In ancient Greece, pederasty "was a broadly practiced custom for over 1,000 years," says Andrew Lear, who is earning his doctoral degree in the Department of Classics. Because of its context in modern society, "people tend to write about pederasty as if it were one thing, as if it had an ethos," he says. "In Greece, it didn't have an ethos—it was part of life." Rather than asking "pederasty—yes or no," people had many different attitudes about pederasty depending on their context: "pederasty this and that."

From 700 BC to 480 BC, for example, "we don't have any evidence that heterosexual relationships in Greece were regarded as romantic," Andrew says. At the same time, "there's all this very romantic stuff about boys." Andrew thinks this is because the relationship of men and boys "was idealizable." Whereas women were either wives chosen by someone else or prostitutes available for a price, "boys could say no"—and doing so may have enhanced their attractiveness. One vase fragment depicts a bearded man with his hands on a boy's shoulders. Cartoon-like bubbles show the man saying, "Let me?" while the boy says, "Won't you stop?"

This is the core of Andrew's dissertation, "Noble Eros: The Idealization of Pederasty From the Greek Dark Ages to the Athens of Socrates." While the subject of vases—specifically the Grecian vessels designed for serving and drinking wine—will take only one chapter in the dissertation, it is a key part of his overall research project. Vases represent "this big black hole" in the study of the ideology surrounding pederasty, he says. "They are neither completely collected nor carefully analyzed."

In the years since his study of vases began, while Andrew was acquiring a master's degree at the University of Virginia, he has found that even many Classicists are uninformed about the objects, which combined pragmatic purpose with artistic decoration. "Some people are intimidated by the quantity of evidence"—about 40,000 figured vases have been discovered—"and by their poorly recorded history," he says.

More of Andrew's research on vases will go into a book he's co-authoring with Professor Eva Cantarella of the University of Milan, titled Images of Greek Pederasty, to be published later this year by Routledge. The book will discuss 110 vases that depict scenes of pederastic courtship in ancient Greece, with 120 or 130 illustrations.

If this doesn't sound like your grandfather's Classics discipline, Andrew would emphatically agree. "Classics are kind of hip now," Andrew says, due in good part to increasing interest from feminist and gay studies, which focus on gender as a construct. The field has also been improved, Andrew says, "by an influx of women." While the field in general is still dominated by men, half of the senior professors in UCLA's Classics Department are women.

Among them is Kathryn Morgan, whom Andrew met while he was working on his master's degree at the University of Virginia. Andrew "can absorb and synthesize large bodies of information and then extract the salient items that allow him to formulate or criticize a hypothesis," Professor Morgan says. "Coupled with this is a fruitful unwillingness to take for granted the `sacred cows' of whatever type of scholarship he is engaged in. He always asks unexpected and fundamental questions."

Andrew's co-chair is Sarah E. Morris, chair of archeology. Because Andrew's dissertation has put him at a crossroads of disciplines, he's had broader opportunities for funding. His time at UCLA has been supported by the Department of Classics through a summer research grant and a PhD candidate stipend, the Division of the Humanities through the Lenart Travel Fellowship, and the Department of Art History through the Dickson Fellowship, which he was awarded two years in a row. He also won the Bourse Chateaubriand, France's equivalent of the Fulbright, for travel and study in 2000-2001.

All of these awards have supported Andrew's research in Europe. He spent 2000-2001 at the Sorbonne, following a bit of European travel looking at vases. The next year, he was at King's College in London, where he returned after spending Fall 2002 at New York University as a visiting scholar. One faculty member has dubbed him "the president of the UCLA Away club," and another wondered aloud if Andrew would have to come back for his orals or might do them by teleconference.

Andrew is coming home, however, probably in 2004, to collect his PhD and find a job in academia. At 43, he's already maneuvered through a number of career changes. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he was told "a poet should major in English," so he did, following it with a master's degree in creative writing—particularly short stories—at City University of New York.

He taught English at the University of Rome for several years—"a perfectly alright job by Italian standards" that nevertheless left him longing for all the intellectual projects he had never developed. That longing brought him back to Harvard, where he taught Italian—and won several awards for teaching—while auditing a range of classes, most of them in the Classics. He has been a freelance fiction editor for a major New York publisher, and he also has worked as a translator. He was nearly forty when he left the University of Virginia for UCLA.

"It's a very good collection of scholars here, and a very warm collection of people," he says. "I felt at home from the day I walked in here."

Published in Spring 2003, Graduate Quarterly