The Greek Gymnasium: What 1 Maccabees 1:14 Actually Describes
In traditional English translations of 1 Maccabees 1:14, the apostasy of the Jewish leadership under Antiochus IV Epiphanes begins with what sounds like a municipal building project: they "built a gymnasium in Jerusalem, according to the customs of the nations." For the modern reader, the word "gymnasium" evokes a harmless image, a room with polished floors, basketball hoops, and exercise equipment. At most, a reader might infer that building a gymnasium was a controversial act of cultural assimilation, like opening a foreign franchise in a traditional neighborhood.
But to an ancient reader, this verse described a catastrophe. The UPDV Updated Bible Version translates γυμνάσιον (gymnasion)24 according to its actual social function in the 2nd century BCE:
"And they built a place for men to prey upon naked boys in Jerusalem, according to the customs of the nations. And they made themselves foreskins, and departed from the holy covenant, and joined themselves to the nations, and were sold to do evil." — 1 Macc 1:14-15 (UPDV)
This translation departs from the whole history of English at this verse: the original Douay-Rheims Old Testament (1610) reads, in modernized spelling, "a school in Jerusalem," the Authorized Version (1611), Brenton, and the Revised Version all read "a place of exercise," and only twentieth-century versions print the borrowed word "gymnasium" (RSV and NRSV: "So they built a gymnasium in Jerusalem, according to Gentile custom"). The English word "gymnasium" has become what linguists call a false friend: a recognizable term that completely fails to communicate what the ancient institution actually was. The UPDV applies classical primary-source research to the literary and theological context of 1 Maccabees so that the translation communicates why the author treated the institution as a catastrophe on par with child sacrifice.
🔗What Traditional Treatments Leave Unsaid
The original Hebrew text of 1 Maccabees is lost, and the work survives in Greek translation. The Greek translator used the standard technical term γυμνάσιον (gymnasion). To a Greek-speaking reader in the 2nd century BCE, it named a familiar institution associated with nude athletics, military and civic training, education, and the regulated pursuit of boys by adult men. The noun named the institution; its known social function supplied these associations.25
Patristic exegesis and modern commentary foreground other aspects of the institution. Theodore of Mopsuestia (c. 350-428), reading Psalm 55 as David speaking in the persona of Onias, records that Jason turned the Jews to "Greek customs" and lists "gymnasia, and palaestras, καὶ τοῖς τοιούτοις" ("and such things"), followed by neglected circumcision and despised Sabbath observance.1 Goldstein and Harrington discuss epispasm, the surgical reversal of circumcision to disguise it while exercising nude. Doran's gymnasium excursus treats the institution's military and educational functions.2 The classical evidence below completes that picture by documenting the institution's sexual dynamics.
Traditional labels preserve legitimate aspects of the institution while leaving its sexual reality unstated. To translate the text faithfully, we must ask what Jason built in Jerusalem in 175 BCE.
🔗What the Gymnasium Actually Was
The word γυμνάσιον (gymnasion) derives from γυμνός (gymnos), meaning "naked." A γυμνάσιον was, at its etymological root, "a place of nakedness." The defining feature of the institution was total nudity during all athletic activity — exercise, wrestling, military training, and bathing. This was not optional; it was the fundamental characteristic that distinguished Greek athletics from those of every other culture in the ancient Mediterranean.
An outsider noticed the nudity at once: in Lucian of Samosata's Anacharsis (ca. 125-180 CE), a Scythian visitor sees the Athenian gymnasium for the first time and is bewildered: "Yet, in the beginning, as soon as they had taken their clothes off, they put oil on themselves and took turns at rubbing each other down very peacefully — I saw it. Since then, I do not know what has got into them that they push one another about with lowered heads and butt their foreheads together like rams."18
The gymnasium was also a center of military training, philosophical education, and civic formation. The Hermeneia commentary on 2 Maccabees documents that "the primary function of the gymnasium in Hellenistic times remained the maintenance of military preparedness to defend the city," with contests in archery, javelin, shield combat, catapult operation, and tactical study.3 The palaestra (wrestling court) was surrounded by colonnaded porches with rooms used for lectures, meals, and civic honors.4
But the gymnasium was not merely a training facility or a school. It was a religious institution with its own patron gods: Hermes (for eloquence), Heracles (for strength), and Eros (for desire). Statues and altars to all three stood in the gymnasium precincts.5 In Athens, the Panathenaic torch race began at the altar of Eros in the Academy and carried the fire used for Athena's sacrifice.6 As classical scholar Thomas Scanlon observes, "Eros, not Prometheus, better symbolized the spirit of what Athenians saw as the source of civic prosperity, the greatest source of strength in the gymnasium."6
This was the institution's defining reality: nudity, athletics, religion, and sexual desire were fused into a single civic package. You could not participate in one without participating in all. As Scanlon concludes in his comprehensive study, "the openly institutionalized Greek nexus of upbringing, athletics, religion, and Eros is alien to modern culture."7
🔗The Sexual Dimension: Primary Source Evidence
The sexual dimension of the gymnasium was not incidental, occasional, or underground. It was a structured, legally regulated feature of the institution, documented in sources spanning eight centuries.
