Pederasty (or paederasty) () refers to same-sex sexual relationships between an adult male and an adolescent boy; some authors also use the term to refer to same-sex female relationships with a similar age gap. Pederasty existed as a socially acknowledged and accepted practice in some premodern societies.
In most countries today, the local age of consent determines whether a person is considered legally competent to consent to sexual acts, and whether such contact is child sexual abuse or statutory rape. An adult engaging in sexual activity with a minor is considered abusive by authorities for a variety of reasons, including the age of the minor and the psychological and physical harm they may endure.
Etymology Pederasty derives from the combination of Marguerite Johnson, Terry Ryan. Sexuality in Greek and Roman Society and Literature: A Sourcebook p. 110.Liddell and Scott, 1968 p. 585. with (cf. eros). Late Latin pæderasta was borrowed in the 16th century directly from Plato's classical Greek in The Symposium. (Latin transliterates as æ.) The word first appeared in the English language during the Renaissance, as pæderastie (e.g. in Samuel Purchas' Pilgrimes), in the sense of sexual relations between men and boys.
History Ancient Greece
Pederasty in ancient Greece was a socially acknowledged romantic relationship between an adult male (the erastes) and a younger male (the eromenos), usually in his teens.C.D.C. Reeve, Plato on Love: Lysis, Symposium, Phaedrus, Alcibiades with Selections from Republic and Laws (Hackett, 2006), p. xxi online; Martti Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World: A Historical Perspective, translated by Kirsi Stjerna (Augsburg Fortress, 1998, 2004), p. 57 online; Nigel Blake et al., Education in an Age of Nihilism (Routledge, 2000), p. 183 online. This age difference between a socially powerful and socially less-powerful partner was characteristic of the Archaic and Classical periods, in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships.Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World, p. 57; William Armstrong Percy III, "Reconsiderations about Greek Homosexualities," in Same–Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West (Binghamton: Haworth, 2005), p. 17. Sexual variety, not excluding paiderastia, was characteristic of the Hellenistic era; see Peter Green, "Sex and Classical Literature," in Classical Bearings: Interpreting Ancient Culture and History (University of California Press, 1989, 1998), p. 146 online. The influence of pederasty on Greek culture of these periods was so pervasive that it has been called "the principal cultural model for free relationships between citizens".Dawson, Cities of the Gods, p. 193. See also George Boys-Stones, "Eros in Government: Zeno and the Virtuous City," Classical Quarterly 48 (1998), 168–174: "there is a certain kind of sexual relationship which was considered by many Greeks to be very important for the cohesion of the city: sexual relations between men and youths. Such relationships were taken to play such an important role in fostering cohesion where it mattered — among the male population — that Lycurgus even gave them official recognition in his constitution for Sparta" (p. 169). The practice was viewed with concerns and disapproval by certain social groups.
In the writings of Xenophon, Socrates says, "A man who sells his favours for a price to anyone who wants them is called a catamite; but if anyone forms a love-attachment with someone whom he knows to be truly good, we regard him as perfectly respectable." According to Kenneth Dover and Michel Foucault, both Xenophon's Socrates and Plato's Socrates opposed pederastic intercourse and instead advocated for chaste pederastic relationships. The two authors' Socratic writings formed one of the main texts that led to their understanding of pederasty as a matter of debate in Ancient Greece.
Some scholars locate its origin in initiation ritual, particularly rites of passage on Crete and in Sparta, where it was associated with entrance into military life and the religion of Zeus.Robert B. Koehl, "The Chieftain Cup and a Minoan Rite of Passage," Journal of Hellenic Studies 106 (1986) 99–110, with a survey of the relevant scholarship including that of Arthur Evans (p. 100) and others such as H. Jeanmaire and R.F. Willetts (pp. 104–105); Deborah Kamen, "The Life Cycle in Archaic Greece," in The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 91–92. Kenneth Dover, a pioneer in the study of Greek homosexuality, rejects the initiation theory of origin; see "Greek Homosexuality and Initiation," in Que(e)rying Religion: A Critical Anthology (Continuum, 1997), pp. 19–38. For Dover, the argument that Greek paiderastia as a social custom was related to rites of passage constitutes a denial of homosexuality as natural or innate; this may be to overstate or misrepresent what the initiatory theorists have said. The initiatory theory claims to account not for the existence of ancient Greek homosexuality in general but rather for that of formal paiderastia. It has no formal existence in the Homeric epics, and seems to have developed in the late 7th century BC as an aspect of Greek homosocial culture,Thomas Hubbard, "Pindar's Tenth Olympian and Athlete-Trainer Pederasty," in Same–Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity, pp. 143 and 163 (note 37), with cautions about the term "homosocial" from Percy, p. 49, note 5. which was characterized also by athletic and artistic nudity, delayed marriage for aristocrats, symposia, and the social seclusion of women.Percy, "Reconsiderations about Greek Homosexualities," p. 17 online et passim. Pederasty was both idealized and criticized in ancient literature and philosophy.For examples, see Kenneth Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Harvard University Press, 1978, 1989), p. 165, note 18, where the eschatological value of paiderastia for the soul in Plato is noted. For a more cynical view of the custom, see the comedies of Aristophanes, e.g. Wealth 149-59. Paul Gilabert Barberà, "John Addington Symonds. A Problem in Greek Ethics. Plutarch's Eroticus Quoted Only in Some Footnotes? Why?" in The Statesman in Plutarch's Works (Brill, 2004), p. 303 online; and the pioneering view of Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis, 1921, 3rd ed.), vol. 2, p. 12 online. For Stoic "utopian" views of paiderastia, see Doyne Dawson, Cities of the Gods: Communist Utopias in Greek Thought (Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 192 online. The argument has recently been made that idealization was universal in the Archaic period; criticism began in Athens as part of the general Classical Athenian reassessment of Archaic culture.See Andrew Lear, 'Was pederasty problematized? A diachronic view' in Sex in Antiquity: exploring gender and sexuality in the ancient world, eds. Mark Masterson, Nancy Rabinowitz, and James Robson (Routledge, 2014).
