Paıdeía 27
ing to select from among the early adolescent boys what the Greeks called a
paıdıká or for preferring as his erō ́menos a boy endowed with wealth to one
virtuous in character. As a surrogate father, the eıspnē ́las would be held per-
sonally responsible for the conduct of the boy that he chose. It was his task to
prepare the boy for his duties as a citizen and soldier, and he was probably
expected to ease the admission of his paıdıká into a sussıtíon. When this was
accomplished, the younger of the two would in turn become an eıspnē ́las him-
self and take on a surrogate son, abandoning the passive for the active homo-
erotic role as the entire process repeated itself in accord with the elaborate
rituals and rules of decorum that governed its course. Finally, when the time
came for marriage, the young man carried off his bride in a ritual abduction,
then left briefly to dine with his mess, and returned to find her waiting in the
dark, dressed in the cloak of a man, her hair cut short in the style of a boy.^65
For some, this transvestism no doubt eased what must have been an awkward
transition to heterosexuality.
The institution of pederasty did not preclude affection between husband
and wife. But, as Plutarch appears to have recognized, it was designed to en-
sure that the emotional ties to the homosexual be stronger than those to the
subsequent heterosexual partner. The ultimate purpose was that a young man’s
loyalty be fixed neither on the parents he had left, nor on the wife and son he
so rarely saw, but rather on his erastē ́s and paıdıká. In normal circumstances,
both were apparently members of his sussıtíon; and as a consequence, the two
would usually be stationed in his immediate vicinity—though not ordinarily,
given the difference in age, on either side of him in the battle formation. It is
not fortuitous that the Spartans customarily sacrificed to Eros before drawing
up their phalanx. They apparently thought that victory and their safety would
depend on the love that united the men about to be posted.^66
The attempt to loosen familial ties was part of a larger scheme. The house-
hold [ oîkos] was the chief obstacle to the city’s complete psychological absorp-
tion of the individual. For the ordinary Greek, as the initial sympathy of the
chorus and of the people of Thebes for the protagonist in Sophocles’ Antigone
makes clear, the oîkos represented a focus of loyalty independent of and po-
tentially opposed to the community in arms.^67 It provided the citizen with
an identity separate from his citizenship, and it consoled him, as his death
approached, with the prospect of living on through his offspring. Essential
though it may have been for the production and early rearing of children and
thereby for the survival of the pólıs, this rival stood in the way of the strategy