The definitive modern treatment is Scanlon's Eros and Greek Athletics (Oxford University Press, 2002), which reports the scholarly consensus: "It is generally accepted that from the sixth century B.C. onward the gymnasium was 'a hotbed of homosexuality.'"8 Scanlon's 466-page study traces the evidence in exhaustive detail. His conclusion after surveying the full literary, legal, epigraphic, and artistic record: "Both serious and comic literature testify to an at least 800-year-old tradition linking pederastic eros and the gymnasium from about 600 B.C. onward."9
The institution operated as a socially sanctioned venue where older, free male citizens (the ἐραστής (erastēs, "lover")) pursued and courted adolescent boys (the ἐρώμενος (erōmenos, "beloved")) who were exercising nude. Boys were a documented, regulated class inside the institution, training daily under their own trainers: Athenian law held the gymnasiarch liable for letting adults into the boys' contests of Hermes, and the Beroea gymnasium law barred the older νεανίσκοι (neaniskoi) from entering among or speaking with the παῖδες (paides) while requiring the boys' trainers to attend them twice daily under penalty.10 Scanlon shows the sexual reality behind the regulation: "the active were customarily the adults (neoi or older), the passive the paides."10
The evidence comes in multiple independent tiers.
#### Legal Evidence
The strongest evidence is legal, because it cannot be dismissed as literary exaggeration or philosophical idealization.
In 345 BCE, the Athenian orator Aeschines delivered a prosecution speech, Against Timarchus, in which he quoted actual Athenian statutes governing behavior in gymnasia and wrestling schools. These are not literary fictions, they are a lawyer quoting legislation in a real courtroom.
The law's rationale (section 10):
"He forbids the teacher to open the school-room, or the gymnastic trainer the wrestling school, before sunrise, and he commands them to close the doors before sunset; for he is exceeding suspicious of their being alone with a boy, or in the dark with him."11
The law itself, quoted verbatim (section 12):
"No person who is older than the boys shall be permitted to enter the room while they are there, unless he be a son of the teacher, a brother, or a daughter's husband. If any one enter in violation of this prohibition, he shall be punished with death. The superintendents of the gymnasia shall under no conditions allow any one who has reached the age of manhood to enter the contests of Hermes together with the boys. A gymnasiarch who does permit this and fails to keep such a person out of the gymnasium, shall be liable to the penalties prescribed for the seduction of free-born youth."11
The slave prohibition (section 138) reveals what free men were permitted to do:
"A slave, says the law, shall not take exercise or anoint himself in the wrestling-schools."11
And section 139 states it explicitly:
"A slave shall not be the lover of a free boy nor follow after him, or else he shall receive fifty blows of the public lash. But the free man was not forbidden to love a boy, and associate with him, and follow after him, nor did the lawgiver think that harm came to the boy thereby, but rather that such a thing was a testimony to his chastity."11
Athens did not prohibit the sexual pursuit of boys in the gymnasium — it regulated it. The death penalty applied to unauthorized adults entering the school-room where boys were present; gymnasium supervisors who permitted adults into boys' contests faced the penalties for seduction of freeborn youth. Free citizens were explicitly permitted to pursue boys. Laws existed because without them the practice was uncontrolled.
