A Problem in Greek Ethics.

I.

For the student of sexual inversion, ancient Greece offers a wide field for observation and reflection. Its importance has hitherto been underrated by medical and legal writers on the subject, who do not seem to be aware that here alone in history have we the example of a great and highly-developed race not only tolerating homosexual passions, but deeming them of spiritual value, and attempting to utilise them for the benefit of society. Here, also, through the copious stores of literature at our disposal, we can arrive at something definite regarding the various forms assumed by these passions, when allowed free scope for development in the midst of refined and intellectual civilisation. What the Greeks called paiderastia, or boy-love, was a phenomenon of one of the most brilliant periods of human culture, in one of the most highly organised and nobly active nations. It is the feature by which Greek social life is most sharply distinguished from that of any other people approaching the Hellenes in moral or mental distinction. To trace the history of so remarkable a custom in their several communities, and to ascertain, so far as this is possible, the ethical feeling of the Greeks upon this subject, must be of service to the scientific psychologist. It enables him to approach the subject from another point of view than that usually adopted by modern jurists, psychiatrists, writers on forensic medicine.

II.

The first fact which the student has to notice is that in the Homeric poems a modern reader finds no trace of this passion. It is true that Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, is distinguished by his friendship for Patroclus no less emphatically than Odysseus, the hero of the Odyssey, by lifelong attachment to Penelope, and Hector by love for Andromache. But in the delineation of the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus there is nothing which indicates the passionate relation of the lover and the beloved, as they were afterwards recognised in Greek society. This is the more remarkable because the love of Achilles for Patroclus added, in a later age of Greek history, an almost religious sanction of the martial form of paiderastia. In like manner the friendship of Idomeneus for Meriones, and that of Achilles, after the death of Patroclus, for Antilochus, were treated by the later Greeks as paiderastic. Yet, inasmuch as Homer gives no warrant for this interpretation of the tales in question, we are justified in concluding that homosexual relations were not prominent in the so-called heroic age of Greece. Had it formed a distinct feature of the society depicted in the Homeric poems, there is no reason to suppose that their authors would have abstained from delineating it. We shall see that Pindar, Æschylus and Sophocles, the poets of an age when paiderastia was prevalent, spoke unreservedly upon the subject.

Impartial study of the Iliad leads us to the belief that the Greeks of the historic period interpreted the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus in accordance with subsequently developed customs. The Homeric poems were the Bible of the Greeks, and formed the staple of their education; nor did they scruple to wrest the sense of the original, reading, like modern Bibliolaters, the sentiments and passions of a later age into the text. Of this process a good example is afforded by Æschines in the oration against Timarchus. While discussing this very question of the love of Achilles, he says: "He, indeed, conceals their love, and does not give its proper name to the affection between them, judging that the extremity of their fondness would be intelligible to instructed men among his audience." As an instance the orator proceeds to quote the passage in which Achilles laments that he will not be able to fulfil his promise to Menœtius by bringing Patroclus home to Opus. He is here clearly introducing the sentiments of an Athenian hoplite who had taken the boy he loved to Syracuse and seen him slain there.

Homer stood in a double relation to the historical Greeks. On the one hand, he determined their development by the influence of his ideal characters. On the other, he underwent from them interpretations which varied with the spirit of each successive century. He created the national temperament, but received in turn the influx of new thoughts and emotions occurring in the course of its expansion. It is, therefore, highly important, on the threshold of this inquiry, to determine the nature of that Achilleian friendship to which the panegyrists and apologists of the custom make such frequent reference.

III.

The ideal of character in Homer was what the Greeks called heroic; what we should call chivalrous. Young men studied the Iliad as our ancestors studied the Arthurian romances, finding there a pattern of conduct raised almost too high above the realities of common life for imitation, yet stimulative of enthusiasm and exciting to the fancy. Foremost among the paragons of heroic virtue stood Achilles, the splendour of whose achievements in the Trojan war was only equalled by the pathos of his friendship. The love for slain Patroclus broke his mood of sullen anger, and converted his brooding sense of wrong into a lively thirst for vengeance. Hector, the slayer of Patroclus, had to be slain by Achilles, the comrade of Patroclus. No one can read the Iliad without observing that its action virtually turns upon the conquest which the passion of friendship gains over the passion of resentment in the breast of the chief actor. This the Greek students of Homer were not slow to see; and they not unnaturally selected the friendship of Achilles for their ideal of manly love. It was a powerful and masculine emotion, in which effeminacy had no part, and which by no means excluded the ordinary sexual feelings. Companionship in battle and the chase, in public and in private affairs of life, was the communion proposed by Achilleian friends—not luxury or the delights which feminine attractions offered. The tie was both more spiritual and more energetic than that which bound man to woman. Such was the type of comradeship delineated by Homer; and such, in spite of the modifications suggested by later poets, was the conception retained by the Greeks of this heroic friendship. Even Æschines, in the place above quoted, lays stress upon the mutual loyalty of Achilles and Patroclus as the strongest bond of their affection: "regarding, I suppose, their loyalty and mutual goodwill as the most touching feature of their love."[1]

IV.

Thus the tale of Achilles and Patroclus sanctioned among the Greeks a form of masculine love, which, though afterwards connected with paiderastia properly so-called, we are justified in describing as heroic, and in regarding as one of the highest products of their emotional life. It will be seen, when we come to deal with the historical manifestations of this passion, that the heroic love which took its name from Homer's Achilles existed as an ideal rather than an actual reality. This, however, is equally the case with Christianity and chivalry. The facts of feudal history fall below the high conception which hovered like a dream above the knights and ladies of the Middle Ages; nor has the spirit of the Gospel been realised, in fact, by the most Christian nations. Still we are not on that account debarred from speaking of both chivalry and Christianity as potent and effective forces.

V.

Homer, then, knew nothing of paiderastia, though the Iliad contained the first and noblest legend of heroic friendship. Very early, however, in Greek history boy-love, as a form of sensual passion, became a national institution. This is proved abundantly by mythological traditions of great antiquity, by legendary tales connected with the founding of Greek cities, and by the primitive customs of the Dorian tribes. The question remains how paiderastia originated among the Greeks, and whether it was introduced or indigenous.

The Greeks themselves speculated on this subject, but they arrived at no one definite conclusion. Herodotus asserts that the Persians learned the habit, in its vicious form, from the Greeks;[2] but, even supposing this assertion to be correct, we are not justified in assuming the same of all barbarians who were neighbours of the Greeks; since we know from the Jewish records and from Assyrian inscriptions that the Oriental nations were addicted to this as well as other species of sensuality. Moreover, it might with some strain on language be maintained that Herodotus, in the passage above referred to, did not allude to boy-love in general, but to the peculiarly Hellenic form of it which I shall afterwards attempt to characterise.

A prevalent opinion among the Greeks ascribed the origin of paiderastia to Crete; and it was here that the legend of Zeus and Ganymede was localised.[3] "The Cretans," says Plato,[4] "are always accused of having invented the story of Ganymede and Zeus, which is designed to justify themselves in the enjoyment of such pleasures by the practice of the god whom they believe to have been their lawgiver."

In another passage,[5] Plato speaks of the custom that prevailed before the time of Laius—in terms which show his detestation of a vice that had gone far toward corrupting Greek society. This sentence indicates the second theory of the later Greeks upon this topic. They thought that Laius, the father of Œdipus, was the first to practise Hybris, or lawless lust, in this form, by the rape committed on Chrysippus, the son of Pelops.[6] To this crime of Laius, the Scholiast to the Seven against Thebes attributes all the evils which afterwards befell the royal house of Thebes, and Euripides made it the subject of a tragedy. In another but less prevalent Saga the introduction of paiderastia is ascribed to Orpheus.

It is clear from these conflicting theories that the Greeks themselves had no trustworthy tradition on the subject. Nothing, therefore, but speculative conjecture is left for the modern investigator. If we need in such a matter to seek further than the primal instincts of human nature, we may suggest that, like the orgiastic rites of the later Hellenic cultus, paiderastia in its crudest form was transmitted to the Greeks from the East. Its prevalence in Crete, which, together with Cyprus, formed one of the principal links between Phœnicia and Hellas proper, favours this view. Paiderastia would, on this hypothesis, like the worship of the Paphian and Corinthian Aphrodite, have to be regarded as in part an Oriental importation.[7] Yet, if we adopt any such solution of the problem, we must not forget that in this, as in all similar cases, whatever the Greeks received from adjacent nations, they distinguished with the qualities of their own personality. Paiderastia in Hellas assumed Hellenic characteristics, and cannot be confounded with any merely Asiatic form of luxury. In the tenth section of this Essay I shall return to the problem, and advance my own conjecture as to the part played by the Dorians in the development of paiderastia into a custom.

