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Adaios, (Αδαίος, lived c.450 BC) also known as Adaeus, was a Macedonian poet of which little is known, save that he made two notable contributions to literature and history. When his good friend Euripides died in exile and was refused burial in his native Athens, Adaios composed the epitaph that graced the playwright's grave in Macedonia. Adaios' other noted achievement was his sage advice for those men who would know the pleasures of another male:
If you see someone beautiful
hammer it out right then.
Say what you think;
grab his balls: be a man.
But if 'I admire you' is what you say
and 'I'll be a brother to you' -
shame will bar the only way
to all you want to do.
(This is one of several modern translations.)
The fact that Adaios does not speak specifically of loving a boy, a custom known to the Greeks as paiderastia, but instead seems to speak of sexual love between males in general, gives a clue to the Macedonians' ideas on the subject. While their neighbors to the south, especially in Athens, believed that such relations should be restricted to those between adult men and teenage boys, and that exclusive homosexuality should be shunned while bisexuality was accepted as the norm, the Macedonians apparently held no such prejudices, and relations between men of similar age was apparently more commonly accepted, as evidenced by the relationships between Alexander the Great and Hephaestion.
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