Love-Gifts

The use of the hare as a sexual symbol or emblem [is] not unique to Greece. But there are vase-paintings depicting a practice that was: the giving of hares as love-gifts.

Examples of those images include men offering hares to women, usually in a lightly eroticized scenario. And men offering the creatures to other men, usually an older man making a gift to a younger, depicted in such a way as to make the sexual meaning of the image explicit. In one such image the hare is stretched out horizontally to make physical connection between the standing figure who holds it by its back legs and ears, and the seated youth on whose shoulders the front legs of the hare rest. This stretching out of the hare, and the artist's skill in painting it, gives to its body a lithe or nubile character which enhances and further clarifies its homoeroticism.

– Simon Carnell
Hare
p. 61

Image: Erich Lessing Photo Archive.