In plain terms: the gymnasium was where boys aged 12-18 exercised naked. Adult men came to watch, select the boys they found attractive, and pursue sexual relationships with them. This was considered normal and acceptable. The Athenian laws put guardrails on it (no unsupervised access, no being alone with a boy in the dark, gym managers held responsible if they let adults in during boys' festivals) but the practice itself was a right of free citizenship.12
#### Literary Evidence
The classical literary sources confirm the legal picture from multiple angles:
Plato (428-348 BCE) regularly sets his dialogues in the palaestra and gymnasium, treating them as the natural venue for admiring boys. In the Charmides (set in the palaestra of Taureas in Athens), a beautiful boy enters and the reaction is immediate: "All the rest were in love with him, such was their astonishment and confusion when he came in, and a number of other lovers were following in his train."13 In the Lysis (set at a newly built palaestra), Socrates' first question upon being invited in is: "Which is the handsome one?" — taking for granted that a wrestling school is a place for admiring boys.14
Aristophanes (ca. 446-386 BCE), in Peace (421 BCE), lists "not hanging around the palaestrae to try to pick up boys" among the markers of good character — confirming that "picking up boys" at the gymnasium was common enough to serve as a comic punchline.15 In Clouds (423 BCE), boys sitting before the trainer "And it behoved the boys, while sitting in the school of the Gymnastic-master, to cover the thigh, so that they might exhibit nothing indecent to those outside; then, again, after rising from the ground, to sweep the sand together, and to take care not to leave an impression of the person for their lovers."16
Cicero (106-43 BCE), evaluating Greek culture from a Roman perspective, stated it directly: "To me at any rate this custom [of pederasty] seems to have been born in the gymnasia of the Greeks, where those loves are unrestricted and permitted."17
Plutarch (ca. 46-120 CE) puts a mythological allegory for how pederasty became attached to the gymnasium into the mouth of Daphnaeus, a character in the Amatorius who is arguing against boy-love: "It was only yesterday or the day before, after the undressing and stripping naked of the youths, that he [Eros] entered the gymnasia, rubbing up against and putting his arm around others calmly during exercise. Then little by little he grew wings in the palaestrae . . ."19 Scanlon notes that "rubbing up against" (prosanatribomenos) and "putting an arm around" (prosagkalizomenos) are double entendres playing on technical athletic terms. The trainer's very title, παιδοτρίβης (paidotribēs), literally means "the one who rubs the boys."20
#### The Hellenistic Bridge: The Beroea Inscription
The Beroea Gymnasium Inscription, discovered in Macedonia, dates to the first third of the second century BCE: Gauthier and Hatzopoulos, editing the inscription, argue that it belongs under the last Antigonid kings, before 167 BCE, and Skaltsa likewise dates it early.21 It is thus broadly contemporary with the building of the Jerusalem gymnasium in 175 BCE and with the crisis that followed. This inscription served as the legal rulebook for a Hellenistic gymnasium. It explicitly bans slaves, freedmen, male prostitutes (ἡταιρηκότες, hētairēkotes), peddlers, drunkards, and lunatics from the gymnasium. It expressly forbids νεανίσκοι (neaniskoi, young men aged 18-30) from speaking to the younger παῖδες (paides, boys).21
The Beroea inscription proves that the sexual protocols and predatory hazards documented in classical Athens were not relics of a distant past. They were active, institutionalized, and legally regulated in the Hellenistic world of Antiochus IV — the exact cultural sphere in which Jason built his gymnasium in Jerusalem. Male prostitutes had to be explicitly banned because their presence was a recognized problem. Age groups had to be forcibly separated because without separation, the older males pursued the younger. To establish a gymnasium "according to the customs of the nations" was to establish this environment.
The classical evidence establishes that to build a gymnasium in the 2nd century BCE was to build a socially sanctioned hunting ground for adult men to pursue boys. The text of 1 Maccabees condemns the institution through its language and scriptural allusions.
🔗The View from Jerusalem: The 2 Kings 17 Allusion
Goldstein traced part of the pattern: his notes see in these verses echoes of Lev 18:3 and 2 Kings 17:8, the Ahab scenes of 1 Kings 21, and the sexual association of Num 25:3.22 The following four-link comparison extends that observation through two additional echoes and their cumulative force. The author communicates not by describing the sexual practices directly but by echoing scriptural language of covenantal apostasy.
🔗Four Correspondences with 2 Kings 17
In 1 Maccabees 1:11-15, the author describes the Hellenizing Jews who established the gymnasium. When this Greek text is laid alongside the Septuagint text of 2 Kings 17:7-23, the passage explaining why God permanently exiled the northern kingdom of Israel, a pattern of verbal and thematic correspondences emerges across four distinct points. (Since 1 Maccabees was originally composed in Hebrew and survives only in Greek translation, these correspondences may originate in the lost Hebrew original drawing on the Hebrew text of Kings, or may have been solidified by the Greek translator drawing on the Septuagint. In either case, the final Greek text preserves them with differing degrees of verbal closeness.)
