Women, Boys, and the Paradigm of Athenian Pederasty

Abstract

I begin with a passage in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (411 bc) to which I shall have occasion to return again in what follows.1 The women of Athens, having agreed earlier to withhold sex from their husbands in order to compel them to end the war between Athens and Sparta, have now seized control of the Athenian acropolis. The purpose of this second stratagem is to prevent the Athenian men from gaining access to the treasury; thus, they will no longer be able to maintain the fleet on which Athens’s power depends and will be obliged to accept peace. At this point in the action, a proboulos, one of the officials elected to exercise plenipotentiary powers in the aftermath of the defeat of the Athenian armada in Syracuse three years earlier, arrives at the gate to the acropolis in order to force an entry into the citadel.2 When he learns the nature of the women’s plot, he complains that the Athenian men themselves are to blame if their wives are now behaving in so outrageous a manner: