Pederasty - Historical Synopsis

Historical Synopsis

In antiquity, pederasty was seen as an educational institution for the inculcation of moral and cultural values, as well as a form of sexual expression, entered history from the Archaic period onwards in Ancient Greece, though Cretan ritual objects reflecting an already formalized practice date to the late Minoan civilization, around 1650 BC. According to Plato, in ancient Greece, pederasty was a relationship and bond – whether sexual or chaste – between an adolescent boy and an adult man outside of his immediate family. While most Greek men engaged in relations with both women and boys, exceptions to the rule were known, some avoiding relations with women, and others rejecting relations with boys. In Rome, relations with boys took a more informal and less civic path, men either taking advantage of dominant social status to extract sexual favors from their social inferiors, or carrying on illicit relationships with freeborn boys.

Analogous relations were documented among other ancient peoples, such as the Thracians, and the Celts. According to Plutarch, the ancient Persians, too, had long practiced it, an opinion seconded by Sextus Empiricus who asserted that the laws of the Persians "recommended" the practice. Herodotus, however, asserts they learned copulation with boys (παισὶ μίσγονται) from the Greeks, by the use of that term reducing their practice to what John Addington Symonds describes as the "vicious form" of pederasty, as opposed to the more restrained and cultured one valued by the Greeks. Plutarch, however, counters Herodotus by pointing out that the Persians had been castrating boys long before being exposed to the mores of the Greeks.

Opposition to the carnal aspects of pederasty existed concurrently with the practice, both within and outside of the cultures in which it was found. Among the Greeks, a few cities prohibited it, and in others, such as Sparta, only the chaste form of pederasty was permitted, according to Xenophon and others. Likewise, Plato's writings devalue and finally condemn sexual intercourse with the boys one loved, while valuing the self-disciplined lover who abstained from consummating the relationship.

Judaism and Christianity also condemned sodomy (while defining that term variously), a theme later promulgated by Islam and, later still, by the Baha'i Faith. Within the Baha'i faith, pederasty is the only mention of any type of homosexuality by Bahá'u'lláh. "We shrink, for very shame, from treating of the subject of boys Commit not that which is forbidden you in Our Holy Tablet, and be not of those who rove distractedly in the wilderness of their desires."

Within this blanket condemnation of sodomy, pederasty in particular was a target. The 2nd-century preacher Clement of Alexandria used divine pederasty as an indictment of Greek religion and the mythological figures of Herakles, Apollo, Poseidon, Laius, and Zeus: "For your gods did not abstain even from boys. One loved Hylas, another Hyacinthus, another Pelops, another Chrysippus, another Ganymedes. These are the gods your wives are to worship!" Early legal codes prescribed harsh penalties for violators. The law code of the Visigothic king Chindasuinth called for both partners to be "emasculated without delay, and be delivered up to the bishop of the diocese where the deed was committed to be placed in solitary confinement in a prison." These punishments were often linked to the penance given after the Sacrament of Confession. At Rome, the punishment was burning at the stake since the time of Theodosius I (390). Nonetheless the practice continued to surface, giving rise to proverbs such as With wine and boys around, the monks have no need of the Devil to tempt them, an early Christian saying from the Middle East.

Pederasty was notable in Moorish Spain, and Tuscany and northern Italy during the Renaissance. and also medieval and Tsarist Russia.

Elsewhere, it was practiced in pre-Modern Japan until the Meiji restoration.

Sexual expression between adults and adolescents is not well studied and since the 1990s has been often conflated with pedophilia. Nonetheless, such relationships have raised issues of morality and functionality, agency for the youth, and parental authority. They also raise issues of legality in those cases where the consenting minor is below the legal age of consent. Homosexual pederasty has been deemed beneficial by ancient philosophers, Japanese samurai, and modern writers such as Oscar Wilde. In many societies, it was justified on the grounds that love was the best foundation for teaching courage as well as civic and cultural values, and that man–boy relations were superior to relations with a woman.