It is enough for the present to remark that, however introduced, the vice of boy-love, as distinguished from heroic friendship, received religious sanction at an early period. The legend of the rape of Ganymede was invented, according to the passage recently quoted from Plato, by the Cretans with the express purpose of investing their pleasures with a show of piety. This localisation of the religious sanction of paiderastia in Crete confirms the hypothesis of Oriental influence; for one of the notable features of Græco Asiatic worship was the consecration of sensuality in the Phallus cult, the Hiero douloi (temple slaves, or bayadères) of Aphrodite, and the eunuchs of the Phrygian mother. Homer tells the tale of Ganymede with the utmost simplicity. The boy was so beautiful that Zeus suffered him not to dwell on earth, but translated him to heaven and appointed him the cupbearer of the immortals. The sensual desire which made the king of gods and men prefer Ganymede to Leda, Io, Danaë, and all the maidens whom he loved and left on earth, is an addition to the Homeric version of the myth. In course of time the tale of Ganymede, according to the Cretan reading, became the nucleus around which the paiderastic associations of the Greek race gathered, just as that of Achilles formed the main point in their tradition of heroic friendship. To the Romans and the modern nations the name of Ganymede, debased to Catamitus, supplied a term of reproach, which sufficiently indicates the nature of the love of which he became eventually the eponym.

VI.

Resuming the results of the last four sections, we find two separate forms of masculine passion clearly marked in early Hellas—a noble and a base, a spiritual and a sensual. To the distinction between them the Greek conscience was acutely sensitive; and this distinction, in theory at least, subsisted throughout their history. They worshipped Erôs, as they worshipped Aphrodite, under the twofold titles of Ouranios (celestial) and Pandemos (vulgar, or volvivaga); and, while they regarded the one love with the highest approval, as the source of courage and greatness of soul, they never publicly approved the other. It is true, as will appear in the sequel of this essay, that boy-love in its grossest form was tolerated in historic Hellas with an indulgence which it never found in any Christian country, while heroic comradeship remained an ideal hard to realise, and scarcely possible beyond the limits of the strictest Dorian sect. Yet the language of philosophers, historians, poets and orators is unmistakable. All testify alike to the discrimination between vulgar and heroic love in the Greek mind. I purpose to devote a separate section of this inquiry to the investigation of these ethical distinctions. For the present, a quotation from one of the most eloquent of the later rhetoricians will sufficiently set forth the contrast, which the Greek race never wholly forgot:[8]—

"The one love is mad for pleasure; the other loves beauty. The one is an involuntary sickness; the other is a sought enthusiasm. The one tends to the good of the beloved; the other to the ruin of both. The one is virtuous; the other incontinent in all its acts. The one has its end in friendship; the other in hate. The one is freely given; the other is bought and sold. The one brings praise; the other blame. The one is Greek; the other is barbarous. The one is virile; the other effeminate. The one is firm and constant; the other light and variable. The man who loves the one love is a friend of God, a friend of law, fulfilled of modesty, and free of speech. He dares to court his friend in daylight, and rejoices in his love. He wrestles with him in the playground and runs with him in the race, goes afield with him to the hunt, and in battle fights for glory at his side. In his misfortune he suffers, and at his death he dies with him. He needs no gloom of night, no desert place, for this society. The other lover is a foe to heaven, for he is out of tune and criminal; a foe to law, for he transgresses law. Cowardly, despairing, shameless, haunting the dusk, lurking in desert places and secret dens, he would fain be never seen consorting with his friend, but shuns the light of day, and follows after night and darkness, which the shepherd hates, but the thief loves."

And again, in the same dissertation, Maximus Tyrius speaks to like purpose, clothing his precepts in imagery:—

"You see a fair body in bloom and full of promise of fruit. Spoil not, defile not, touch not the blossom. Praise it, as some wayfarer may praise a plant—even so by Phœbus' altar have I seen a young palm shooting toward the sun. Refrain from Zeus and Phœbus' tree; wait for the fruit-season and thou shall love more righteously."

With the baser form of paiderastia I shall have little to do in this essay. Vice of this kind does not vary to any great extent, whether we observe it in Athens or in Rome, in Florence of the sixteenth or in Paris of the nineteenth century;[9] nor in Hellas was it more noticeable than elsewhere, except for its comparative publicity. The nobler type of masculine love developed by the Greeks is, on the contrary, almost unique in[10] the history of the human race. It is that which more than anything else distinguishes the Greeks from the barbarians of their own time, from the Romans and from modern men in all that appertains to the emotions. The immediate subject of the ensuing inquiry will, therefore, be that mixed form of paiderastia upon which the Greeks prided themselves, which had for its heroic ideal the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus, but which in historic times exhibited a sensuality unknown to Homer.[11] In treating of this unique product of their civilisation I shall use the terms Greek Love, understanding thereby a passionate and enthusiastic attachment subsisting between man and youth, recognised by society and protected by opinion, which, though it was not free from sensuality, did not degenerate into mere licentiousness.

VII.

Before reviewing the authors who deal with this subject in detail, or discussing the customs of the several Greek states, it will be well to illustrate in general the nature of this love, and to collect the principal legends and historic tales which set it forth.

Greek love was, in its origin and essence, military. Fire and valour, rather than tenderness or tears, were the external outcome of this passion; nor had Malachia, effeminacy, a place in its vocabulary. At the same time it was exceedingly absorbing. "Half my life," says the lover, "lives in thine image, and the rest is lost. When thou art kind, I spend the day like a god; when thy face is turned aside, it is very dark with me."[12] Plato, in his celebrated description of a lover's soul, writes:[13]—

"Wherever she thinks that she will behold the beautiful one, thither in her desire she runs. And when she has seen him, and bathed herself with the waters of desire, her constraint is loosened and she is refreshed, and has no more pangs and pains; and this is the sweetest of all pleasures at the time, and is the reason why the soul of the lover will never forsake his beautiful one, whom he esteems above all; he has forgotten mother and brethren and companions, and he thinks nothing of the neglect and loss of his property. The rules and proprieties of life, on which he formerly prided himself, he now despises, and is ready to sleep like a servant, wherever he is allowed, as near as he can to his beautiful one, who is not only the object of his worship, but the only physician who can heal him in his extreme agony."

These passages show how real and vital was the passion of Greek love. It would be difficult to find more intense expressions of affection in modern literature. The effect produced upon the lover by the presence of his beloved was similar to that inspiration which the knight of romance received from his lady.

"I know not," says Phædrus, in the Symposium of Plato,[14] "any greater blessing to a young man beginning life than a virtuous lover, or to the lover than a beloved youth. For the principle which ought to be the guide of men who would nobly live—that principle, I say, neither kindred, nor honour, nor wealth, nor any other motive is able to implant so well as love. Of what am I speaking? Of the sense of honour and dishonour, without which neither states nor individuals ever do any good or great work. And I say that a lover who is detected in doing any dishonourable act, or submitting, through cowardice, when any dishonour is done to him by another, will be more pained at being detected by his beloved than at being seen by his father, or by his companions, or by any one else. The beloved, too, when he is seen in any disgraceful situation, has the same feeling about his lover. And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour; and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at one another's side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post, or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger? The veriest coward would become an inspired hero, equal to the bravest, at such a time; love would inspire him. That courage which, as Homer says, the god breathes into the soul of heroes, love of his own nature inspires into the lover."

With the whole of this quotation we might compare what Plutarch in the Life of Pelopidas relates about the composition of a Sacred Band;[15] while the following anecdote from the Anabasis of Xenophon may serve to illustrate the theory that regiments should consist of lovers.[16] Episthenes of Olynthus, one of Xenophon's hoplites, saved a beautiful boy from the slaughter commanded by Seuthes in a Thracian village. The king could not understand why his orders had not been obeyed, till Xenophon excused his hoplite by explaining that Episthenes was a passionate boy-lover, and that he had once formed a corps of none but beautiful men. Then Seuthes asked Episthenes if he was willing to die instead of the boy, and he answered, stretching out his neck, "Strike," he says, "if the boy says 'Yes,'[17] and will be pleased with it." At the end of the affair, which is told by Xenophon with a quiet humour that brings a little scene of Greek military life vividly before us, Seuthes gave the boy his liberty, and the soldier walked away with him.

In order further to illustrate the hardy nature of Greek love, I may allude to the speech of Pausanias in the Symposium of Plato.[18] The fruits of love, he says, are courage in the face of danger, intolerance of despotism, the virtues of the generous and haughty soul.

"In Ionia," he adds, "and other places, and generally in countries which are subject to the barbarians, the custom is held to be dishonourable; loves of youth share the evil repute of philosophy and gymnastics because they are inimical to tyranny, for the interests of rulers require that their subjects should be poor in spirit, and that there should be no strong bond of friendship or society among them, which love, above all other motives, is likely to inspire, as our Athenian tyrants learned by experience."

VIII.

Among the myths to which Greek lovers referred with pride, besides that of Achilles, were the legends of Theseus and Peirithous, of Orestes and Pylades, of Talos and Rhadamanthus, of Damon and Pythias. Nearly all the Greek gods, except, I think, oddly enough, Ares, were famous for their love. Poseidon, according to Pindar, loved Pelops; Zeus, besides Ganymede, was said to have carried off Chrysippus. Apollo loved Ayacinth, and numbered among his favourites Branchos and Claros. Pan loved Cyparissus, and the spirit of the evening star loved Hymenæus. Hypnos, the god of slumber, loved Endymion, and sent him to sleep with open eyes, in order that he might always gaze upon their beauty. (Ath. xiii. 564). The myths of Phœbus, Pan, and Hesperus, it may be said in passing, are paiderastic parallels to the tales of Adonis and Daphne. They do not represent the specific quality of national Greek love at all in the same way as the legends of Achilles, Theseus, Pylades, and Pythias. We find in them merely a beautiful and romantic play of the mythopœic fancy, after paiderastia had taken hold on the imagination of the race. The case is different with Herakles, the patron, eponym, and ancestor of Dorian Hellas. He was a boy-lover of the true heroic type. In the innumerable amours ascribed to him we always discern the note of martial comradeship. His passion for Iolaus was so famous that lovers swore their oaths upon the Theban's tomb;[19] while the story of his loss of Hylas supplied Greek poets with one of their most charming subjects. From the idyll of Theocritus called Hylas we learn some details about the relation between lover and beloved, according to the heroic ideal.

