Likewise, Plato's writings devalue and finally condemn sexual intercourse with the boys one loved, while glorifying the self-disciplined lover who abstained from consummating the relationship. Among the Greeks, a few cities prohibited pederasty, and in others, such as Sparta, some claimed that only the chaste form was permitted. Opposition to the carnal aspects of pederasty existed concurrently with the practice, both within and outside of the cultures in which it was found. According to Plutarch, the ancient Persians, too, had long practiced it (though according to Herodotus they learned of pederasty from the Greeks ).
In Rome relations with boys took a more informal and less civic, often illicit path.Īnalogous relations were documented among other ancient peoples, such as the Thracians, the Celts and various Germanic peoples such the Heruli and the Taifali. 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. As idealized by the Greeks, pederasty was a relationship and bond–whether sexual or chaste–between an adolescent boy and an adult man outside of his immediate family.
In antiquity, pederasty as an educational institution for the inculcation of moral and cultural values, as well as a sexual diversion, was practiced from the Archaic period onwards in Ancient Greece. Rendered as "age-structured homosexuality" it is, together with gender-structured relations and egalitarian relations one of the three main subdivisions of homosexuality proposed by anthropologists, and the most common historically.Ī similar term, pedophilia, is related, but is used to denote the condition in which children are the preferred sexual object. Pederastic relations can have widely dissimilar manifestations – they can be spiritual or materialistic, lawful or transgressive, loving or commercial, compassionate or abusive – and have been documented from prehistory to modern times. The term pederasty embraces a wide range of erotic practices between adult males and adolescent boys.