The answer really depends on how we consider the question. For instance, if we were to ask whether ancient Greeks in the Classical period considered it automatically wrong to have sexual contact with an individual under the age of say, 18, the answer would be “no”. If we were to ask whether Classical Athenians or Spartans thought it was wrong to have sex with an Athenian or Spartan boy under the age of 18 it would be “yes”, because obviously that would be seen as abusive. But then these same apparently morally concerned men would see nothing wrong with having sex with an enslaved or prostituted male under this age or with marrying a girl in her tweens. Obviously, there is something more complex and alien under the hood of Greek culture, and we are going to have to dig into this if you want an answer to your question.

There are three main points to consider:

When did people grow up in ancient Greece and how does their concept of adulthood compare to ours?

In what ways did ancient Greeks try to protect youths from abuse?

Why are these questions important and what do we hope to gain by considering Greek opinions on pedophilia?

#Growing up in ancient Greece

The first thing we have to unravel is the concept of adulthood and childhood in ancient Greece, because the question itself hinges upon the idea of childhood and transgression against the innocent youth. So what made an adult in ancient Greece?

Broadly speaking, a girl matured when she had her first menses, but she was not really a woman until she married. The term for an unmarried adolescent girl was simply parthenos, which implied both youth and virginity, after marriage she was a full-fledged nymphe. But students of ancient Greece will realize that the most common term for a fully grown Greek woman is actually gyne, which denoted a woman who had a child.

For an Athenian girl marriage might occur anytime between 12 and 22, but most Athenians married in their mid-teens (14-17). A Spartan girl would marry around 18 or older. The reason for this cultural difference was not made out of respect for the girl’s emotional or developmental maturity, but out of differing rationale relating to maternity and other practical considerations.

For Athenians marriage was a way of creating a bond between two families, and the bride’s family was compensated with a dowry. This made it important for girls to be married off as soon as possible for financial and at times political reasons. Women in Sparta occupied different societal role as equal inheritors to their brothers. This made arranging marriages easier as grooms could expect that the bride would bring capital into his household. Additionally, the Spartan emphasis on the health and strength of the citizen body contributed to later average age for marriage. This is because the Spartans recognized the medical danger posed to mother’s under a certain age, which include an elevated risk of miscarriage, labour-related mortality, and other complications. As a consequence, Spartan women typically married at slightly later ages when their bodies were fully developed and better able to handle the strain of pregnancy and childbirth.

A boy (pais) became an adolescent or young man (neos) between the ages of 18 and 20. This was signalled by the appearance of facial hair and the more manlike appearance of his body. The fact that these changes occurred somewhat later than they do in most modern populations has been corroborated by archaeological evidence which suggests that adolescents in antiquity generally reached puberty a few years after their modern counterparts would have due to nutritional and environmental factors. It was only after a youth became a neos that they were considered to valid objects of romantic pursuit for other Greek men, and this time frame is hardly incompatible with the age of consent in modern Western countries.

So for both males and females, the physical signs of puberty signalled their departure from childhood but there were also different rites of passage associated with adulthood. For instance, Athenian girls dedicated their toys and childish possessions to Artemis, the goddess of maidenhood, before they married. Spartan girls had their cropped and were dressed in male clothing to prepare for their marriage. Spartan males over the age of 20 were separated from boys under this age, and were referenced in different terms, and Athenian males also reached certain rites of passage at this time. However, peak maturity for a man was usually placed around age 30, which is also when most Greek men married.

This late age of marriage made sense for the aristocracy because of social reasons surrounding a man's peer status and perceived maturity, but for the lower classes it would have been practical to wait for marriage as it allowed time for men to acquire the capital (through inheritance and labour) to sustain a household.

#Why age of consent matters in modern society, and why this becomes difficult to make sense of in ancient Greek society

The idea behind the concept of pedophilia is complex, but there are two major issues involved. The first is the issue of consent, and the idea that individuals without a certain minimal level of life experience are not capable of making potentially life-changing decisions and are easily manipulated or coerced. The second ties into the first, and is concerned with the potential for individuals with legal power and personal authority over a minor can easily abuse them. Modern societies around the world have created laws to prevent this, with varying levels of success but the central idea that children ought to be protected from sexual abuse is at least given lip service to.

Being able to understand this framework and the separate legal and moral framework which existed in ancient Greece is essential to deconstructing this question. For instance that central idea that no child should be abused under any circumstance seems obvious to us, but was utterly absent from ancient Greece. From helots, to slaves, captives from war, foreigners, and even the lower classes, there were demographics with little or no protection under the law, and no consideration in the eyes of the affluent Greek citizens whose writings survive. This was a society where slaves could be harmed or killed on a whim, where prostitutes were openly and routinely assaulted, and where unwanted infants were abandoned to die or be taken by slavers.

It was only free individuals who were protected under the law, and even then most of the laws and customs I am going to mention only applied to citizens who were themselves often a large minority of the Greek population. What this means is that historians can only make educated assumptions about "silent" or poorly represented social strata. For example, it is generally assumed that pederasty was much less common among the lower classes than it was with the aristocracy, but the homoerotic or homosexual relations were nonetheless fairly common. Unfortunately, we do not have the volume of literature or art necessary to really understand the social lives of the statistically average inhabitant of ancient Greece, so instead we talk about the fairly rich people who did leave a large mark on the historical record.

With this in mind, we can take a look at how the ancient Greeks felt about age and consent, including which groups of minors were protected and in what ways.

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