1. "The ordinances of the nations"
| 2 Kings 17:8 (LXX) | 1 Maccabees 1:13 |
|---|---|
| ἐπορεύθησαν τοῖς δικαιώμασιν τῶν ἐθνῶν | ποιῆσαι τὰ δικαιώματα τῶν ἐθνῶν |
| "walked in the ordinances of the nations" | "do the ordinances of the nations" |
Same lemma (δικαίωμα, dikaiōma), same genitive construction (τῶν ἐθνῶν, tōn ethnōn); the case government differs, but this is the Deuteronomist's phrase for the sin that caused the exile.22
2. "The nations round about"
| 2 Kings 17:15 (LXX) | 1 Maccabees 1:11 |
|---|---|
| ὀπίσω τῶν ἐθνῶν τῶν περικύκλῳ αὐτῶν | μετὰ τῶν ἐθνῶν τῶν κύκλῳ ἡμῶν |
| "after the nations round about them" | "with the nations round about us" |
Close: κύκλῳ (kyklō) versus the compound περικύκλῳ (perikyklō), both meaning "round about." In 2 Kings, Israel went "after" the surrounding nations. In 1 Maccabees, the Hellenizers propose making a covenant "with" them — the same sin, now spoken in the first person by the perpetrators themselves.22
3. Covenant rejection
| 2 Kings 17:15 (MT/LXX) | 1 Maccabees 1:15 |
|---|---|
| MT: rejected his covenant (בְּרִיתוֹ); LXX: did not keep his testimonies (τὰ μαρτύρια ... οὐκ ἐφύλαξαν) | ἀπέστησαν ἀπὸ διαθήκης ἁγίας |
| MT: "rejected his covenant"; LXX: "did not keep his testimonies" | "departed from the holy covenant" |
Both passages frame the same core charge of covenant rejection. The explicit covenant noun belongs to the Hebrew of Kings (בְּרִיתוֹ) and to 1 Maccabees (διαθήκης); the Greek of 2 Kings 17:15 has instead "did not keep his testimonies," so covenant rejection is explicit in the MT and in 1 Maccabees but only thematic in the LXX.22
4. "Sold themselves to do evil" — verbatim
| 2 Kings 17:17 (LXX) | 1 Maccabees 1:15 |
|---|---|
| ἐπράθησαν τοῦ ποιῆσαι τὸ πονηρόν ἐν ὀφθαλμοῖς κυρίου | ἐπράθησαν τοῦ ποιῆσαι τὸ πονηρόν |
| "sold themselves to do evil in the eyes of the Lord" | "sold themselves to do evil" |
The Greek matches on every grammatical level: an identical verb form (ἐπράθησαν, aorist passive), an identical infinitive construction (τοῦ ποιῆσαι), and an identical adjective (τὸ πονηρόν). This exact clause is the strongest verbal correspondence in the sequence. Its shortened form may invite a reader who recognizes the allusion to supply the continuation from memory.22
🔗Why 2 Kings 17 Matters
The context of 2 Kings 17:17 is not generic moral disapproval. The verse comes at the climax of a specific sin catalogue:
"They made their sons and their daughters pass through fire, and they practiced divination and omens, and sold themselves to do evil in the eyes of the Lord, to provoke him to anger." — 2 Kings 17:17
The result (v. 18): "Therefore Yahweh was very angry with Israel, and removed them out of his sight." The consequence (v. 23): "So Israel was carried away out of their own land to Assyria to this day."
This is permanent exile, the heaviest punishment in the Deuteronomistic history. The northern kingdom never returned. The "evil" the Israelites "sold themselves to" in 2 Kings 17 included the full spectrum of apostasy (idolatry, golden calves, worship of the starry hosts, service to Baal) but it climaxed in the destruction of their own children: passing sons and daughters through fire. By constructing his condemnation as a sustained echo of this passage, the author of 1 Maccabees maps the gymnasium onto the total covenantal collapse of the northern kingdom, up to and including the sacrifice of Jewish youth to foreign powers.
