Talk:Erastes

Comments

What is the source for this? Some of the information seems similar to what's in Plato's Symposium, but the tone is so different that it's unclear. DanB DanD 01:02, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Mostly from the article in the French Wikipedia. Consider it a starting point, it needs quite a bit of expansion and clarification. Haiduc 01:09, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Categorization

This article is currently in the categories Ancient Greece, Category:Sexuality in the classical world and Category:Greek Pederasty. The last of these is a subcategory, by degrees, of the other two. Should the article be in both? WP:SUBCAT has some guidelines, but I'm not certain how they apply in this case. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 00:06, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Regarding " user:Erastes Homoerotic Historical Fiction "

This link should not be in the article page since it is a personal advertisement. Haiduc 14:10, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Intracrural sex vs. penetration

This article comes pretty close to saying that there was no actual sex going on. This is not in line with current scholarship. Enter "erastes penetration" in Google Books and you'll find lots of stuff. Ifnkovhg (talk) 05:29, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I was puzzled by your claim, and immediately went to look at the first three books dragged up by your suggested search. The first (and also a very recent work which presumably presents a current, rather than an obsolete, view), Sex from Plato to Paglia, is pretty clear: "To consummate desire did not have to involve penetrating or being penetrated." Soble goes on to say (803) that there is controversy about penetration of the beloved being seen as deviant. Nussbaum is not useful here, but Fisher (42) associates buggery with prostitution.

As far as claiming that actual sex was not going on, I disagree. There are many forms of actual sex, and the one most frequently depicted is treated explicitly in the article: "frontal, standing up, and between the thighs." But we should probably also discuss fondling, since that is almost universal in the vase depictions.Haiduc (talk) 10:52, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Forgive me, Haiduc, but I think you might be misreading Soble. His first statement... "...did not have to involve pentrating...) acknowledges that the pederastic relationship could involve penetration; in the second excerpt he merely equivocates as to its prevalence and reputation. I think you might be reading Fisher a little too selectively, as well. While Fisher correctly points out that sodomy had the connotation of prostitution (as well as slavery), he does not suggest that passive anal sex was limited to prostitutes and slaves.

The issue at hand is the difference between representation and reality. It is true that man-on-boy anal sex is less attested in vase painting, for example. But that could simply be a matter of convention and decorum (cf. the twin beds that married couples used in 1950's sitcoms). Passages from Aristophanes as well as grafitti near gymnasia suggest that there was a fair amount of sodomy happening within the erastes-eromenos relationship. Was it the norm? Who knows?

See Dover, Halperin, Foucault re: Greek homosexuality. Ifnkovhg (talk) 23:55, 21 June 2009 (UTC)