I seen latest debates over Ganymede lately on whether it's okay to ship Ganymede and Zeus, or they are just romanticizing rape.
I don't have any strong feelings toward this subject matter cause it's pretty heavy and complicated like most things about the ancient Greeks.
Because while Ganymede is always seen young and an eronemos (beloved), we don't know how young and obviously this depend on the writers and period of time and places, and various factors like marriage and life transition.
History Stuff Being Complicated
For the Greeks and Romans, while they recognized the concepts of life cycle and don't have the term "teens" (it's often divided between children and adult), they don't have a strict definitions and set of specific ages for each terms, and thus fluctuate the meaning for males and females.
With Greek terminologies for examples:
Neos - a term referred to a young man roughly between in their 20-30, but was sometimes used for a man in their 50s.
Ephebos/ephebeia - teens from 16-20s, but in truth there's no fixed age. Reports of ephebos were referred from boys of 12 to 20s.
Pais - child, but is used to refer to a 17 or 18 years old.
Parthenos & kore - young girls, but sometimes referred a child or adult.
Not to mention the categories of life cycle for an age bracket differs from writer to writer. Aristotle believed men mentally matured at the age 14, but not all agreed with him and some who do only partially with some may agree a man may matured, but he has yet to grow a beard for example.
-Youth in the Roman Empire: The Young and the Restless Years?
By Christian Laes, Johan Strubbe
Alright, but what about legally? For marriage, women were typically married off much younger than men, but the age differed somewhere between 12-20s. In Classical Athen, girls were married off at the age 14 or 15 (particularly for epikleroi), 20 for Sparta, 12 for Crete according to the law code of Gortyn. For men, it's 30.
However despite all this, there’s no fixed minimum age requirement as age was not the determining factor, but rather the age correspond to a woman’s menarche and a man’s polis rights. A man is legally considered an adult when he earned his civic and military duties.
Further complicated the issue is the age of consent - or rather the lack thereof. While there were instances of pushback in which a boy take on the role of an eronemos, it's more to do with the adjacent roles like the impact on the boy's status rather than the pederasty system as a whole.
-José Malheiro Magalhães' The Rape of Boys in Ancient Athen In Revisiting Rape in Antiquity: Sexualised Violence in Greek and Roman Worlds
So when it comes Greek languages, the contexts always matter. But when it comes to Greek myth however, well there are rarely contexts on what the author exactly meant or envisioned. Ganymede was always referred as an eronemos in Ibycus, Pindar, Hymn to Aphrodite, but no other descriptions given other than he's young and beautiful across most, if not, all accounts.
All these similar problems applies for the Romans too.
With that being said, I will be up front that virtually any lovers of the gods or heroes can be interpreted as young that would fall in the category of being a minor today. Hence why I decided to include the information about women because I think it's relevant. Persephone, Semele, Europa, Ariadne doesn't have any aspects that indicate them otherwise older than being 18 or more. They can be imagined as anachronistically adolescent or teens by default to the Greeks and Romans, in the same vein we tend to imagine the characters at least 18 years of age or older. The rare exception to the ambiguity age is famously Helen which I made a post about her.
Besides Ganymede, other characters like Pelops, Hyacinthus, Achilles or Patroclus, were sometimes molded into the pederasty image.
Youths who were most handsome. Adonis, son of Cinyras and Smyrna, whom Venus [Aphrodite] loved. Endymion, son of Aetolus, whom Luna [Selene] loved. Ganymede, son of Erichthonius, whom Jove [Zeus] loved. Hyacinthus, son of Oebalus, whom Apollo loved. Narcissus, son of the river Cephisus, who loved himself . . .
-Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 271 (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd A.D.)
-Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West
Philostratus the Younger, Imagines 14 (trans. Fairbanks) (Greek rhetorician C3rd A.D.) :
"[Ostensibly a description of an ancient Greek painting :] Hyakinthos (Hyacinthus). Let us ask the youth, my boy, who he is and what is the reason for Apollon's presence with him, for he will not be afraid to have us, at least, look at him. Well, he says that he is Hyakinthos, the son of Oibalos (Oebalus); and now that we have learned this we must also know the reason for the god's presence. The son of Leto for love of the youth promises to give him all he possesses for permission to associate with him; for he will teach him the use of the bow, and music, and understanding the art of prophecy, and not to be unskilful with the lure, and to preside over the contest of the palaestra, and he will grant to him that, riding in the chariot drawn by swans, he should visit all the lands dear to Apollon. Here is the god, painted as usual with unshorn locks; he lifts a radiant forehead above eyes that shine like rays of light, and with a sweet smile he encourages Hyakinthos, extending his right hand with the same purpose. The youth keeps his eyes steadfastly on the ground, and they are very thoughtful, for he rejoices at what he hears and tempers with modesty the confidence that is yet to come. He stands there, covering with a purple mantle the left side of his body, which is also drawn back, and he supports his right hand on a spear, the hip being thrown forward and the right side exposed to view, and this bare arm permits us to describe what is visible. He has a slender ankle below the straight lower leg, and above the latter this supple knee-joint; then come thighs not unduly developed and hip-joints which support the rest of the body; his side rounds out a full-lunged chest, his arm swells in a delicate curve, his neck is moderately erect, while the hair is not unkempt nor stiff from grime, but falls over his forehead and blends with the first down of his beard.
On the other hand, grown adult depictions of the usual eromeos examples also exists.
On the altar are also Demeter, the Maid, Pluto, next to them Fates and Seasons, and with them Aphrodite, Athena and Artemis. They are carrying to heaven Hyacinthus and Polyboea, the sister, they say, of Hyacinthus, who died a maid. Now this statue of Hyacinthus represents him as bearded, but Nicias, son of Nicomedes, has painted him in the very prime of youthful beauty, hinting at the love of Apollo for Hyacinthus of which legend tells.
-Pausanias, Description of Greece. 3.19.4
Very different was the reward of the true love of Achilles towards his lover Patroclus—his lover and not his love (the notion that Patroclus was the beloved one is a foolish error into which Aeschylus has fallen, for Achilles was surely the fairer of the two, fairer also than all the other heroes; and, as Homer informs us, he was still beardless, and younger far.)
In general even outside of the pederasty practices, the Greeks and Romans thrived off age-gap and power imbalance.
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