365 Project: Photo 023

This blog has been going for nearly two years now and so I thought it's about time I posted a picture of a graphically explicit act of homosexual paedophilia; and so I have. But don't get too excited, perverts, it's also a little bit artsy and I reckon I could even work a history lesson in if I tried.

The picture below is of the Warren Cup, one of the treasures of the British Museum. I work just a five minute walk from the British Museum and can frequently be found wandering its galleries during my lunch break. I was there today when I remembered that I still had to take today's photo for the 365 Project, the theme of which was Snuggle. I was thinking of ways I could best pull this off when I remembered that in the Roman Gallery sat the beautiful piece below. Made of silver sometime between 5-15CE the Warren Cup has two images hammered onto its surface, both of a similar nature. In the image below the active lover, the erastes, sits below the passive eromenos who we can tell is a young boy by the lack of beard, wreath and musculature. I chose this half of the cup to show as it has an extra element to it, a servant peeking in through the door to see if now would be a good time to disturb; I'm going to guess: no.

One of the reasons I like this cup, other than marvelling at the intricacy of 2,000 year old craftsmanship, is that it perfectly portrays the way cultures can change over time. Public buildings in Roman cities were very often adorned with scenes of a graphically sexual nature, it was the done thing, and there could have been nothing more normal than for a man to have sex with another man - homosexuality was so common that the Romans didn't even have a word for it. Also, incest and what we now call paedophilia were not frowned upon, especially amongst the ruling classes. The cornerstone of education in Ancient Greece was to pair up a young boy with an older male teacher; tutorials were thorough.

In the UK in 2013, far from commissioning an expensive piece of silverware to show off to your friends, the perpetrator of such an act would be incarcerated for the protection society. One of my pet hates, though, is when people today try to reframe the past through a modern lens, pronouncing events or ideas to be savage or brutal or wrong. The example that annoys me most frequently is that of the Maya, Toltecs and over Pre-Columbian cultures. There are so many interesting things to be leant but every documentary seems obsessed with portraying the human sacrifice associated with the cyclical demise of their cities and proclaiming it evil. It doesn't even have to be a culture of years gone by, however; there are plenty of disparate societies alive and kicking in the world today and what's wrong in one will be mainstream in another. The age of consent in Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy is 14, in Spain it is 13, for me that's too young, but hey, they can do what they like.

Cultures, by their very nature, change. Think of your grandparents as young children and what would have been considered 'normal' or acceptable for them and how that has changed in just one life time. What more will change before we all die? It's impossible to say, but let's hope there are records made of it and that they're at least half as beautiful as this cup.