"Nay, but the son of Amphitryon, that heart of bronze, he that abode the wild lion's onset, loved a lad, beautiful Hylas—Hylas of the braided locks, and he taught him all things as a father teaches his child, all whereby himself became a mighty man and renowned in minstrelsy. Never was he apart from Hylas,..... and all this that the lad might be fashioned to his mind, and might drive a straight furrow, and come to the true measure of man."[20]

IX.

Passing from myth to semi-legendary history, we find frequent mention made of lovers in connection with the great achievements of the earliest age of Hellas. What Pausanias and Phædrus are reported to have said in the Symposium of Plato, is fully borne out by the records of the numerous tyrannicides and self-devoted patriots who helped to establish the liberties of the Greek cities. When Epimenides of Crete required a human victim in his purification of Athens from the Musos of the Megacleidæ, two lovers, Cratinus and Aristodemus, offered themselves as a voluntary sacrifice for the city.[21] The youth died to propitiate the gods; the lover refused to live without him. Chariton and Melanippus, who attempted to assassinate Phalaris of Agrigentum, were lovers.[22] So were Diocles and Philolaus, natives of Corinth, who removed to Thebes, and after giving laws to their adopted city, died and were buried in one grave.[23] Not less celebrated was another Diocles, the Athenian exile, who fell near Megara in battle, fighting for the boy he loved.[24] His tomb was honoured with the rites and sacrifices specially reserved for heroes. A similar story is told of the Thessalian horseman Cleomachus.[25] This soldier rode into a battle which was being fought between the people of Eretria and Chalkis, inflamed with such enthusiasm for the youth he beloved, that he broke the foemen's ranks and won the victory for the Chalkidians. After the fight was over Cleomachus was found among the slain, but his corpse was nobly buried; and from that time forward love was honoured by the men of Chalkis. These stories might be paralleled from actual Greek history. Plutarch, commenting upon the courage of the sacred band of Thebans,[26] tells of a man "who, when his enemy was going to kill him, earnestly requested him to run him through the breast, that his lover might not blush to see him wounded in the back." In order to illustrate the haughty temper of Greek lovers, the same author, in his Erotic Dialogue, records the names of Antileon of Metapontum, who braved a tyrant in the cause of the boy he loved;[27] of Crateas, who punished Archelaus with death for an insult offered to him; of Pytholaus, who treated Alexander of Pheræ in like manner; and of another youth who killed the Ambracian tyrant Periander for a similar affront.[28] To these tales we might add another story by Plutarch in his Life of Demetrius Poliorketes. This man insulted a boy called Damocles, who, finding no other way to save his honour, jumped into a cauldron of boiling water and was killed upon the spot.[29] A curious legend, belonging to semi-mythical romance related by Pausanias,[30] deserves a place here, since it proves to what extent the popular imagination was impregnated by notions of Greek love. The city of Thespia was at one time infested by a dragon, and young men were offered to appease its fury every year. They all died unnamed and unremembered except one, Cleostratus. To clothe this youth, his lover, Menestratus, forged a brazen coat of mail, thick set with hooks turned upwards. The dragon swallowed Cleostratus and killed him, but died by reason of the hooks. Thus love was the salvation of the city and the source of immortality to the two friends.

difficult to multiply romances of this kind; the rhetoricians and moralists of later Greece abound in them.[31] But the most famous of all remains to be recorded. This is the story of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who freed Athens from the tyrant Hipparchus. There is not a speech, a poem, essay, a panegyrical oration in praise of either Athenian liberty or Greek love which does not tell the tale of this heroic friendship. Herodotus and Thucydides treat the event as matter of serious history. Plato refers to it as the beginning of freedom for the Athenians. "The drinking-song in honour of these lovers, is one of the most precious fragments of popular Greek poetry which we possess. As in the cases of Lucretia and Virginia, so here a tyrant's intemperance was the occasion, if not the cause, of a great nation's rising. Harmodius and Aristogeiton were reverenced as martyrs and saviours of their country. Their names gave consecration to the love which made them bold against the despot, and they became at Athens eponyms of paiderastia."[32]

X.

A considerable majority of the legends which have been related in the preceding section are Dorian, and the Dorians gave the earliest and most marked encouragement to Greek love. Nowhere else, indeed, except among the Dorians, who were an essentially military race, living like an army of occupation in the countries they had seized, herding together in barracks and at public messes, and submitting to martial drill and discipline, do we meet with paiderastia developed as an institution. In Crete and Lacedæmon it became a potent instrument of education. What I have to say, in the first instance, on this matter is derived almost entirely from C. O. Müllers's Dorians,[33] to which work I refer my readers for the authorities cited in illustration of each detail. Plato says that the law of Lycurgus in respect to love was Poikiles,[34] by which he means that it allowed the custom under certain restrictions. It would appear that the lover was called Inspirer, at Sparta, while the youth he loved was named Hearer. These local phrases sufficiently indicate the relation which subsisted between the pair. The lover taught, the hearer learned; and so from man to man was handed down the tradition of heroism, the peculiar tone and temper of the state to which, in particular among the Greeks, the Dorians clung with obstinate pertinacity. Xenophon distinctly states that love was maintained among the Spartans with a view to education; and when we consider the customs of the state, by which boys were separated early from their homes and the influences of the family were almost wholly wanting, it is not difficult to understand the importance of the paiderastic institution. The Lacedæmonian lover might represent his friend in the Assembly. He was answerable for his good conduct, and stood before him as a pattern of manliness, courage, and prudence. Of the nature of his teaching we may form some notion from the precepts addressed by the Megarian Theognis to the youth Kurnus. In battle the lovers fought side by side; and it is worthy of notice that before entering into an engagement the Spartans sacrificed to Erôs. It was reckoned a disgrace if a youth found no man to be his lover. Consequently we find that the most illustrious Spartans are mentioned by their biographers in connection with their comrades. Agesilaus heard Lysander; Archidamus, his son, loved Cleonymus; Cleomenes III, was the hearer of Xenares and the inspirer of Panteus. The affection of Pausanias, on the other hand, for the boy Argilus, who betrayed him according to the account of Thucydides,[35] must not be reckoned among these nobler loves. In order to regulate the moral conduct of both parties, Lycurgus made it felony, punishable with death or exile, for the lover to desire the person of a boy in lust; and, on the other hand, it was accounted exceedingly disgraceful for the younger to meet the advances of the elder with a view to gain. Honest affection and manly self-respect were exacted on both sides; the bond of union implied no more of sensuality than subsists between a father and a son, a brother and a brother. At the same time great license of intercourse was permitted. Cicero, writing long after the great age of Greece, but relying probably upon sources to which we have no access, asserts that, "Lacedæmoni ipsi cum omnia concedunt in amore juvenum præter stuprum tenui sane muro dissæpiunt id quod excipiunt: complexus enim concubitusque permittunt."[36] The Lacedæmonians, while they permit all things except outrage in the love of youths, certainly distinguish the forbidden by a thin wall of partition from the sanctioned, for they allow embraces and a common couch to lovers."

In Crete the paiderastic institutions were even more elaborate than at Sparta. The lover was called Philetor, and the beloved one Kleinos. When a man wished to attach to himself a youth in the recognised bonds of friendship, he took him away from his home, with a pretence of force, but not without the connivance, in most cases, of his friends.[37] For two months the pair lived together among the hills, hunting and fishing. Then the Philetor gave gifts to the youth, and suffered him to return to his relatives. If the Kleinos (illustrious or laudable) had received insult or ill-treatment during the probationary weeks, he now could get redress at law. If he was satisfied with the conduct of his would-be comrade, he changed his title from Kleinos to Parastates (comrade and bystander in the ranks of battle and life), returned to the Philetor, and lived thenceforward in close bonds of public intimacy with him.

The primitive simplicity and regularity of these customs make it appear strange to modern minds; nor is it easy to understand how they should ever have been wholly free from blame. Yet we must remember the influences which prevalent opinion and ancient tradition both contribute toward preserving a delicate sense of honour under circumstances of apparent difficulty. The careful reading of one Life by Plutarch, that, for instance, of Cleomenes or that of Agis, will have more effect in presenting the realities of Dorian existence to our imagination than any amount of speculative disquisition. Moreover, a Dorian was exposed to almost absolute publicity. He had no chance of hiding from his fellow-citizens the secrets of his private life. It was not, therefore, till the social and political complexion of the whole nation became corrupt that the institutions just described encouraged profligacy.[38] That the Spartans and the Cretans degenerated from their primitive ideal is manifest from the severe critiques of the philosophers. Plato, while passing a deliberate censure on the Cretans for the introduction of paiderastia into Greece,[39] remarks that syssitia, or meals in common, and gymnasia are favourable to the perversion of the passions. Aristotle, in a similar argument,[40] points out that the Dorian habits had a direct tendency to check the population by encouraging the love of boys and by separating women from the society of men. An obscure passage quoted from Hagnon by Athenæus might also be cited to prove that the Greeks at large had formed no high opinion of Spartan manners.[41] But the most convincing testimony is to be found in the Greek language: "to do like the Laconians, to have connection in Laconian way, to do like the Cretans," tell their own tale, especially when we compare these phrases with, "to do like the Corinthians, the Lesbians, the Siphnians, the Phœnicians, and other verbs formed to indicate the vices localised in separate districts.

