

• "Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece" by William A. Percy, III. University of Illinois Press, 1996. ISBN 0252022092