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

MALE HOMOSEXUALITY

Throughout Greece there were festivals which served for the glorification of boyish and youthful beauty, or at which it at least appeared conscious of its aim. ‘Thus at Megara the spring-festival Diocleia (Theocr., xii, 30) was celebrated, at which contests of boys and youths in kissing took place ; at Thespize (Plut., Amat., 1; Pausan., ix, 31, 3; Ath., xiii, 601a) the festival of Eros, at which prize songs on the love of boys were sung; at Sparta the festival of the naked boys, the Gymnopedia, also the Hyacinthia ; and the island of Delos (Lucian, De Saltat., 16) is said to have specially rejoiced ‘in the round dances of boys (see pp. 109, 115, eétc., and 164).

When Plutarch (Prov. Al., i, 44), speaking of the boys of the Peloponnesian city of Argos, says that “those who have kept their youthful bloom pure and uncorrupted, as an honourable distinction lead the procession at a festival with a shield, according to old custom ”’, he does not mean that these boys have not been the favourites of men of standing, but only that, so long as they were still boys, they had abstained from female intimacy.

The question of the love of boys in Sparta (Xen., Rep. Lac., 2, 13; Sympos., 8, 35; Plut., Lyc., 17s Ages., 20; Cleom., 3; Institut. Lac., 75 /elian, Var. hist., iii, 10) is very difficult to decide, since on this point the reports of ancient times are actually contradictory. Xenophon and Plutarch assert that the Spartan love of boys certainly depended upon the sensual pleasure in corporeal beauty, but did not arouse sensual desires also. To have designs upon a boy sensually was put on the same level as a father seeking his son or a brother his brother, and whoever did so was throughout his lite ““vithout honour’, that is, he was deprived of his rights as a citizen.

Maximus of Tyre (Diss., xxvi, 8), a rhetorician who lived in the time of the Antonines and Commodus and so wrote very late, says that in Sparta

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