Up to this point I have been content to follow the notices of Dorian institutions which are scattered up and down the later Greek authors, and which have been collected by C. O. Müller. I have not attempted to draw definite conclusions, or to speculate upon the influence which the Dorian section of the Hellenic family may have exercised in developing paiderastia. To do so now will be legitimate, always remembering that what we actually know about the Dorians is confined to the historic period, and that the tradition respecting their early customs is derived from second-hand authorities.

It has frequently occurred to my mind that the mixed type of paiderastia which I have named Greek Love took its origin in Doris. Homer, who knew nothing about the passion as it afterwards existed, drew a striking picture of masculine affection in Achilles. And Homer, I may add, was not a native of northern Greece. Whoever he was, or whoever they were, the poet, or the poets, we call Homer, belonged to the south-east of the Ægean. Homer, then, may have been ignorant of paiderastia. Yet friendship occupies the first place in his hero's heart, while only the second is reserved for sexual emotion. Now Achilles came from Phthia, itself a portion of that mountain region to which Doris belonged.[42] Is it unnatural to conjecture that the Dorians in their migration to Lacedæmon and Crete, the recognised headquarters of the custom, carried a tradition of heroic paiderastia along with them? Is it unreasonable to surmise that here, if anywhere in Hellas, the custom existed from prehistoric times? If so, the circumstances of their invasion would have fostered the transformation of this tradition into a tribal institution. They went forth, a band of warriors and pirates, to cross the sea in boats, and to fight their way along the hills and plains of Southern Greece. The dominions they had conquered with their swords they occupied like soldiers. The camp became their country, and for a long period of time they literally lived upon the bivouac. Instead of a city-state, with is manifold complexities of social life, they were reduced to the narrow limits and the simple conditions of a roving horde. Without sufficiency of women, without the sanctities of established domestic life, inspired by the memory of Achilles, and venerating their ancestor Herakles, the Dorian warriors had special opportunity for elevating comradeship to the rank of an enthusiasm. The incidents of emigration into a distant country—perils of the sea, passages of rivers and mountains, assaults of fortresses and cities, landings on a hostile shore, night-vigils by the side of blazing beacons, foragings for food, picquet services in the front of watchful foes—involved adventures capable of shedding the lustre of romance on friendship. These circumstances, by bringing the virtues of sympathy with the weak, tenderness for the beautiful, protection for the young, together with corresponding qualities of gratitude, self-devotion and admiring attachment, into play, may have tended to cement unions between man and man no less firm than that of marriage. On such connections a wise captain would have relied for giving strength to his battalion, and for keeping alive the flame of enterprise and daring. Fighting and foraging in company, sharing the same wayside board and heath-strewn bed, rallying to the comrade's voice in onset, relying on the comrade's shield when fallen, these men learned the meanings of the words Philetor and Parastates. To be loved was honourable, for it implied being worthy to be died for. To love was glorious, since it pledged the lover to self-sacrifice in case of need. In these conditions the paiderastic passion may have well combined manly virtue with carnal appetite, adding such romantic sentiment as some stern men reserve within their hearts for women.[43] A motto might be chosen for a lover of this early Dorian type from the Æolic poem ascribed to Theocritus: "And made me tender from the iron man I used to be."

In course of time, when the Dorians had settled down upon their conquered territories, and when the passions which had shown their more heroic aspect during a period of warfare came, in a period of idleness, to call for methods of restraint, then the discrimination between honourable and base forms of love, to which Plato pointed as a feature of the Dorian institutions, took place. It is also more than merely probable that in Crete where these institutions were the most precisely regulated, the Dorian immigrants came into contact with Phœnician vices, the repression of which required the adoption of a strict code.[44] In this way paiderastia, considered as a mixed custom, partly martial, partly luxurious, recognised by public opinion and controlled by law, obtained among the Dorian Tribes, and spread from them throughout the states of Hellas. Relics of numerous semi-savage habits—thefts of food, ravishment as a prelude to marriage, and so forth—indicate in like manner the survival among the Dorians of primitive tribal institutions.

It will be seen that the conclusion to which I have been drawn by the foregoing consideration is that the mixed form of paiderastia, called by me in this essay "Greek love," owed its peculiar quality, what Plato called its intricacy of "laws and customs," to two diverse strains of circumstances harmonised in the Greek temperament. Its military and enthusiastic elements were derived from the primitive conditions of the Dorians during their immigration into Southern Greece. Its refinements of sensuality and sanctified impurity are referable to contact with Phoenician civilisation. The specific form it assumed among the Dorians of the historic period, equally removed from military freedom and from Oriental luxury, can be ascribed to the operation of that organising, moulding and assimilating spirit which we recognise as Hellenic.

The position thus stated is, unfortunately, speculative rather than demonstrable; and in order to establish the reasonableness of the speculation, it would be natural at this point to introduce some account of paiderastia as it exists in various savage tribes, if their customs could be seen to illustrate the Doric phase of Greek love. This, however, is not the case. Study of Mr. Herbert Spencer's Tables, and of Bastian's Der Mensch in der Geschichte (vol. iii. pp. 304-323), together with the facts collected by travellers among the North American Indians, and the mass of curious information supplied by Rosenbaum in his Geschichte der Lustseuche im Alterthume, makes it clear to my mind that the unisexual vices of barbarians follow, not the type of Greek paiderastia, but that of the Scythian disease of effeminacy, described by Herodotus and Hippocrates as something essentially foreign and non-Hellenic. In all these cases, whether we regard the Scythian impotent effeminates, the North American Bardashes, the Tsecats of Madagascar, the Cordaches of the Canadian Indians and similar classes among Californian Indians, natives of Venezuela, and so forth—the characteristic point is that effeminate males renounce their sex, assume female clothes, and live either in promiscuous concubinage with the men of the tribe or else in marriage with chosen persons. This abandonment of the masculine attributes and habits, this assumption of feminine duties and costume, would have been abhorrent to the Doric custom. Precisely similar effeminacies were recognised as pathological by Herodotus, to whom Greek paiderastia was familiar. The distinctive feature of Dorian comradeship was that it remained on both sides masculine, tolerating no sort of softness. For similar reasons, what we know about the prevalence of sodomy among the primitive peoples of Mexico, Peru and Yucatan, and almost all half-savage nations,[45] throws little light upon the subject of the present inquiry. Nor do we gain anything of importance from the semi-religious practices of Japanese Bonzes or Egyptian priests. Such facts, taken in connection with abundant modern experience of what are called unnatural vices, only prove the universality of unisexual indulgence in all parts of the world and under all conditions of society. Considerable psychological interest attaches to the study of these sexual aberrations. It is also true that we detect in them the germ or raw material of a custom which the Dorians moralised or developed after a specific fashion; but nowhere do we find an analogue to their peculiar institutions. It was just that effort to moralise and adapt to social use a practice which has elsewhere been excluded in the course of civil growth, or has been allowed to linger half-acknowledged as a remnant of more primitive conditions, or has re-appeared in the corruption of society; it was just this effort to elevate paiderastia according to the æsthetic standard of Greek ethics which constituted its distinctive quality in Hellas. We are obliged, in fact, to separate this, the true Hellenic manifestation of the paiderastic passion, from the effeminacies, brutalities, and gross sensualities which can be noticed alike in imperfectly civilised and in luxuriously corrupt communities.

Before leaving this part of the subject, I must repeat that what I have suggested regarding the intervention of the Dorians in creating the type of Greek love is a pure speculation. If it has any value, that is due to the fixed and regulated forms which paiderastic institutions displayed at a very early date in Crete and Sparta, and also to the remnants of savage customs embedded in them. It depends to a certain extent also upon the absence of paiderastia in Homer. But on this point something still remains to be said. Our Attic authorities certainly regarded the Homeric poems as canonical books, decisive for the culture of the first stage of Hellenic history. Yet it is clear that Homer refined Greek mythology, while many of the cruder elements of that mythology survived from pre-Homeric times in local cults and popular religious observances. We know, moreover, that a body of non-Homeric writings, commonly called the cyclic poems, existed by the side of Homer, some of the material of which is preserved to us by dramatists, lyrists, historians, antiquaries and anecdotists. It is not impossible that this so-called cyclical literature contained paiderastic elements, which were eliminated, like the grosser forms of myth, in the Homeric poems.[46] If this be conceded, we might be led to conjecture that paiderastia was a remnant of ancient savage habits, ignored by Homer, but preserved by tradition in the race. Given the habit, the Greeks were certainly capable of carrying it on without shame. We ought to resist the temptation to seek a high and noble origin for all Greek institutions. But there remains the fact that, however they acquired the habit, whether from North Dorian customs antecedent to Homer, or from conditions of experience subsequent to the Homeric age, the Greeks gave it a dignity and an emotional superiority which is absent in the annals of barbarian institutions. Instead of abandoning it as part of the obsolete lumber of their prehistoric origins, they chose to elaborate it into the region of romance and ideality. And this they did in spite of Homer's ignorance of the passion or of his deliberate reticence. Whatever view, therefore, we may take about Homer's silence, and about the possibility of paiderastia occurring in the lost poems of the cyclic type, or lastly, about its probable survival in the people from an age of savagery, we are bound to regard its systematical development among the Dorians as a fact of paramount significance.

