1 Work by optimystik
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Summary
In ancient Greece the custom of sexual relationships between young boys and adult men, paiderastia, or pederasty, was a formalized social institution. The ideal was that an adult man (the erastes) would take a boy (the eromenos) under his wing and into his bed and thus provide an initiation for the boy into adult aristocratic society. The sex they shared was thought advantageous for both. The relationship provided the young boy with a socially recognized coming-of-age function, as well as access to wider and better social networks. In turn the erastes had his sexual needs fulfilled by his young eromenos. Paiderastia was already a very old custom by the time it reached its zenith in the 5th c. BC. After the Roman conquest of Greece, pederastic relationships of this kind continued to the end of antiquity, but, under the influence of on-again-off-again Roman moralizing, were never as common or as universally praised as they had been in the past.
This is a story of one such pederastic love affair between a Roman man in his 30's (Caius) and a Greek boy of 11 (Attalus), set in Corinth in the second century AD, well after the heyday of the erastes-eromenos ideal had passed.