Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

HISTORY OF GREEK LOVE rr. History oF GREEK LOVE oF Boys

Naturally, it cannot belong to our task in the present book to examine more closely the different theories, especially of medical men, as to how the problem generally is to be explained. It would also be superfluous, since not only have these different attempts at explanation been clearly and conveniently collected in Hirschfeld’s standard work, but also that Greek love of boys at least, of which alone we are speaking here, in general needs no explanation at all as a phenomenon difficult to understand. Some space may be given, however, to a description of its historical development.

Goethe’s assertion that “the love of boys is as old as humanity ” is confirmed by modern science. The oldest literary testimony hitherto known dates back more than 4,500 years, and is to be found in an Egyptian papyrus which proves not only that pederasty was at that time widespread in Egypt, but also that it was presumed to exist amongst the gods as a matter of course.

The first beginnings of the Greek love of boys are lost in prehistoric times, even in the darkness of Greek mythology, which is completely saturated with stories of pedophilia. The Greeks themselves transfer the beginnings to the oldest times of their legendary history. The assertion, often naively made, that in the Homeric poems there is as yet no trace of the love of boys to be met with, and that it was a phenomenon which first appeared during the so-called decadence is, in my opinion, false, for I have already shown in an earlier work (in Anthropophyteta, ix, pp. 291 ff.) that the bond of friendship between Achilles and Patroclus (the most important passages are I/., xxiii, 843; ix, 186, 663; xviii, 22 ff., 65, 315, 3343 xix, 209, 315), however ideal it was, yet contains a high percentage of homoerotic sentiment and action; that the Homeric epos also abounds in undoubted traces of ephebophilia, and

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