In that passage of the Symposium[47] where Plato notices the Spartan law of love as Poikilos, he speaks with disapprobation of the Bœotians, who were not restrained by custom and opinion within the same strict limits. Yet it should here be noted that the military aspect of Greek love in the historic period was nowhere more distinguished than at Thebes. Epaminondas was a notable boy-lover; and the names of his beloved Asopichus and Cephisodorus are mentioned by Plutarch.[48] They died, and were buried with him at Mantinea. The paiderastic legend of Herakles and Iolaus was localised in Bœotia; and the lovers, Diocles and Philolaus, who gave laws to Thebes, directly encouraged those masculine attachments, which had their origin in the Palæstra.[49] The practical outcome of these national institutions in the chief town of Bœotia was the formation of the so-called Sacred Band, or Band of Lovers, upon whom Pelopidas relied in his most perilous operations. Plutarch relates that they were enrolled, in the first instance, by Gorgidas, the rank and file of the regiment being composed of young men bound together by affection. Report goes that they were never beaten till the battle of Chæronea. At the end of that day, fatal to the liberties of Hellas, Philip of Macedon went forth to view the slain; and when he "came to that place where the three hundred that fought his phalanx lay dead together, he wondered, and understanding that it was the band of lovers, he shed tears, and said, 'Perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered anything that was base.'"[50] As at all the other turning points of Greek history, so at this, too, there is something dramatic and eventful. Thebes was the last strong-hold of Greek freedom; the Sacred Band contained the pith and flower of her army; these lovers had fallen to a man, like the Spartans of Leonidas at Thermopylæ, pierced by the lances of the Macedonian phalanx; then, when the day was over and the dead were silent, Philip, the victor in that fight, shed tears when he beheld their serried ranks, pronouncing himself therewith the fittest epitaph which could have been inscribed upon their stelë by a Hellene.

At Chæronea, Greek liberty, Greek heroism, and Greek love, properly so-called, expired. It is not unworthy of notice that the son of the conqueror, young Alexander, endeavoured to revive the tradition of Achilleian friendship. This lad, born in the decay of Greek liberty, took conscious pleasure in enacting the part of a Homeric hero, on the altered stage of Hellas and of Asia, with somewhat tawdry histrionic pomp.[51] Homer was his invariable companion upon his marches; in the Troad he paid special honour to the tomb of Achilles, running naked races round the barrow in honour of the hero, and expressing the envy which he felt for one who had so true a friend and so renowned a poet to record his deeds. The historians of his life relate that, while he was indifferent to women,[52] he was madly given to the love of males. This the story of his sorrow for Hephaistion sufficiently confirms. A kind of spiritual atavism moved the Macedonian conqueror to assume on the vast Bactrian plain the outward trappings of Achilles Agonistes.[53]

Returning from this digression upon Alexander's almost hysterical archaism, it should next be noticed that Plato includes the people of Elis in the censure which he passes upon the Bœotians. He accused the Eleans of adopting customs which permitted youths to gratify their lovers without further distinction of age, or quality, or opportunity. In like manner, Maximus Tyrius distinguishes between the customs of Crete and Elis: "While I find the laws of the Cretans excellent, I must condemn those of Elis for their license."[54] Elis,[55] like Megara, instituted a contest for beauty among youths; and it is significant that the Megarians were not uncommonly accused of Hybris, or wanton lust, by Greek writers. Both the Eleans and the Megarians may therefore reasonably be considered to have exceeded the Greek standard of taste in the amount of sensual indulgence which they openly acknowledged. In Ionia, and other regions of Hellas exposed to Oriental influences, Plato says that paiderastia was accounted a disgrace.[56] At the same time he couples with paiderastia, in this place, both addiction to gymnastic exercise and to philosophical studies, pointing out that despotism was always hostile to high thoughts and haughty customs. The meaning of the passage, therefore, seems to be that the true type of Greek love had no chance of unfolding itself freely on the shores of Asia Minor. Of paiderastic Malakia, or effeminacy, there is here no question, else Plato would probably have made Pausanias use other language.

XI.

Before proceeding to discuss the conditions under which paiderastia existed in Athens, it may be well to pause and to consider the tone adopted with regard to it by some of the earlier Greek poets. Much that is interesting on the subject of the true Hellenic Erôs can be gathered from Theognis, Solon, Pindar, Æschylus, and Sophocles; while the lyrics of Anacreon, Alcæus, Ibycus, and others of the same period illustrate the wanton and illiberal passion (Hybris) which tended to corrode and undermine the nobler feeling.

It is well known that Theognis and his friend Kurnus were members of the aristocracy of Megara. After Megara had thrown off the yoke of Corinth in the early part of the sixth century, the city first submitted to the democratic despotism of Theagenes, and then for many years engaged in civil warfare. The larger number of the elegies of Theognis are specially intended to instruct Kurnus how he ought to act as an illustrious party-leader of the nobles (Esthloi) in their contest with the people (Deiloi). They consist, therefore, of political and social precepts, and for our present purpose are only important as illustrating the educational authority assumed by a Dorian Philetor over his friend. The personal elegies intermingled with these poems on conduct reveal the very heart of a Greek lover at his early period. Here is one on loyalty:—

"Love me not with words alone, while your mind and thoughts are otherwise, if you really care for me and the heart within you is loyal. But love me with a pure and honest soul, or openly disown and hate me; let the breach between us be avowed. He who hath a single tongue and a double mind is a bad comrade, Kurnus, better as a foe than a friend."[57]

The bitter-sweet of love is well described in the following couplets:—

"Harsh and sweet, alluring and repellent, until it be crowned with completion, is love for young men. If one brings it to perfection, then it is sweet; but if a man pursues and does not love, then it is of all things the most painful."[58]

The same strain is repeated in the lines which begin, "a boy's love is fair to keep, fair to lay aside."[59] As one time Theognis tells his friend that he has the changeable temper of a hawk, the skittishness of a pampered colt.[60] At another he remarks that boys are more constant than women in their affection.[61] His passion rises to its noblest height in a poem which deserves to rank with some of Shakespeare's sonnets, and which, like them, has fulfilled its own promise of immortality.[62] In order to appreciate the value of the fame conferred on Kurnus by Theognis, and celebrated in such lofty strains, we must remember that these elegies were sung at banquets. "The fair young men," of whom the poet speaks, boy-lovers themselves, chaunted the praise of Kurnus to the sound of flutes, while the cups went round or the lyre was passed from hand to hand of merry-making guests. A subject to which Theognis more than once refers is calumny:—

"Often will the folk speak vain things against thee in my ears, and against me in thine. Pay thou no heed to them."[63]

Again, he frequently reminds the boy he loves, whether it be Kurnus or some other, that the bloom of youth is passing, and that this is a reason for showing kindness.[64] This argument is urged with what appears like coarseness in the following couplet:—

"O boy, so long as thy chin remains smooth, never will I cease from fawning, no, not if it is doomed for me to die."[65]

A couplet, which is also attributed to Solon, shows that paiderastia at this time in Greece was associated with manly sports and pleasures:—

Nor must the following be omitted:—

The following couplet is attributed to him by Plutarch,[68] nor does there seem any reason to doubt its genuineness. The text seems to be corrupt, but the meaning is pretty clear:—

"In the charming season of the flower-time of youth thou shalt love boys, yearning for their thighs and honeyed mouth."

Solon, it may be remembered, thought it wise to regulate the conditions under which the love of free youths might be tolerated.

The general impression produced by a careful reading of Theognis is that he entertained a genuine passion for Kurnus, and that he was anxious to train the young man's mind in what he judged the noblest principles. Love, at the same time, except in its more sensual moments, he describes as bitter-sweet and subject to anxiety. That perturbation of the emotions, which is inseparable from any of the deeper forms of personal attachment, and which the necessary conditions of boy-love exasperated, was irksome to the Greek. It is not a little curious to observe how all the poets of the despotic age resent and fret against the force of their own feeling, differing herein from the singers of chivalry, who idealised the very pains of passion.

Of Ibycus, who was celebrated among the ancients as the lyrist of paiderastia,[69] very little has been preserved to us, but that little is sufficient to indicate the fervid and voluptuous style of his art. His imagery resembles that of Anacreon. The onset of love, for instance, in one fragment is compared to the down-swooping of a Thracian whirlwind; in another the poet trembles at the approach of Erôs like an old racehorse who is dragged forth to prove his speed once more.

Of the genuine Anacreon we possess more numerous and longer fragments, and the names of his favourites, Cleobulus, Smerdies, Leucaspis, are famous. The general tone of his love-poems is relaxed and Oriental, and his language abounds in phrases indicative of sensuality. The following may be selected:—

"Cleobulus I love, for Cleobulus I am mad, Cleobulus I watch and worship with my gaze."[70]

Again:—

"O boy, with the maiden's eyes, I seek and follow thee, but thou heedest not, nor knowest that thou art my soul's charioteer."

