Games of Venus: An Anthology of Greek and Roman Erotic Verse from Sappho to Ovid

by Peter Bing

Perhaps the general cultural etiquette regarding homosexual relationships can shed some light on the problem. As we noted in the first part of this introduction, it was not considered proper for the boy (eromenos)to initiate a relationship with a man (erastes). There is, of course, the example in Plato's Symposium where Alcibiades—though the younger, and by all rights the one who should have been wooed—takes it on himself to court Socrates. But this example only proves the rule. For Alcibiades is himself aware of the peculiarity of his action and how it inverts the normal procedure, causing him to woo the much older Socrates as though he (Socrates) were the paidika (217b, literally “boy-things,” though used to denote the beloved). There is doubtless a deliberate and comic incongruity between Alcibiades’ previous characterization of Socrates as a Silenos (a hoary old satyr, 216d) and that here as a “boy-thing.”