Why Male–Male Sex Was Normal in Ancient Greece

In classical Athens, no one would have blinked if a respected citizen like Pericles had a teenage male lover and a wife at home. What might get him mocked was not that he desired a boy, but if he seemed too obsessed, too passive, or too unmanly about it.

Male–male attraction in ancient Greece was common enough that philosophers wrote about it, vase painters depicted it, and city-states like Sparta and Thebes built military ideals around it. Yet most of these men also married women and produced children. That jars against a modern world that sorts people into gay, straight, or bi and treats those as inner identities.

Male–male relationships in ancient Greece were not organized around sexual orientation. They were organized around age, status, and gendered roles. Same-sex behavior was widespread, but the Greeks did not think in terms of a fixed, inner “gay” identity.

To understand how so many men could engage in male–male sex without most of them being what we would call gay, you have to step into a society that cared less about the gender of your partner and more about who was on top, who was older, and who kept his dignity.

What was Greek pederasty, really?

When modern readers hear “pederasty,” they often picture only abuse. In Greek sources, the word paiderastia literally means “love of boys,” but it referred to a socially recognized pattern: an older male (erastes, the lover) courting an adolescent boy (eromenos, the beloved), usually in his mid-teens.

In many Greek cities, especially Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, this was an idealized bond. The older man was supposed to educate, sponsor, and model virtue for the younger. The younger was supposed to respond with admiration, loyalty, and, yes, some level of erotic favor. Think of it as a mix of mentorship, courtship, and status ritual, wrapped in a lot of poetry.

Greek pederasty was a socially approved relationship between an adult citizen male and an adolescent male, framed as education and moral formation but often including sexual acts. It was age-structured and role-structured, not an identity label.

There were rules. The boy should not appear greedy or prostitute himself. The older man should not be crude or coercive. Public art often shows the erastes reaching for the boy’s chin or genitals while the boy stands somewhat stiff, a visual code for “he is yielding, but with modesty.”

At the same time, adult male citizens were expected to marry women and produce legitimate children. A man could have a wife, female prostitutes, and a male beloved without any sense that these desires contradicted each other.

So what? Because pederasty was defined by age and role rather than by a category like “gay,” it could be widespread without implying that most Greek men had a fixed same-sex orientation in the modern sense.

Why did Greek culture encourage male–male bonds?

Three big structural features of Greek society pushed male–male relationships into the center of elite culture: gender segregation, citizen ideals, and the politics of hierarchy.

First, gender segregation. Respectable citizen women in places like classical Athens were married young, kept mostly indoors, and excluded from symposia (drinking parties), political assemblies, and formal education. Elite men spent most of their waking hours with other men: in the gymnasium, the assembly, the law courts, the army, and the symposium. If you are a status-conscious Athenian man, the people you debate, admire, compete with, and drink with are men and boys, not your wife.

Second, the ideal of the citizen male. Greek culture, especially in the classical period, celebrated the male body and male virtue. Statues, athletics, and poetry all fixated on the beauty of young men. Plato’s dialogues, Xenophon’s works, and lyric poets like Theognis all present the love of boys as a refined taste that fits an educated citizen.

Third, hierarchy and control. Greek cities were obsessed with status: citizen vs. slave, freeborn vs. foreigner, male vs. female, adult vs. youth. Sexuality slotted neatly into that. The honorable role for a citizen man was to be the active, penetrating partner with social inferiors: women, slaves, prostitutes, or youths. The shameful position for a citizen man was to be penetrated, which was coded as feminine and subordinate.

Put bluntly, Greek sexual ethics asked: Are you acting like a dominant free man, or like someone’s woman or slave? The gender of your partner mattered less than whether you were on the “manly” side of the equation.

So what? Because male–male desire was woven into male education, civic ideals, and status hierarchies, Greek culture did not treat it as a rare trait but as a normal part of elite male life.

Did Greeks think in terms of sexual orientation?

No. Not in the way modern societies usually do.

Greek authors did recognize that some people seemed especially drawn to their own sex. Plato’s Symposium has Aristophanes tell a myth about humans once being double-bodied and then split, so that some now seek men, some women, some both. Later writers like Athenaeus mention men who prefer boys and avoid women.

But there is no Greek word that cleanly maps onto “homosexual” as an identity. The closest you get are labels for roles and behaviors. A man could be mocked as a kinaidos (a kind of effeminate, sexually passive male) or praised as a self-controlled lover of boys. These were moral and gendered judgments, not claims about an inner, lifelong orientation.

Greek sexual categories focused on active vs. passive, free vs. slave, citizen vs. non-citizen, and adult vs. youth. They did not sort people into fixed types based on the sex of their preferred partners.

Modern historians and anthropologists often stress this point: sexual behavior is universal, but the way societies classify and interpret it varies wildly. A man who has sex with men in Athens in 430 BCE is not automatically a “gay man” in the sense that phrase carries in 2024.

So what? Because the Greeks lacked our orientation categories, same-sex behavior could be common without creating a visible minority identity, which is why ancient evidence does not map neatly onto modern statistics about “how many people are gay.”

What actually happened in these relationships?

The Reddit question cuts to the heart of it: were these men genuinely attracted to boys, or just going through motions demanded by culture and status?