In another place he speaks of[71]—

Syneban (to pass the time of youth with friends) is a word which Anacreon may be said to have made current in Greek. It occurs twice in his fragments,[72] and exactly expresses the luxurious enjoyment of youthful grace and beauty which appear to have been his ideal of love. We are very far here from the Achilleian friendship of the Iliad. Yet, occasionally, Anacreon uses images of great force to describe the attack of passion, as when he says that love has smitten him with a huge axe, and plunged him in a wintry torrent.[73]

It must be remembered that both Anacreon and Ibycus were court poets, singing in the palaces of Polycrates and Hippias. The youths they celebrated were probably little better than the exoleti of a Roman Emperor.[74] This cannot be said exactly of Alcæus, whose love for black-eyed Lycus was remembered by Cicero and Horace. So little, however, is left of his erotic poems that no definite opinion can be formed about them. The authority of later Greek authors justifies our placing him upon the list of those who helped to soften and emasculate the character of Greek love by their poems.[75]

Two Athenian drinking-songs preserved by Athenæus,[76] which seem to bear the stamp of the lyric age, may here be quoted. They serve to illustrate the kind of feeling to which expression was given in public by friends and boy-lovers:—

"Would I were a lovely heap of ivory, and that lovely boys carried me into the Dionysian chorus."[77]

This is marked by a very delicate, though naïf, fancy. The next is no less eminent for its sustained, impassioned, simple, rhythmic feeling:—

"Drink with me, be young with me, love with me, wear crowns with me, with me when I am mad be mad, with me when I am temperate be sober."

The greatest poet of the lyric age, the lyrist par excellence Pindar, adds much to our conception of Greek love at this period. Not only is the poem to Theoxenos, whom he loved, and in whose arms he is said to have died in the theatre at Argos, one of the most splendid achievements of his art;[78] but its choice of phrase, and the curious parallel which it draws between the free love of boys and the servile love of women, help us to comprehend the serious intensity of this passion. "The flashing rays of his forehead," and "is storm-tossed with desire," and "the young-limbed bloom of boys," are phrases which it is impossible adequately to translate. So, too, are the images by which the heart of him who does not feel the beauty of Theoxenos is said to have been forged with cold fire out of adamant, while the poet himself is compared to wax wasting under the sun's rays. In Pindar, passing from Ibycus and Anacreon, we ascend at once into a purer and more healthful atmosphere, fraught, indeed, with passion and pregnant with storm, but no longer simply sensual. Taken as a whole, the Odes of Pindar, composed for the most part in the honour of young men and boys, both beautiful and strong, are the work of a great moralist as well as a great artist. He never fails to teach by precept and example; he does not, as Ibycus is reported to have done, adorn his verse with legends of Ganymede and Tithonus, for the sake of insinuating compliments. Yet no one shared in fuller measure the Greek admiration for health and grace and vigour of limb. This is obvious in the many radiant pictures of masculine perfection he has drawn, as well as in the images by which he loves to bring the beauty-bloom of youth to mind. The true Hellenic spirit may be better studied in Pindar than in any other poet of his age; and after we have weighed his high morality, sound counsel, and reverence for all things good, together with the passion he avows, we shall have done something toward comprehending the inner nature of Greek love.

XII.

The treatment of paiderastia upon the Attic stage requires separate considerations. Nothing proves the popular acceptance and national approval of Greek love more forcibly to modern minds than the fact that the tragedians like Æschylus and Sophocles made it the subject of their dramas. From a notice in Athenæus it appears that Stesichorus, who first gave dramatic form to lyric poetry, composed interludes upon paiderastic subjects.[79] But of these it is impossible to speak, since their very titles have been lost. What immediately follows, in the narrative of Athenæus, will serve as text for what I have to say upon this topic. "And Æshylus, that mighty poet, and Sophocles, brought masculine loves into the theatre through their tragedies. Wherefore some are wont to call tragedy a paiderast; and the spectators welcome such." Nothing, unfortunately, remains of the plays which justified this language but a few fragments cited by Aristophanes, Plutarch, Lucian, and Athenæus. To examine these will be the business of this section.

The tragedy of the Myrmidones, which formed part of a trilogy by Æschylus upon the legend of Achilles, must have been popular at Athens, for Aristophanes quotes it no less than four times—twice in the Frogs, once in the Birds, and once in the Ecclesiazusæ. We can reconstruct its general plan from the lines which have come down to us on the authority of the writers above mentioned.[80] The play opened with an anapæstic speech of the chorus, composed of the clansmen of Achilles, who upbraided him for staying idle in his tent while the Achaians suffered at the hands of Hector. Achilles replied with the metaphor of the eagle stricken by an arrow winged from one of his own feathers. Then the embassy of Phœnix arrived, and Patroclus was sent forth to battle. Achilles, meanwhile, engaged in a game of dice; and while he was thus employed Antilochus entered with the news of the death of Patroclus. The next fragment brings the whole scene vividly before our eyes.

"Wail for me, Antilochus, rather than for the dead man—for me, Achilles, who still live." After this, the corpse of Patroclus was brought upon the stage, and the son of Peleus poured forth a lamentation over his friend. The Threnos of Achilles on this occasion was very celebrated among the ancients. One passage of unmeasured passion, which described the love which subsisted between the two heroes, has been quoted, with varieties of reading, by Lucian, Plutarch, and Athenæus.[81] Lucian says: "Achilles, bewailing the death of Patroclus with unhusbanded passion, broke forth into the truth in self-abandonment to woe." Athenæus gives the text as follows:—

"Hadst thou no reverence for the unsullied holiness of thighs, O thou ungrateful for the showers of kisses given."

What we have here chiefly to notice is the change which the tale of Achilles had undergone since Homer.[82] Homer represented Patroclus as older in years than the son of Peleus, but inferior to him in station; nor did he hint which of the friends was the Erastes of the other. That view of their comradeship had not occurred to him. Æschylus makes Achilles the lover; and for this distortion of the Homeric legend he was severely criticised by Plato.[83] At the same time, as the two lines quoted from the Threnos prove, he treated their affection from the point of view of post-Homeric paiderastia.

Sophocles also wrote a play upon the legend of Achilles, which bears for its title Achilles' Loves. Very little is left of this drama; but Hesychius has preserved one phrase which illustrates the Greek notion that love was an effluence from the beloved person through the eyes into the lover's soul,[84] while Stobæus quotes the beautiful simile by which love is compared to a piece of ice held in the hand by children.[85] Another play of Sophocles, the Niobe, is alluded to by Plutarch and by Athenæus for the paiderastia which it contained. Plutarch's words are these:[86] "When the children of Niobe, in Sophocles, are being pierced and dying, one of them cries out, appealing to no other rescuer or ally than his lover: Ho! comrade, up and aid me!" Finally, Athenæus quotes a single line from the Colchian Women of Sophocles, which alludes to Ganymede, and runs as follows:[87] "Inflaming with his thighs the royalty of Zeus."

Whether Euripides treated paiderastia directly in any of his plays is not quite certain, though the title Chrysippus, and one fragment preserved from that tragedy—

justify us in believing that he made the crime of Laius his subject. It may be added that a passage in Cicero confirms this belief.[88] The title of another tragedy, Peirithous, seems in like manner to point at friendship; while a beautiful quotation from the Dictys sufficiently indicates the high moral tone assumed by Euripides in treating of Greek love. It runs as follows:—"He was my friend; and never may love lead me to folly, nor to Kupris. There is, in truth, another kind of love—love for the soul, righteous, temperate, and good. Surely men ought to have made this law, that only the temperate and chaste should love and send Kupris, daughter of Zeus, a-begging." The philosophic ideal of comradeship is here vitalised by the dramatic vigour of the poet; nor has the Hellenic conception of pure affection for "a soul, just, upright, temperate and good," been elsewhere more pithily expressed. The Euripidean conception of friendship, it may further be observed, is nobly personified in Pylades, who plays a generous and self-devoted part in the three tragedies of Electra, Orestes, and Iphigenia in Tauris.

Having collected these notices of tragedies which dealt with boy-love, it may be well to add a word upon comedies in the same relation. We hear of a Paidika by Sophron, a Malthakoi by the older Cratinus, a Baptœe by Empolis, in which Alcibiades and his society were satirised. Paiderastes is the title of plays by Diphilis and Antiphanes; Ganymedes of plays of Alkaeus, Antiphanes and Eubulus.

What has been quoted from Æschylus and Sophocles sufficiently establishes the fact that paiderastia was publicly received with approbation on the tragic stage. This should make us cautious in rejecting the stories which are told about the love adventures of Sophocles.[89] Athenæus calls him a lover of lads, nor is it strange if, in the age of Pericles, and while he was producing the Achilles' Loves, he should have shared the tastes of which his race approved.

At this point it may be as well to mention a few illustrious names which, to the student of Greek art and literature, are indissolubly connected with paiderastia. Parmenides, whose life, like that of Pythagoras, was accounted peculiarly holy, loved his pupil Zeno.[90] Pheidias loved Pantarkes, a youth of Elis, and carved his portrait in the figure of a victorious athlete at the foot of the Olympian Zeus.[91] Euripides is said to have loved the adult Agathon Lysias, Demosthenes, and Æschines, orators whose conduct was open to the most searching censure of malicious criticism, did not scruple to avow their love. Socrates described his philosophy as the science of erotics. Plato defined the highest form of human existence to be "philosophy together with paiderastia," and composed the celebrated epigrams on Aster and on Agathon. This list might be indefinitely lengthened.