Scholars have debated the role or extent of pederasty, which is likely to have varied according to local custom and individual inclination.Michael Lambert, "Athens," in Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia (Taylor & Francis, 2000), p. 122. Athenian law, for instance, recognized both consent and age as factors in regulating sexual behavior.Gloria Ferrari notes that there were conventions of age pertaining to sexual activity, and if a man violated these by seducing a boy who was too young to consent to becoming an eromenos, the predator might be subject to prosecution under the law of hubris; Figures of Speech: Men and Maidens in Ancient Greece (University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 139–140.
Enid Bloch argues that many Greek boys in these relationships may have been traumatized by knowing that they were violating social customs, since the "most shameful thing that could happen to any Greek male was penetration by another male." She further argues that vases showing "a boy standing perfectly still as a man reaches out for his genitals" indicate the boy may have been "psychologically immobilized, unable to move or run away". One vase shows a young man or boy running away from Eros, the Greek god of desire."Like the depiction of Eros pursuing a young man... for this lust is not entirely free of violence, and there can be something slightly frightening about it (after all, the boy in Ill. 19 is running away)" Glenn W. Most "The Athlete's Body in Ancient Greece" in Stanford Humanities Review V.6.2 1998
Ancient Rome
In Latin, mos Graeciae or mos Graecorum ("Greek custom" or "the way of the Greeks") refers to a variety of behaviors the ancient Romans regarded as Greek, including but not confined to sexual practice. Ancient Roman society only tolerated same-sex intercourse within an inherently unequal relationship; male Roman citizens retained their masculinity as long as they took the active, penetrating role, and the appropriate male sexual partner was a prostitute or slave, who would nearly always be non-Roman.King, Helen, "Sowing the Field: Greek and Roman Sexology", in Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 30. Adolescent male partners were known as catamites. In Archaic and classical Greece, paiderasteia had been a formal social relationship between freeborn males; taken out of context and refashioned as the luxury product of a conquered people, pederasty came to express roles based on domination and exploitation.Pollini, John, "The Warren Cup: Homoerotic Love and Symposial Rhetoric in Silver", in Art Bulletin 81.1 (1999) Masters often gave enslaved males, and prostitutes sometimes assumed, Greek names regardless of their ethnic origin; the boys (pueri) Martial loved had Greek names.Joshel, Sandra R., Slavery in the Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 78 and 95Younger, John G. Sex in the Ancient World from A to Z (Routledge, 2005), p. 38. The use of slaves defined Roman pederasty; sexual practices were "somehow 'Greek when they were directed at "freeborn boys openly courted in accordance with the Hellenic tradition of pederasty".
Effeminacy or a lack of discipline in managing one's sexual attraction to another male threatened a man's "Roman-ness" and thus might receive disparagement as "Eastern" or "Greek". Fears that Greek models might "corrupt" traditional Roman social codes (the mos maiorum) seem to have prompted a vaguely documented law (Lex Scantinia) that attempted to regulate aspects of homosexual relationships between freeborn males and to protect Roman youth from older men emulating Greek customs of pederasty.Bremmer, Jan, "An Enigmatic Indo-European Rite: Paederasty", in Arethusa 13.2 (1980), p. 288.
Theologian Edith Humphrey commented that "the Graeco-Roman 'ideal' regarding homosexuality entailed erotic love, not of children, but of young (teenage) males of the same age that a young woman would be given in marriage, and that frequently the more mature male was only slightly older than the partner."
Medieval and Renaissance Europe
The Roman Emperor Justinian I, upon converting to Christianity, banned all forms of homosexual intercourse within the Roman Empire, regardless of age. The shift in these cultural attitudes transpired into literature; Eratosthenes Scholastikos, a 6th century Greek author writing shortly after the empire's Christianization, wrote "Let males be for others; I can love only women, whose love lasts a long time. There is no beauty in pubescent youths: I loathe that hateful hair that begins to grow too soon." in an epigram numbered 277 in the Greek Anthology. Nevertheless, various covert forms of pederasty persisted in Europe following his edict.