The honest answer is: both, and it varied. Some men clearly felt intense erotic and emotional attraction to youths. We have poetry full of longing, jealousy, and heartbreak. Theognis writes about loving a boy named Cyrnus. Anacreon sings about desire for young men. Plato’s dialogues, especially the Phaedrus and Symposium, circle obsessively around male–male love, whether idealized or physical.

At the same time, the system was heavily scripted. A respectable youth was not supposed to be too eager. The older man was supposed to present his pursuit as admiration for the boy’s virtue and beauty, not raw lust. There were civic myths that framed these bonds as producing courage and loyalty, like the Sacred Band of Thebes, a unit of 150 pairs of male lovers said to fight more bravely because they did not want to shame each other.

Sexual acts themselves are described in sources, though often coyly. Vase paintings and some texts suggest that intercrural sex (between the thighs) was common, perhaps because it avoided the more feminized connotations of anal penetration of a citizen youth. Other acts certainly occurred, but the key was that the boy should not be treated as a prostitute or a long-term passive partner.

Many of these older men also married women, sometimes quite early. The same man might court a boy in his twenties, marry a teenage girl in his thirties, and later visit female prostitutes. Greek culture did not demand that he choose one gender forever.

So what? Because desire and duty were tangled together, you cannot cleanly separate “real attraction” from “social script,” which is exactly why Greek evidence challenges simple modern stories about sexuality being either 100% innate or 100% social.

What changed when Christianity and new norms arrived?

Greek norms did not last unchanged. Even within the classical world, there were critics. Plato in the Laws has a character argue that male–male sex is against nature and bad for the city. Some Greek cities regulated pederasty more tightly than others. There was never one uniform practice across all of “ancient Greece.”

Under the Roman Empire, attitudes shifted further. Roman elites inherited Greek ideas but plugged them into Roman values. Roman men were even more obsessed with active vs. passive roles. A Roman citizen could penetrate male slaves, prostitutes, or foreigners without much scandal. But an adult citizen man who took the passive role could be ridiculed as unmanly. The Greek-style idealization of citizen youth as beloveds faded in many places.

With the rise of Christianity from the 1st to 4th centuries CE, a new moral framework entered the picture. Christian writers like Paul of Tarsus, John Chrysostom, and later church councils condemned male–male sex as sinful, often grouping it with adultery and other sexual acts outside marriage. By the late Roman and Byzantine periods, laws criminalized certain same-sex acts more harshly.

Over centuries, Western societies moved toward a model where legitimate sex was defined by heterosexual marriage, procreation, and Christian norms. Same-sex acts did not disappear, but they were pushed underground and recast as deviance or sin.

So what? Because later religious and legal changes made same-sex behavior more dangerous and stigmatized, the kind of open, elite male–male culture seen in classical Greece became much rarer, which feeds modern illusions that such behavior is inherently marginal.

Does this challenge the idea of fixed sexual orientation?

The Reddit question ends on the big modern anxiety: if Greek men so casually mixed male and female partners, does that mean sexual orientation is not “real” or innate?

Most historians and anthropologists would say two things at once.

First, there is good evidence that some people, across cultures and eras, have persistent patterns of attraction that are not easily changed by social pressure. Ancient texts themselves hint at this. Some men are portrayed as consistently preferring boys, others as preferring women, others as flexible. Modern research on sexual orientation supports the idea that for many people, attraction is not a simple choice.

Second, how those attractions are expressed, labeled, and valued is very much shaped by culture. In ancient Greece, a man who felt strong attraction to both sexes had a ready-made script for expressing male–male desire without giving up marriage and fatherhood. In a modern society that sorts people into “gay” and “straight,” the same pattern might push him to pick a side, suppress one set of desires, or reinterpret his past.

Sexual orientation is partly innate, but the social meaning of desire, and the range of acceptable behaviors, depend heavily on time and place.

So what? Because Greek history shows that human sexual potential is broad, but culture channels it into specific patterns, it undercuts any claim that today’s categories are timeless or that past societies can be mapped neatly onto our identity labels.

Why ancient Greek sexuality still matters today

Ancient Greece has been a battleground in modern culture wars. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, some European writers romanticized Greek pederasty as a noble model for male–male love. Others used it as a warning about decadence. Today, people on all sides still reach for Greece to argue about whether queerness is “natural” or “Western” or “decadent.”

The historical record is stubborn. It shows a society where male–male sex was not a marginal hobby for a tiny minority, but a visible, sometimes admired part of elite male life. It also shows a society that tied that sex to hierarchy, age difference, and rigid gender roles in ways that many modern people, including LGBTQ activists, would reject.

Looking at Greek sexuality does not give us a simple model to copy or condemn. What it does give is a reminder that our categories are recent inventions. “Gay,” “straight,” and “bi” as identity boxes are products of the last 150 years. The Greeks had different boxes: active vs. passive, citizen vs. slave, lover vs. beloved.

When someone on Reddit asks, “How could so many Greek men do this if most men today aren’t gay?” the answer is that they are trying to use a 21st-century sorting system on a 5th-century BCE society. The fit will always be off.

So what? Because Greek sexuality shows how flexible human behavior is and how powerful social scripts can be, it forces us to question easy assumptions about what is “natural,” what is “normal,” and how much of our own sexual identities are shaped by the world we happen to be born into.