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glbtq.com article: "Cicero and Tiro Roman inconsistency in matters of love is amusingly demonstrable in the case of Cicero himself. Despite his public posture in the Senate and his philosophical writings, in which he attacks Greek love and erotic poetry, we have evidence, in the letters of Pliny the Younger, that Cicero in private life was less austere. Pliny, wondering whether it might be respectable for a Roman official to write erotic verse, plucks up courage from the example of Cicero, who, he tells us, wrote poems about kissing his freedman, Tiro. Tiro, who began life as a slave, became Cicero's secretary and literary executor. After his mentor's death, he wrote his biography and had a distinguished literary career of his own. The relation thus provides a parallel in Roman life with the Greek erastes-eromenos bond and the traditions of the Platonic Academy. Roman literature in the last days of the republic and the reign of Augustus exhibits a deep cultural conflict. Livy, in his history, had painted a picture of early Rome as a society of unpolished, hard-working farmers who despised luxury and dissipation." From BoyWiki: "Cicero and Marcus Tullius Tiro Tiro was first a slave and later a freedman of Cicero's. Theirs was a life-long friendship and collaboration. From their letters to each other (a collection curated by Tiro himself, which can cut both ways) we deduce only friendship, mutual appreciation, and Cicero's concern for Tiro's weak health - despite which he lived to the age of 99. But Pliny the Younger has another take on the affair. While reading a book about Cicero, he stumbles upon a poem by Cicero himself, in which he laments that young Tiro tricked him and did not deliver the kisses he had promised for after dinner. Pliny admires Cicero's frankness and takes it as inspiration for similar confessions of his own. Why should his own loves remain hidden, Pliny asks, and why fear letting on that he too has been the target of such tricks, and tasted the fleeting nature of boyish favors, and been inflamed by boyish deceptions. [164] The art of Pliny's letters: a poetics of allusion in the private correspondence By Ilaria Marchesi p.82 ...to whom the master wrote an amatory epigram bemoaning Tiro's refusal to let himself be kissed) he is nonetheless seen as having benefited from his connection with his master, as he went on to have a distinguished literary career of his own - as well as being Cicero's literary executor. Thus the couple is seen as a Roman example of the erastes/eromenos pair. THREE OTHER FOOTNOTES: Josephus, Ant. 15:25-30 John Dugan, Making of a New Man: Ciceronian Self-fashioning in the Rhetorical Works p.347 glbtq.com: Roman Literature - Cicero Seems likely. M. http://www.glbtq.com/literature/roman_lit%2C2.html https://www.boywiki.org/en/Pederastic_relationships_in_classical_antiquity |