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Beloved Charioteers

 Straton of Sardis, Musa Paidike (The Boyish Muse), in The Greek Anthology, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1918, XII #228 (Author's rendition) Plato, Symposium, Tom Griffith, Tr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986, 181d B. Sergent, Homosexuality in Greek Myth, A. Goldhammer, Tr. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986, 40. 4The artistic convention for scenes of seduction was to show the lover fondling the young man's genitals with one hand, and with the other cupping his chin to look him in the eye. Youths were shown putting up various degrees of resistance, as it was not cool to give in without a fight. In this case the young man is presenting only token resistance, for he is not preventing anything. Two other men, one holding a sacrificial fawn, dance delightedly. 5Or, in Greek, eromenos for "beloved" and erastes for "lover." In Greek poetry, there seems to be a regular homoerotic connection between the chariot rider (the senior fighter and the chariot's owner) and the chariot driver (the younger male, often coming of age, clearly the less-experienced fighter) The Spartan terms are evocative: The youth was the aïtas, or "hearer," and his lover, the eispnelas, or "inspirer." <li>Xenophon, Symposium VIII, and The Lacedemonian Republic, II, in R. Peyrefitte, La Muse Garçonniere, Paris: Flammarion, 1973, 150.</li> <li>Callimachus, Aetia, Iambi, Hecale and Other Fragments, C. A. Trypanis, Tr. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1958, 571.</li> <li>See Lucian's Different Loves, Part II, p. 37 in this volume.</li> </ol>123