Athens, fifth century BCE, an evening drinking party. A boy enters; a citizen man of about thirty pours his wine and recites poetry to him. They talk philosophy, talk politics, and in time share a bed. Teacher and pupil, lover and beloved, and a device for raising the next generation of the citizen community: this relationship was called paiderastia in Greek. In the ancient Greek world, the erotic bond between an adult man and a youth was a socially sanctioned institution and one of the central subjects of literature, philosophy, and art.

Sexuality in ancient Greece is the whole of practices, institutions, and norms surrounding sex in the Hellenic world from the Homeric age of the eighth century BCE to the end of the Hellenistic fourth century BCE. This article treats pederasty, the high-class courtesan (hetaira), symposium culture, and the hierarchical structure of sexual norms.

Pederasty

Paiderastia denotes the erotic and pedagogical relationship between an adult citizen man (erastes, the lover) and an adolescent youth (eromenos, the beloved). Institutionalised in many city-states including Athens, Sparta, and Thebes, it was a recurring subject of literature and philosophy from the sixth to the fourth century BCE.

The typical course ran as follows. A man of around thirty chose a youth of roughly twelve to eighteen and offered gifts, education, and social protection. The youth was free to accept or refuse; acceptance opened an intimate exchange that included a sexual relationship. When the youth reached the age of beard growth the relationship dissolved, and the former eromenos in turn became an erastes who chose a youth of the next generation.

Plato’s Symposium (c. 385 BCE) is the classic text that philosophically idealised this relationship. Through the exchanges of Socrates and Alcibiades and Pausanias’s distinction between “heavenly” and “common” Eros, the dialogue placed pederasty as a noble spiritual discipline. The reality, however, often diverged from the ideal. The sources record many cases that present-day norms of consent and age would treat as problems: economically weak youths drawn into relationships through money, coercive seduction, episodes of jealousy and violence. This article does not adopt the position of fully justifying the ancient institution by contemporary ethics.

The hetaira

The Greek hetaira (female companion, plural hetairai) was a high-class courtesan who attended citizen men at the symposium and offered conversation, music, poetry, and sex. Clearly distinguished from the common streetwalker (porne), the hetairai were highly cultivated women who formed long-term relationships with upper-class men.

Aspasia of Miletus (fifth century BCE) was known as the companion of the statesman Pericles and was said to debate as an equal with philosophers including Socrates; Plato’s Menexenus preserves a passage of her rhetoric. In the fourth century, Phryne was remembered as the lover of the orator Hypereides and as the model for Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Knidos. The hetaira filled a role unlike that of the citizen wife, who was confined to the household, never appeared at the symposium, and was not her husband’s partner in intellectual conversation. The setting in which a citizen man engaged with an educated woman was the hetaira’s banquet.

The symposium

The symposion (drinking-together) was the social ritual in which citizen men gathered in the private dining room (andron), drank, recited poetry, talked philosophy, and amused themselves with hetairai and youths. It is the setting of Plato’s dialogues and the subject of Xenophon’s Symposium, a key stage of classical philosophy and literature.

The symposium followed strict conventions. Participants reclined on couches (kline), and a designated master of the feast (symposiarchos) fixed the dilution of the wine. Boys served, and hetairai and flute-girls (auletrides) supplied music and erotic excitement. The wine-flinging game of kottabos and the exchange of improvised verse layered intellectual and bodily play.

The hierarchy of sexual norms

Greek sexual norms operated within a framework unlike the modern binary of heterosexual and homosexual. Foucault’s The Use of Pleasure argues that what mattered to the Greeks was the active or passive role, not the sex of the partner.

The adult citizen man was expected to take the active role, and placing women, youths, slaves, and foreigners in the passive role was socially accepted. For a citizen man to take the passive role with another adult citizen, or to offer his body for money, was despised as damaging his citizenship and could even bring disenfranchisement at Athens. Roman sexual culture inherited this active-passive framework, but institutional pederasty did not develop at Rome; a different structure centred on the sexual disposal of slaves took its place.

See also

• Sexuality in ancient Rome
• European sexual culture
• Buddhism, Shinto, and sex
• Shudo (the way of youths)