Spartan pederasty?

[Marius_Ursus]

The argument is not if paedophils existed. They did.
Perhaps they expressed themselves in art too.
The practice was not encouraged though.
Imagine if in 2000 years someone finds erotic art of our time and wonders about our attitutes.

It most porobably was as in our time.
If you had the money or you were essential to the city's defence you could get away with lots of things.

Plus if you translate Aristofanes accuratly you will get sued by minority groups for inciting hatered against them.

Kind regards

This is a very good point and one that can be amplified with the idea that if they had rampant homosexuality, wouldn't they have had much smaller populations? I recall speaking with an old friend years ago about the "homosexual" attitudes in ancient Greece (She did her Master's Thesis on Alexandrian iconography in Egyptian coin, so I trusted her knwoledge and interpretation of classical Greek culture.), and she explained to me that what we, today, see in homosexuals isn't what the Greeks considered love between men. It wasn't an effiminacy or a "flaming homosexual" personality. The attitude was best explained that no woman can understand a man on the same level that another man can, that the bond between soldiers and Olympians was stronger than anything a man and woman can experience, so they developed "love affairs" that weren't really sexual in nature. They were expressions of what, I believe Homer, called "pure love".