XIII.

Before proceeding to collect some notes upon the state of paiderastia at Athens, I will recapitulate the points which I have already attempted to establish. In the first place, paiderastia was unknown to Homer.[92] Secondly, soon after the heroic age, two forms of paiderastia appeared in Greece—the one chivalrous and martial, which received a formal organisation in the Dorian states; the other sensual and lustful which, though localised to some extent at Crete, pervaded the Greek cities like a vice. Of the distinction between these two loves the Greek conscience was well aware, though they came in course of time to be confounded. Thirdly, I traced the character of Greek love, using that term to indicate masculine affection of a permanent and enthusiastic temper, without further ethical qualification, in early Greek history and in the institutions of the Dorians. In the fourth place, I showed what kind of treatment it received at the hands of the elegiac, lyric, and tragic poets.

It now remains to draw some picture of the social life of the Athenians in so far as paiderastia is concerned, and to prove how Plato was justified in describing Attic customs on this point as qualified by important restriction and distinction.

I do not know a better way of opening this inquiry, which must by its nature be fragmentary and disconnected, than by transcribing what Plato puts into the mouth of Pausanias in the Symposium.[93] After observing that the paiderastic customs of Elis and Bœotia involved no perplexity, inasmuch as all concessions to the god of love were tolerated, and that such customs did not exist in any despotic states, he proceeds to Athens.

"There is yet a more excellent way of legislating about them, which is our own way; but this, as I was saying, is rather perplexing. For observe that open loves are held to be more honourable than secret ones, and that the love of the noblest and highest, even if their persons are less beautiful than others, is especially honourable. Consider, too, how great is the encouragement which all the world gives to the lover; neither is he supposed to be doing anything dishonourable; but if he succeeds he is praised, and if he fail he is blamed. And in the pursuit of his love, the custom of mankind allows him to do many strange things, which philosophy would bitterly censure if they were done from any motive of interest or wish for office or power. He may pray and entreat, and supplicate and swear, and be a servant of servants, and lie on a mat at the door; in any other case friends and enemies would be equally ready to prevent him, but now there is no friend who will be ashamed of him and admonish him, and no enemy will charge him with meanness or flattery; the actions of a lover have a grace which ennobles them, and custom has decided that they are highly commendable, and that there is no loss of character in them; and what is strangest of all, he only may swear or forswear himself (this is what the world says), and the gods will forgive his transgression, for there is no such thing as a lover's oath. Such is the entire liberty which gods and men have allowed the lover, according to the custom which prevails in our part of the world. From this point of view a man fairly argues that in Athens to love and to be loved is held to be a very honourable thing. But when there is another regime, and parents forbid their sons to talk with their lovers, and place them under a tutor's care, and their companions and equals cast in their teeth anything of this sort which they may observe, and their elders refuse to silence the reprovers, and do not rebuke them; any one who reflects on all this will, on the contrary, think that we hold these practices to be most disgraceful. But the truth, as I imagine, and as I said at first, is, that whether such practices are honourable or whether they are dishonourable is not a simple question; they are honourable to him who follows them honourably, dishonourable to him who follows them dishonourably. There is dishonour in yielding to the evil, or in an evil manner; but there is honour in yielding to the good, or in an honourable manner. Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, and who is inconstant because he is a lover of the inconstant, and, therefore, when the bloom of youth, which he was desiring, is over, takes wing and flies away, in spite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble mind, which is one with the unchanging, is lifelong."

Pausanias then proceeds, at considerable length, to describe how the customs of Athens required deliberate choice and trial of character as a condition of honourable love; how it repudiated hasty and ephemeral attachments, and engagements formed with the object of money-making or political aggrandisement; how love on both sides was bound to be disinterested, and what accession both of dignity and beauty the passion of friends obtained from the pursuit of philosophy, and from the rendering of mutual services upon the path of virtuous conduct.

This sufficiently indicates, in general terms, the moral atmosphere in which Greek love flourished at Athens. In an earlier part of his speech Pausanias, after dwelling upon the distinction between the two kinds of Aphrodite, heavenly and vulgar, describes the latter in a way which proves that the love of boys was held to be ethically superior to that of women.[94]

"The Love who is the offspring of the common Aphrodite is essentially common, and has no discrimination, being such as the meaner sort of men feel, and is apt to be of women as well as of youths, and is of the body rather than the soul; the most foolish beings are the objects of this love, which desires only to gain an end, but never thinks of accomplishing the end nobly, and therefore does good and evil quite indiscriminately. The goddess who is his mother is far younger than the other, and she was born of the union of the male and female, and partakes of both."

Then he turns to the Uranian love.

"The offspring of the heavenly Aphrodite is derived from a mother in whose birth the female has no part. She is from the male only; this is that love which is of youths, and the goddess being older, has nothing of wantonness. Those who are inspired by this love turn to the male, and delight in him who is the most valiant and intelligent nature; any one may recognise the pure enthusiasts in the very character of their attachments; for they love not boys, but intelligent beings whose reason is beginning to be developed, much about the time at which their beards begin to grow. And in choosing them as their companions they mean to be faithful to them, and pass their whole life in company with them, not to take them in their inexperience, and deceive them, and play the fool with them, or run away from one to another of them. But the love of young boys should be forbidden by law, because their future is uncertain; they may turn out good or bad, either in body or soul, and much noble enthusiasm may be thrown away upon them; in this matter the good are a law to themselves, and the coarser sort of lovers ought to be restrained by force, as we restrain or attempt to restrain them from fixing their affections on women of free birth."

These long quotations from a work accessible to every reader may require apology. My excuse for giving them must be that they express in pure Athenian diction a true Athenian view of this matter. The most salient characteristics of the whole speech are, first, the definition of a code of honour, distinguishing the nobler from the baser forms of paiderastia; secondly, the decided preference of male over female love; thirdly, the belief in the possibility of permanent affection between paiderastic friends; and, fourthly, the passing allusion to rules of domestic surveillance under which Athenian boys were placed. To the first of these points I shall have to return on another occasion. With regard to the second, it is sufficient for the present purpose to remember that free Athenian women were comparatively uneducated and uninteresting, and that the hetairai had proverbially bad manners. While men transacted business and enjoyed life in public, their wives and daughters stayed in the seclusion of the household, conversing to a great extent with slaves, and ignorant of nearly all that happened in the world around them. They were treated throughout their lives as minors by the law, nor could they dispose by will of more than the worth of a bushel of barley. It followed that marriages at Athens were usually matches of arrangement between the fathers of the bride and the bridegroom, and that the motives which induced a man to marry were less the desire for companionship than the natural wish for children and a sense of duty to the country.[95] Demosthenes, in his speech against Neæra, declares:[96] "We have courtesans for our pleasures, concubines for the requirements of the body, and wives for the procreation of lawful issue." If he had been speaking at a drinking-party, instead of before a jury, he might have added, "and young men for intellectual companions."

The fourth point which I have noted above requires more illustration, since its bearing on the general condition of Athenian society is important. Owing to the prevalence of paiderastia, a boy was exposed in Athens to dangers which are comparatively unknown in our great cities, and which rendered special supervision necessary. It was the custom for fathers, when they did not themselves accompany their sons,[97] to commit them to the care of slaves chosen usually among the oldest and most trustworthy. The duty of the attendant guardian was not to instruct the boy, but to preserve him from the addresses of importunate lovers or from such assaults as Peisthetærus in the Birds of Aristophanes describes.[98] He followed his charge to the school and the gymnasium, and was responsible for bringing him home at the right hour. Thus at the end of the Lysis we read:[99]—

"Suddenly we were interrupted by the tutors of Lysis and Menexenus; who came upon us like an evil apparition with their brothers, and bade them go home, as it was getting late. At first, we and the bystanders drove them off; but afterwards, as they would not mind, and only went on shouting in their barbarous dialect, and got angry, and kept calling the boys—they appeared to us to have been drinking rather too much at the Hermæa, which made them difficult to manage—we fairly gave way and broke up the company."

In this way the daily conduct of Athenian boys of birth and good condition was subjected to observation; and it is not improbable that the charm which invested such lads as Plato portrayed in his Charmides and Lysis was partly due to the self-respect and self-restraint generated by the peculiar conditions under which they passed their life.

Of the way in which a Greek boy spent his day, we gain some notion from two passages in Aristophanes and Lucian. The Dikaios Logos[100] tells that—

"in his days, when justice flourished and self-control was held in honour, a boy's voice was never heard. He walked in order with his comrades of the same quarter, lightly clad even in winter, down to the school of the harp-player. There he learned old-fashioned hymns to the gods, and patriotic songs. While he sat, he took care to cover his person decently; and when he rose, he never forgot to rub out the marks which he might have left upon the dust lest any man should view them after he was gone. At meals he ate what was put before him, and refrained from idle chattering. Walking through the streets, he never tried to catch a passer's eye or to attract a lover. He avoided the shops, the baths,[101] the Agora, the houses of Hetairai.[102] He reverenced old age and formed within his soul the image of modesty. In the gymnasium he indulged in fair and noble exercise, or ran races with his comrades among the olive-trees of the Academy."

