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Re: Really?

Posted by diogenes on 2025-January-23 08:50:25, Thursday
In reply to Re: Really? posted by Eric Tazelaar on 2025-January-22 21:14:22, Wednesday
Your "impressions" have no evidential value whatever. If you are interested in discovering the truth, then I can only refer you to the scholarship on the subject. The Lear and Cantarella volume would be a good start, with its detailed examination of vase depictions of pederasty and what this tells us about these relationships.
It would not ... seem exaggerated to us to say that the erastes is portrayed as a beggar. He offers gifts and caresses and receives only disinterested acquiescence in return, and he receives it by crouching in front of an eromenos who overtops and overlooks him. (p. 114)
Elsewhere, the authors show how this wasn't the whole story, and that the eromenos was frequently far from "disinterested", but an enthusiastic participant. Nevertheless, "the erastes gives the eromenos a gift in return for access to his genitals and/or thighs. The eromenos retains control of his self, which ... remains focused on his own interests, which the erastes' gift satisfies. (p. 87) The iconography "constantly and insistently distinguishes pederastic courtship scenes from scenes of violence." (ibid.)

It is impossible for me to summarise all the evidence contained in one volume, let alone all the evidence scattered in innumerable volumes of scholarship. Edmund's website gives access to much of this material to anyone who is genuinely interested.

The whole notion that freeborn Greeks would permit the violation of their sons is absurd. Really, attempting to combat the bigotry of those who insist on looking at history through the lens of modern ideology is a singularly pointless exercise, and I don't intend to waste my time any further.


diogenes
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