Hi. Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you

with the support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust, online at

W.W. History of Philosophy.net. Today's episode, Wings of Desire, Plato's

erotic dialogues.

The past, as they say, is a foreign country, and ancient Greece can often seem to be a very foreign country indeed.

Some aspects of Greek culture do find echoes in our own, even if the echoes are distant ones. There aren't really any sophists nowadays, but there are spin doctors.

The pre-Sachratics did philosophy of of nature and we do science.

Europe-A-Dian tragedy and Aristophanic comedy are very distant ancestors of modern theatre,

and so on.

In this episode, though, I'll be looking at Plato's reaction to a Greek cultural practice that really has no parallel in our own.

Petarasty.

Nowadays, sexual liaisons between adult men and young boys are not merely illegal, but among

the most repugnant moral crimes that can be committed.

But in ancient Greece, such liaisons played an accepted role in civil life.

These pedarastic relationships were seen as a way of educating young men in the ways of the

Polis.

And I do mean young men, boys really.

Ideally, the younger partner would be in the bloom of youth

before the first growth of their beard.

This boy was called the beloved,

while the lover was the older man. Notice the implication that the attraction was not necessarily mutual.

It was assumed that the older lover would take physical pleasure in their partnering,

...