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around 20.5 years." (81) Thus, according to Davidson, it was not until he was in his
21st year that a Greek youth acquired the physical characteristics (marked by full
facial hair, stature, and body mass) of an adult male. The various Greek
nomenclatures we know of for the periodization of male childhood, youth, and
adulthood are inexact and slippery, even when one factors in the phenomenon of ageclasses--the detailed exposition of which is perhaps the most notable contribution to
scholarship made by Davidson in this book--but nothing in all these classificatory
schemes suggests an age-gap of approximately four years, as posited by Davidson,
between Greek and modern male puberty. It is hard to believe that Athenian youths
would have been enrolled as citizens and subjected to the rigors of military training as
they entered ephebeia if at the age of eighteen they were just in the early phase of
their puberty. Looking at another ancient Mediterranean society, with living
conditions comparable to those of ancient Greece, we must consider the fact that in
Rome citizen-boys nearly always assumed the toga virilis well before the age of 18,
typically in the 14-16 age-range; again, it is difficult to believe that they would have
done so before the start of puberty. I am prepared to admit an average age-gap of up
to two years, but no more, between ancient Mediterranean and modern puberty for
males and females alike.
4. Given his estimate that a large proportion, and perhaps even the majority of
pederastic relationships involved males who were not far apart in age, and could even
be coevals, Davidson is bound to reject the theory, propounded by Erich Bethe in the
1900s and revived at great length in the 1980s by Bernard Sergent, that the highly
institutionalized homoerotic bonding between erastai and eromenoi in parts of Dorian
Greece--which was cemented in some Cretan city-states by peculiar rites of
abduction, seclusion and gift-giving--fulfilled a crucial initiatory function for the
younger partner, enabling and marking his entry into male adulthood. Rather,
according to Davidson, the purpose of the relationship in its most ideal form was
viewed by the Greeks as creating "syzygy," "pair-bonding," the word being
introduced by him in the title of chapter 13, "Syzygies." Such close, passionate
relationships were celebrated in numerous Greek myths and memorialized in Greek
epic and art already at an early point of time so that their homoerotic coloring must
not be understood as the work of late- archaic or classical Greek culture. Thus, for
Davidson, as becomes already clear earlier in his book, the profound friendship
between Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad is indeed deeply erotic : "The main reason
why I think the Greeks of Homer's time would read the relationship of Achilles and
Patroclus in the same way that the classical Greeks would read it is because I think
the phenomenon was already around in 700 B.C, and the main reason I think that is
because it appears in so many different places in so many different forms with so
many peculiar practices." (299) One will appreciate that Davidson's foregrounding of
close pair-bonding, so vividly fabulized by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium, while
it articulates Greek pederasty in what many persons, both past and present, would
regard as its most sublime form, has the effect of removing from it much of the
pedagogic rationale attached to it by canonical Greek authors such as Plato,
Xenophon and Plutarch, by 19th century Hellenophiles such as Shelley, Symonds and
Wilde, and even by some modern scholars (cf, for instance, William A. Percy's 1996
book, Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece).
Is Davidson pressing male homoerotic "syzygy" as a precursor of today's contested
same-sex marriage, as Hubbard, and even more Jope, accuse him of doing? I'll
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