Cultural References
In a funeral speech ascribed to him by Thucydides, Pericles exhorts the Athenians to "gaze day after day on the power of the city and become her erastai", interpreted to mean "that citizen-soldiers should behave towards Athens like boyfriends, erastai: i.e. love the city without calculation, more than life itself."
Athenian pederasty is a major theme in the historical novel The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault.
Read more about this topic: Athenian Pederasty
Famous quotes containing the word cultural:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)