EROS AMONG CITIZENS
EROS AMONG CITIZENS

Summary/Abstract: Girls of this age have much need of surveillance. For then in particular they feel a natural impulse to make usage of the sexual faculties that are developing in them; so that unless they guard against any further impulse beyond that inevitable one which their bodily development of itself supplies, even in the case of those who abstain altogether from passionate indulgence, they contract habits which are apt to continue into later life. For girls who give way to wantonness grow more and more wanton; and the same is true of boys, unless they be safeguarded from one temptation and another. This extremely important passage from Aristotle (Historia animalium 581b 11–18; tr. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson), concerning the sexual maturation of youngsters, has not, to my knowledge, been hitherto analysed in works on eroticism in Greek culture, especially those referring to the issue of Greek homosexuality, or rather paiderastia. On the other hand, this is the passage referred to by the title of the second volume of The History of Sexuality, the famous and fundamental, indeed classic work by Michel Foucault, L’Usage des plaisirs, translated into English as The Use of Pleasures.

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