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| Detail from an ancient Greek bowl showing
an eromenos entertaining his mentor, or erastes, on the flute.
Picture courtesy Truth Tree.Com. |
Eromenos mean literally, "beloved,"
a term used in ancient Athens
and Sparta
to refer to a youth loved by an older man, known as his erastes.
The plural of eromenos is eromeni. While erotic love between
males of the same age was usually considered abnormal and even ridiculed
by most Greeks in antiquity, male love which crossed generations was considered
quite normal and even a duty on the part of the older male, who acted not
only as the lover but also the teacher of the youth. This man would
introduce the youth to the pleasures of sex, yet also instruct him in athletics,
soldiering, and good citizenship, in a relationship the Greeks called paiderastia,
the origin of today's term pederasty.
The age range for eromeni usually
was from adolescence to young adulthood for the boys and from early twenties
to thirties for the older men. Custom maintained that the youth
be old enough to think for himself and be plied with gifts or at the very
least consent to the relationship. A young male might have many male
suitors, of whom he would choose one to be his erastes. Coercion
and unwelcomed advances, and any relationships with pre-adolescent boys,
were frowned upon and were grounds for hubris, or contempt for the
law, a serious charge.
The relationship was also meant to
be a compliment to heterosexual married life and not a substitute.
While bisexuality was the norm in ancient Greece, exclusive homosexuality
was not. Further, the older male was forbidden by custom from
ever being the passive partner during sex since, being older, he was expected
to be "more of a man" than his protege. Exceptions existed in some areas,
such as Macedonia, as exampled by the relationship between Alexander
the Great and Hephastion,
who were more or less of equal age.
When an eromenos came of age, he in
turn would choose a youth of his own to love and teach, and also would
take a wife and father children, still maintaining his earlier love relationships.
Often, his bride would dress as a boy on the wedding night.
Indeed, many Greek men considered adolescent males to be even more beautiful
than women. The whole purpose of paiderastia, in fact,
was to realize through a combination of male-bonding and male erotic love
the ideal of the young man who was physically beautiful, intellectually
cultured, and good-hearted.
Links:
The
World History of Male Love
The
Erastic Eromenos
Truth
Tree: Pederasty
Alexander's
sexuality - Alexander the Great
Gender
and Sexuality in the Classical World
Plato's
Symposium
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