Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece
William A. Percy
[University of Illinois Press, 1996]

Description from University of Illinois Press: Combining impeccable scholarship with accessible, straightforward prose, Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece argues that institutionalized pederasty began after 650 B.C., far later than previous authors have thought, and was initiated as a means of stemming overpopulation in the upper class.

William A. Percy III maintains that Cretan sages established a system under which a young warrior in his early twenties took a teenager of his own aristocratic background as a beloved until the age of thirty, when service to the state required the older partner to marry. The practice spread with significant variants to other Greek-speaking areas. In some places it emphasized development of the athletic, warrior individual, while in others both intellectual and civic achievement were its goals. In Athens it became a vehicle of cultural transmission, so that the best of each older cohort selected, loved, and trained the best of the younger.

Pederasty was from the beginning both physical and emotional, the highest and most intense type of male bonding. These pederastic bonds, Percy believes, were responsible for the rise of Hellas and the "Greek miracle": in two centuries the population of Attica, a mere 45,000 adult males in six generations, produced an astounding number of great men who laid the enduring foundations of Western thought and civilization.

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Reviews/Commentaries:

On Kenneth Dover's Greek Homosexuality

On Homosexuality in Greece and Rome by Thomas Hubbard

“The general thesis of this well-argued and highly informative book is that the practice of pederasty in archaic Greece was not a survival of some primitive ritualistic act, but a consciously devised institution that was at the heart of a boldly innovative culture whose achievements rightly remain a source of wonder…this is an extraordinarily well-researched, well-written, and carefully argued book that deserves serious attention.”
-Alden A. Mosshammer, University of California, San Diego



“…Greek pederasty has to be approached on its own terms and has to be examined free from confusion with androphilia (or modern homosexuality) and in terms of its own values. In sum Percy has made a major contribution to the scholarship on Greek homosexuality. The book should add to the debate about homosexuality in history and its cautious conclusions should be diligently read and digested by scholars in all fields of history.”
-Vern L. Bullough, PhD



“This is a very thorough and scholarly book. It fully belongs in the company of the other great works on the topic: John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883); Hans Licht (pseudo. Of Paul Brandt), Sexual Life in Ancient Greece (English Edition 1932); and K.J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (1978).
-John Lauritsen



“The first study in English to give a detailed account of this crucial formative period. Its wealth of new documentation and challenging new hypotheses will inaugurate a significant debate on an important topic.”

- Lou Crompton, author of Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia
in 19th Century England



“A major contribution to the scholarship on Greek homosexuality. Percy’s command of the primary sources is exemplary, and his handling of the vast array of scholarship on this subject is well informed and judicious.”
- Beert C. Verstraete, Acadia University

From The International History Review, Volume 19, 1997, p.887:

The body is currently a sexy topic in Classical studies (see, for example, A. Richlin, ‘Towards a History of Body History’ in Inventing Ancient Culture: Historicism, Periodization, and Ancient History, ed. M. Golden and P. Toohey [1997], pp.16-35; or A. Stewart Art, Desire, and the Body in Ancient Greece [1997]). So too is confessional, self-fashioning historiography, whether it be race, sexual orientation, or creed that is the driving impetus to the public exhibition of the writing self. Greek pederasty, moreover, since the first appearance of Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality (1978; updated edition, 1989) has remained a central element in the body of innovative work devoted to ancient Greek and Roman gender and sexuality (or sexualities).

William Armstrong Percy III, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, is not therefore doing anything terribly daring or original in writing a crusading, self-confessedly homophilic account of pederasty in ancient Greece (‘Archaic’ is intended to indicate that its chronological focus is on the period roughly 700-500 BCE). What does, however, make Percy’s contributions unusual are, first, that he is a man of a certain age, intellectually formed well before the ‘60s and ‘70s generations for whom (in Richlin’s words Inventing Ancient Culture, p. 23) ‘body and political liberation movements intermingled’, and second, that he is a medievalist by specialization, not an ancient historian.

For the most part he has done his homework well. Rather than merely parroting Dover, he seeks to correct or improve upon him in three main ways. First, he cogently restates against him the case for ‘initiatory’ pederasty as a social institution, in Crete (the alleged fons et origo from which institutionalized pederasty was diffused in Greece) and Sparta. Second, he divides up his carefully analysed source material on a regional basis, seeking to distinguish between, say, Spartan and Athenian forms of pederasty rather than regarding the evidence from one city or area as transferable to another. Third, with rather touching acknowledgment to Werner Jaeger, he emphasizes the pedagogical function of pederasty above all others. His bibliography is a rich if not altogether up-to-date or accurate resource, including even a tantalizingly unpublished 1985 work by Parker Rossman that refines ‘in even greater detail the various forms of pederasty that have been observed’ (p. 194 n.15).

On the other hand, the book also has some serious imperfections. It is inconsistent to distinguish sharply and plausibly between (ancient) ‘situational’ or (modern) ‘androphile’ ‘homosexuality’ on the one hand, and (ancient) ‘pederasty’ on the other, while simultaneously declining even to take part, let alone take sides, in the intellectual debate between ‘essentialists’ (a gay is a gay is a gay) and ‘social contructionists’ (there were no gays before the later nineteenth century at the earliest). The appearance of his article ‘Greek Pederasty’ in the Journal of Homosexuality (1987) does nothing to clarify matters. To classify and explain the intellectual court of the tyrant Polycrates of Samos as diagnostically ‘pederastic’ seems hugely reductionist, not to mention parti pris, a criticism that applies in spades to Percy’s unconscionable coinage ‘pederastic democracy’ for the Athens of Aristeides and Themistocles. Percy’s use of ‘Ionian’ and ‘Dorian’ as more than dialectical labels, as if they picked out genetically based cultural oppositions, is to fall victim to the snares of ancient rhetoric and the wiles of its less savoury modern inheritors (of which he is, however, aware). If pedersastic pedagogy was, as Percy claims, what most accounted for the cultural greatness of early Greece, why, despite is alleged persistence as an institution, did it cease to have that effect during the Classical (post-500) and subsequent ages?

Finally, inevitably, Percy’s non-specialist inexperience does occasionally deserve palmary punishment. For example, Pausanias the character in Plato’s Symposium is confused with Pausanias the second-century CE travel writer (Index s.v. to p. 29). The idea that the ‘Lelantine War’, itself probably a factoid, ‘lasted almost two centuries’ is ludicrous, not to mention the belief that ‘Brelich (1961)’ represents the ‘latest scholarship’ (p. 212 n. 4). More seriously, the proposition that ‘Chrimes’ argument that Sparta preserved its agoge (rigorous training for the Spartiates) with only insignificant changes and brief interruptions from Archaic to imperial [Roman] times is convincing’ (p. 82) is not cogent. A reading of especially A. Spawforth’s contribution to P.A. Cartledge and Spawforth’s Hellenistic and Roman Sparta (1989), not cited, would presumably have been enough to convince him otherwise. Now Nigel Kennell’s Gymnasium of Virtue (1995) must surely complete his re-education.

Nevertheless, this is not a book to be despised, and especially outside Classical circles it may well have some deservedly positive impact.

Clare College, Cambridge
P. A. Cartledge
William A. Percy Online © 2005