The author did not need to enumerate every practice the gymnasium involved. His audience knew. The 2 Kings 17 allusion functions as a comprehensive condemnation: everything the nations do in their gymnasia (nudity, idol worship, and the sexual exploitation of youth) falls under the umbrella of "sold themselves to do evil." He chose the heaviest language available in the Hebrew scriptures and let it do the work.
Closely related language appears in 1 Kings 21:20, 25, where Ahab "sold himself to do that which was evil in the sight of Yahweh" — mapping the Hellenizers onto both the worst king and the worst generation simultaneously.23
🔗Why "Gymnasium" Fails as a Translation
Translation is fundamentally about communication. If a word reproduces the letters of the original text but evokes an entirely different image in the mind of the modern reader, the translation has failed.
The English word "gymnasium" derives from the Greek γυμνάσιον, but the two words no longer share a meaning. The English word entered the language through Latin and lost every dimension of its Greek origin except the vague association with physical exercise. A modern English speaker who reads "they built a gymnasium in Jerusalem" pictures a large room with exercise equipment — not a religious-civic institution where adult men pursued naked boys under the patronage of Eros.
This communicative failure has consequences for the text. The author's maximum-intensity condemnation, language reserved for child sacrifice and permanent national exile, reads like an incomprehensible overreaction to a building permit. The reader cannot understand why God's response to a gymnasium would be the same as his response to burning children alive. The allusion to 2 Kings 17 becomes invisible, because there is nothing in the modern word "gymnasium" that would trigger the connection.
The UPDV's translation, "a place for men to prey upon naked boys," restores the communicative force of the original by making explicit what the ancient word carried implicitly:
- "place" renders the Greek suffix -ιον (-ion, "place of"), matching the institutional scale of the gymnasium complex
- "men" specifies the exclusively male environment
- "prey upon" captures the predatory dynamic of the ἐραστής-ἐρώμενος (erastēs-erōmenos) system from the Jewish covenantal perspective — what the Greeks romanticized as mentorship and civic virtue, the author of 1 Maccabees viewed as predation on children
- "naked" recovers the root meaning of γυμνάσιον (from γυμνός, "naked") — what every Greek reader heard in the word itself
- "boys" identifies the pursued class: the παῖδες (paides, boys aged 12-18) whose presence inside the gymnasium, and whose regulation away from the older neaniskoi, the Athenian statutes and the Beroea law document
The phrase "according to the customs of the nations" immediately following explains whose laws permit this, preserving the foreign, covenant-breaking dimension. And "were sold to do evil" still works as escalation, because the reader now understands what evil they sold themselves to.
This dynamic rendering foregrounds the moral and covenantal violation that drove the biblical author's condemnation. The footnote at 1 Maccabees 1:14 preserves the institution's military and educational dimensions and directs readers to this article for the full evidence. By naming the exploitation in the verse text, the translation communicates why the author places the institution within the covenantal catastrophe evoked by 2 Kings 17.
🔗Bibliography
🔗Primary Sources
Aeschines. Against Timarchus. Translated by Charles Darwin Adams. Loeb Classical Library 106. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919.
Aristophanes. Peace. Translated by Eugene O'Neill Jr. In Aristophanes: Complete Plays. New York: Random House, 1938.
Aristophanes. Clouds. Translated by William James Hickie. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853.
Cicero. Tusculan Disputations. Translated by J. E. King. Loeb Classical Library 141. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927.
Lucian of Samosata. Anacharsis, or Athletics. Translated by A. M. Harmon. Loeb Classical Library 162. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925.
Plato. Charmides. Translated by W. R. M. Lamb. Loeb Classical Library 201. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927.
Plato. Lysis. Translated by W. R. M. Lamb. Loeb Classical Library 201. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927.
Plato. Symposium. Translated by W. R. M. Lamb. Loeb Classical Library 166. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925.
Plutarch. Amatorius (Erotikos). In Moralia Vol. IX. Translated by Edwin L. Minar Jr., F. H. Sandbach, and W. C. Helmbold. Loeb Classical Library 425. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961.
Strato. Greek Anthology 12.206, 12.222. Translated by W. R. Paton. Loeb Classical Library 86. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918.
Theodore of Mopsuestia. Commentary on the Psalms (I–LXXX), on Psalm 54 LXX (= 55 MT). Edited by Robert Devreesse. Le commentaire de Théodore de Mopsueste sur les Psaumes (I–LXXX). Studi e Testi 93. Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1939. Translated by Robert C. Hill. Theodore of Mopsuestia: Commentary on Psalms 1-81. Writings from the Greco-Roman World 5. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006. Also Patrologia Graeca 66:675-676. Edited by J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1859.
🔗Commentaries
Goldstein, Jonathan A. I Maccabees: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Anchor Bible 41. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.
Harrington, Daniel J. First Maccabees. New Collegeville Bible Commentary. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012.
Doran, Robert. 2 Maccabees: A Critical Commentary. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012.
🔗Modern Scholarship
Scanlon, Thomas F. Eros and Greek Athletics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Corré, Alan D. "A Reference to Epispasm in Koheleth." Vetus Testamentum 4 (1954): 416-418.
Gauthier, Philippe, and Miltiade B. Hatzopoulos. La loi gymnasiarchique de Beroia. Meletemata 16. Athens: Centre de recherches de l'Antiquité grecque et romaine; Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1993.
Kah, Daniel, and Peter Scholz, eds. Das hellenistische Gymnasion. Wissenskultur und gesellschaftlicher Wandel 8. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007.
Skaltsa, Stella. "Gymnasiarchic Law (Beroia)." In The Encyclopedia of Ancient History, edited by Roger S. Bagnall et al. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. DOI: 10.1002/9781444338386.wbeah13109.
🔗Reviews of Scanlon (2002)
Stewart, Andrew. Review of Eros and Greek Athletics, by Thomas F. Scanlon. American Historical Review 108 (February 2003): 231-232.
Tyrrell, Blake. Review of Eros and Greek Athletics, by Thomas F. Scanlon. Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2002.05.20.
Younger, John G. Review of Eros and Greek Athletics, by Thomas F. Scanlon. Journal of the History of Sexuality 12, no. 1 (2003): 153-155.
1 Theodore of Mopsuestia, Commentary on the Psalms, on Psalm 54 LXX (= 55 MT); the gymnasium passage at PG 66:676B. The Greek reads: γυμνάσιόν τε κατεσκεύασεν παρὰ τὸ Ἰουδαϊκὸν ἔθος — "he constructed a gymnasium contrary to Jewish custom" — followed by γυμνασίοις, καὶ παλαίστραις, καὶ τοῖς τοιούτοις ("gymnasia, and wrestling-schools, and such things"); the text then names neglected circumcision (ἠμελεῖτο δέ λοιπόν καί τά τῆς περιτομῆς) and despised Sabbath keeping (κατεφρονεῖτο καί τῶν σαββάτων ἡ τήρησις), with David prophesying in the persona of Onias. Critical text: Robert Devreesse, ed., Le commentaire de Théodore de Mopsueste sur les Psaumes (I–LXXX), Studi e Testi 93 (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1939), 352-353. English translation: Robert C. Hill, trans., Theodore of Mopsuestia: Commentary on Psalms 1-81, Writings from the Greco-Roman World 5 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006), 703-707, especially 707.
2 Harrington: "The surgical removal of the marks of circumcision is called 'epispasm.' For Jews it may have reflected a desire to conform to the Greek practice of nudity in physical exercise and athletics," adding that "whether many Jewish men actually underwent this operation is debated" (Harrington, First Maccabees, commentary on 1:10-15). Goldstein reports that some Hellenized Jewish youths "were willing to submit to painful operations to disguise the fact that they had been circumcised," but concludes that "probably few" of the Hellenizing Jews "underwent the operation to reverse their circumcision" (Goldstein, I Maccabees, notes on 1:15). Doran's gymnasium excursus treats the institution's military and educational functions and does not discuss epispasm (Doran, 2 Maccabees, "The Gymnasium," commentary on 4:12-15).
3 Doran, 2 Maccabees, commentary on 4:12-15. Doran documents contests with bow, javelin, curved and oblong shield, sprints, and long races (paralleled at Athens, Samos, and Tralles in inscriptions from 109-108 BCE). He also notes catapult operation, stone hurling, and the study of tactics as gymnasium activities.
4 Doran, 2 Maccabees, commentary on 4:12-15. Peter Scholz has demonstrated that the "school" function of the gymnasium is overstated — modern notions of education should not be imported back into the institution (cited in Doran). Cf. Kah and Scholz, Das hellenistische Gymnasion (2007).
5 Athenaeus 13.561d-e. The three patron gods are discussed in Scanlon, Eros and Greek Athletics, 5 and 254-256, and throughout Chapter 8.
6 Scanlon, Eros and Greek Athletics, 255-258. The torch race is documented in the scholion on Plato, Phaedrus 231e (Hermias), printed at 256: "The long race in the Panathenaia began from the altar of Eros. The ephebes lighting their torches there ran the race and the fire for the sacrificial offering to Athena was lighted from the torch of the victor." See also Plutarch, Solon 1.7.
7 Scanlon, Eros and Greek Athletics, 333.
8 Scanlon, Eros and Greek Athletics, 64. Scanlon presents this as established scholarly consensus ("generally accepted"), citing the broader classical literature. The phrase "hotbed of homosexuality" originates in earlier scholarship which Scanlon references.
9 Scanlon, Eros and Greek Athletics, 219.
10 On paides present and in daily training inside the gymnasium: Aeschines, Against Timarchus 9-12 (statutory hours for the boys' trainers; the gymnasiarch liable for admitting adults to the boys' contests of Hermes); the Beroea law, SEG 27.261 = I.Beroia 1 (ed. Gauthier and Hatzopoulos, Greek text 20-21, French translation 30-31): the ephebes and men under twenty-two train daily with javelin and bow "when the boys have anointed," the boys' trainers (paidotribai) must attend the gymnasium twice daily on pain of a five-drachma fine, and no neaniskos is to enter among or speak with the boys (side B, lines 13-16); and Scanlon, Eros and Greek Athletics, 214-215: "the active were customarily the adults (neoi or older), the passive the paides." Lloyd Jonnes and Marijana Ricl read the charter of one newly founded gymnasium at Tyriaion in Phrygia as reserving membership for ephebes (18–20 years) and neoi (20–30 years), "while paides (12–18 years) were allowed to enter only on special occasions, such as festivals" (quoted in Doran, 2 Maccabees, commentary on 4:12-15, which prints the name as "Rici" [recte Ricl]); as a general account of the Hellenistic gymnasium it is the outlier against the Athenian and Beroean evidence.
11 Aeschines, Against Timarchus 10, 12, 138-139. Translation from Adams (Loeb). The speech was delivered in 345 BCE as part of a real prosecution in an Athenian court. Aeschines is quoting actual Athenian statutes, not offering personal opinions.
12 Scanlon's assessment of the legal evidence: "Such laws illustrate that by the late sixth century the palaestrae were prime locales for forming pederastic relationships and that the protocol for these relationships was an object of extremely serious civic concern" (Eros and Greek Athletics, 88).
13 Plato, Charmides 154a-c (Stephanus pagination). Translation adapted from Lamb (Loeb).
14 Plato, Lysis 204b, 206e-207a (Stephanus pagination). Translation adapted from Lamb (Loeb).
15 Aristophanes, Peace 762-763. Scanlon translates the same passage with the phrase "pick up boys" (Eros and Greek Athletics, 219). In Against Timarchus Aeschines anticipates his opponent's taunt that he will "ask me if I am not ashamed ... after having made a nuisance of myself in the gymnasia" (135), and separately concedes: "I do not deny that I myself have been a lover and am a lover to this day" (136); Scanlon compresses the two when he reports that Aeschines "admitted an allegation" that he made himself "a nuisance in the gymnasia" (219).
16 Aristophanes, Clouds 973-976.
17 Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 4.70. The Latin reads: isti liberi et concessi sunt amores ("those loves are unrestricted and permitted").
18 Lucian, Anacharsis 1. Translation from Harmon (Loeb). Solon's defense of the gymnasium in section 24 details the training process: "We strip them, and think it best to begin by habituating them to the weather... we have suppled and trained their bodies naked."
19 Plutarch, Amatorius 751f-752a; the quotation is Scanlon's rendering, Eros and Greek Athletics, 212.
20 Scanlon, Eros and Greek Athletics, 212. Scanlon notes that gymnasium officials "sought to keep the important practice of anointing literally in the hands of responsible professionals" — the trainer's physical access to naked boys' bodies was a recognized hazard requiring institutional controls.
21 Edition of record: Philippe Gauthier and Miltiade B. Hatzopoulos, La loi gymnasiarchique de Beroia, Meletemata 16 (Athens: Centre de recherches de l'Antiquité grecque et romaine, 1993); the inscription is SEG 27.261 = I.Beroia 1. Gauthier and Hatzopoulos date the law before 167 BCE, under the last Antigonid kings (35-45); Skaltsa, "Gymnasiarchic Law (Beroia)," The Encyclopedia of Ancient History (Wiley, 2012), places it in the first third of the second century BCE. Scanlon, Eros and Greek Athletics, 214-215, dates it "mid-second century B.C." and discusses it there. On the prohibition against neaniskoi speaking with paides (side B, lines 13-16), Scanlon quotes "one recent commentator": "The law recognized and, so to speak, codified their status, taking care to prevent them seducing their younger companions" (215 n. 56). The exclusion list (side B, lines 26-29: slaves, freedmen and their sons, apalaistroi, hētairēkotes, market tradesmen, drunkards, and the insane) is edited in Gauthier and Hatzopoulos, Greek text 20-21.
22 The four correspondences were identified through comparison of the LXX text of 2 Kings 17:7-23 (Rahlfs, Septuaginta, 1935/2006) with the Greek text of 1 Maccabees 1:11-15; link 3 was additionally checked against the Masoretic text of Kings (BHS; 2 Kgs 17:15 וַיִּמְאֲסוּ ... אֶת־בְּרִיתוֹ). The morphological analysis follows the Septuagint (Rahlfs, Septuaginta, 1935/2006). They differ in kind: links 1 and 2 are lexical and phrase-level correspondences under differing case government, prepositions, and pronouns; link 3 is explicit in the MT of Kings and in 1 Maccabees but only thematic in the LXX; link 4 is verbatim through τὸ πονηρόν. Whether these correspondences originated in the lost Hebrew original (drawing on the Hebrew text of Kings) or were solidified by the Greek translator of 1 Maccabees (drawing on the Septuagint text of Kings), they stand in the final Greek text with differing degrees of verbal closeness. Goldstein anticipated part of this study: his notes on 1:11-15 say that "the 'practices' and 'customs' of the gentiles in vss. 14 and 15 echo Lev 18:3 and 2 Kings 17:8, to show that when the Hellenizers accept the institutions of the Greeks, their sin is as grave as idolatry, incest, adultery, and perversion"; that "became willing slaves to" literally means "sold themselves [as slaves] to," comparing Deut 28:68; 1 Kings 21:20, 25; and 2 Kings 17:17; and that "'Joined themselves' reflects Num 25:3, and here as there the writer probably means sexual association" (Goldstein, I Maccabees, notes on 1:11-15). The four-link pattern brings those observations together and adds links 2 and 3; reading the four as one sustained allusion is this article's cumulative synthesis.
23 Closely related language appears in the Ahab narrative: Rahlfs 3 Kgdms 20:20 (= English 1 Kings 21:20) reads πέπρασαι ποιῆσαι τὸ πονηρόν (perfect middle/passive, second singular), and 3 Kgdms 20:25 (= 1 Kings 21:25) reads ἐπράθη ποιῆσαι τὸ πονηρόν (aorist passive, third singular). Compared with 4 Kgdms 17:17 and 1 Maccabees 1:15 (ἐπράθησαν τοῦ ποιῆσαι τὸ πονηρόν), both Ahab clauses are singular and omit the articular infinitive, and 20:20 also changes tense. Ahab is presented as the worst king in Israel's history. The Hellenizers are thus mapped onto both the worst king (Ahab) and the worst generation (the exiled northern kingdom) simultaneously.
24 Not to be confused with γυμνασία (gymnasia), the abstract noun meaning "training" or "exercise," which appears in 1 Timothy 4:8: "bodily exercise (σωματικὴ γυμνασία) is profitable for a little." While sharing the same root (γυμνός, "naked"), the words are entirely different: γυμνάσιον is a concrete noun specifying the civic-religious institution, while γυμνασία is an abstract noun for the act of training. Paul's adjective σωματικὴ ("bodily") further restricts the meaning to generic physical fitness. Paul is employing an athletic metaphor contrasting physical discipline with spiritual godliness — he is not referencing the Hellenistic institution of 1 Maccabees 1:14.
25 Cf. LSJ, s.v. γυμνάσιον ("bodily exercises"; "gymnastic school"), and LEH, s.v. γυμνάσιον ("(gymnastic) school, centre for schooling in athletics and Greek culture"). The lexicons identify the institution; the primary evidence above establishes its social function.