The Adikos Logos replies by pleading that this temperate sort of life is quite old-fashioned; boys had better learn to use their tongues and bully. In the last resort he uses a clinching argumentum ad juvenem.[103]

Were it not for the beautiful and highly-finished portraits in Plato, to which I have already alluded, the description of Aristophanes might be thought a mere ideal; and, indeed, it is probable that the actual life of the average Athenian boy lay mid-way between the courses prescribed by the Dikaios and the Adikos Logos.

Meanwhile, since Euripides, together with the whole school of studious and philosophic speculators, are aimed at in the speeches of the Adikos Logos, it will be fair to adduce a companion picture of the young Greek educated on the athletic system, as these men had learned to know him. I quote from the Autolycus, a satyric drama of Euripides:—

"There are a myriad bad things in Hellas, but nothing is worse than the athletes. To begin with, they do not know how to live like gentlemen, nor could they if they did; for how can a man, the slave of his jaws and his belly, increase the fortune left him by his father? Poverty and ill-luck find them equally incompetent. Having acquired no habits of good living, they are badly off when they come to roughing it. In youth they shine like statues stuck about the town, and take their walks abroad; but when old age draws nigh, you find them as threadbare as an old coat. Suppose a man has wrestled well, or runs fast, or has hurled a quoit, or given a black eye in fine style, has he done the State a service by the crowns he won? Do soldiers fight with quoits in hand, or without the press of shields can kicks expel the foeman from the gate? Nobody is fool enough to do these things with steel before his face. Keep, then, your laurels for the wise and good, for him who rules a city well, the just and temperate, who by his speeches wards off ill, allaying wars and civil strife. These are the things for cities, yea, and for all Greece to boast of."

Lucian represents, of course, a late period of Attic life. But his picture of the perfect boy completes, and in some points supplements, that of Aristophanes. Callicratidas, in the Dialogue on Love, has just drawn an unpleasing picture of a woman, surrounded in a fusty boudoir with her rouge-pots and cosmetics, perfumes, paints, combs, looking-glasses, hair-dyes, and curling irons. Then he turns to praise boys:[104]

"How different is the boy! In the morning, he rises from his chaste couch, washes the sleep from his eyes with cold water, puts on his chlamys,[105] and takes his way to the school of the musician or the gymnast. His tutors and guardians attend him, and his eyes are bent upon the ground. He spends the morning in studying the poets and philosophers, in riding, or in military drill. Then he betakes himself to the wrestling-ground, and hardens his body with noontide heat and sweat and dust. The bath follows and a modest meal. After this he returns for awhile to study the lives of heroes and great men. After a frugal supper sleep at last is shed upon his eyelids."

Such is Lucian's sketch of the day spent by a young Greek at the famous University of Athens. Much is, undoubtedly, omitted; but enough is said to indicate the simple occupations to which an Athenian youth, capable of inspiring an enthusiastic affection, was addicted. Then follows a burst of rhetoric, which reveals, when we compare it with the dislike expressed for women, the deeply-seated virile nature of Greek love.

"Truly he is worthy to be loved. Who would not love Hermes in the palæstra, or Phœbus at the lyre, or Castor on the racing-ground? Who would not wish to sit face to face with such a youth, to hear him talk, to share his toils, to walk with him, to nurse him in sickness, to attend him on the sea, to suffer chains and darkness with him if need be? He who hated him should be my foe, and who so loved him should be loved by me. At his death I would die; one grave should cover us both; one cruel hand cut short our lives!"

In the sequel of the dialogue Lucian makes it clear that he intends these raptures of Callicratidas to be taken in great measure for romantic boasting. Yet the fact remains that, till the last, Greek paiderastia among the better sort of men implied no effeminacy. Community of interest in sport, in exercise, and in open-air life rendered it attractive.[106]

The palæstra was the place at Athens where lovers enjoyed the greatest freedom. In the Phædrus Plato observes that the attachment of the lover for a boy grew by meetings and personal contact[107] in the gymnasiums and other social resorts, and in the Symposium he mentions gymnastic exercises, with philosophy, and paiderastia, as the three pursuits of freemen most obnoxious to despots. Æschines, again describing the manners of boy-lovers in language familiar to his audience, uses these phrases: "having grown up in gymnasium and games," and "the man having been a noisy haunter of gymnasiums, and having been the lover of multitudes." Aristophanes, also, in the Wasps,[108] employs similar language: "and not seeking to go revelling around in exercising grounds." I may compare Lucian, Amores, cap. 2, "you care for gymnasiums and their sleek oiled combatants," which is said to a notorious boy-lover. Boys and men met together with considerable liberty in the porches, peristyles and other adjuncts to an Attic wrestling-ground; and it was here, too, that sophists and philosophers established themselves, with the certainty of attracting a large and eager audience for their discussions. It is true that an ancient law forbade the presence of adults in the wrestling-grounds of boys; but this law appears to have become almost wholly obsolete in the days of Plato. Socrates, for example, in the Charmides, goes down immediately after his arrival from the camp at Potidæa into the palæstra of Taureas to hear the news of the day, and the very first question which he asks his friends is whether a new beauty has appeared among the youths.[109] So again in the Lysis, Hippothales invites Socrates to enter the private palæstra of Miccus, where boys and men were exercising together on the feast-day of Hermes.[110] "The building," he remarks, "is a newly-erected palæstra, and the entertainment is generally conversation, to which you are welcome." The scene which immediately follows is well known to Greek students as one of the most beautiful and vivid pictures of Athenian life. One group of youths are sacrificing to Hermes; another are casting dice in a corner of the dressing-room. Lysis himself is "standing among the other boys and youths, having a crown upon his head, like a fair vision, and not less worthy of praise for his goodness than for his beauty." The modesty of Lysis is shown by the shyness which prevents him joining Socrates' party until he has obtained the company of some of his young friends. Then a circle of boys and men is formed in a corner of the court, and a conversation upon friendship begins. Hippothales, the lover of Lysis, keeps at a decorous distance in the background. Not less graceful as a picture is the opening of the Charmides. In answer to a question of Socrates, the frequenters of the palæstra tell him to expect the coming of young Charmides. He will then see the most beautiful boy in Athens at the time: "for those who are just entering are the advanced guard of the great beauty of the day, and he is likely to be not far off." There is a noise and a bustle at the door, and while the Socratic party continues talking Charmides enters. The effect produced is overpowering:[111]—

"You know, my friend, that I cannot measure anything, and of the beautiful I am simply such a measure as a white line is of chalk; for almost all young persons appear to be beautiful in my eyes. But at that moment when I saw him coming in, I confess that I was quite astonished at his beauty and his stature; all the world seemed to be enamoured of him; amazement and confusion reigned when he entered; and a troop of lovers followed him. That grown-up men like ourselves should have been affected in this way was not surprising, but I observed that there was the same feeling among the boys; all of them, down to the very least child, turned and looked at him, as if he had been a statue."

Charmides, like Lysis, is persuaded to sit down by Socrates, who opens a discussion upon the appropriate question of Sophrosyne, or modest temperance and self-restraint.[112]

"He came as he was bidden, and sat down between Critias and me. Great amusement was occasioned by everyone pushing with might and main at his neighbour in order to make a place for him next to them, until at the two ends of the row one had to get up, and the other was rolled over sideways. Now I, my friend, was beginning to feel awkward; my former bold belief in my powers of conversing with him had vanished. And when Critias told him that I was the person who had the cure, he looked at me in such an indescribable manner, and was going to ask a question; and then all the people in the palæstra crowded about us, and, O rare! I caught a sight of the inwards of his garment, and took the flame. Then I could no longer contain myself. I thought how well Cydias understood the nature of love when, in speaking of a fair youth, he warns someone, 'not to bring the fawn in the sight of the lion to be devoured by him,' for I felt that I had been overcome by a sort of wild-beast appetite."

The whole tenor of the dialogue makes it clear that, in spite of the admiration he excited, the honour paid him by a public character like Socrates and the troops of lovers and of friends surrounding him, yet Charmides was unspoiled. His docility, modesty, simplicity, and healthiness of soul are at least as remarkable as the beauty for which he was so famous.

A similar impression is produced upon our minds by Autolycus in the Symposium of Xenophon.[113] Callias, his acknowledged lover[114] had invited him to a banquet after a victory which he had gained in the pancration; and many other guests, including the Socratic party, were asked to meet him. Autolycus came, attended by his father; and as soon as the tables were covered and the seats had been arranged, a kind of divine awe fell upon the company. The grown-up men were dazzled by the beauty and the modest bearing of the boy, just as when a bright light is brought into a darkened room. Everybody gazed at him, and all were silent, sitting in uncomfortable attitudes of expectation and astonishment. The dinner party would have passed off very tamely if Phillipus, a professional diner-out and jester, had not opportunely made his appearance. Autolycus meanwhile never uttered a word, but lay beside his father like a breathing statue. Later on in the evening he was obliged to answer a question. He opened his lips with blushes, and all he said was,[115] "Not I, by gad." Still, even this created a great sensation in the company. Everybody, says Xenophon, was charmed to hear his voice, and turned their eyes upon him. It should be remarked that the conversation at this party fell almost entirely upon matters of love. Critobulus, for example, who was very beautiful and rejoiced in having many lovers, gave a full account of his own feelings for Cleinias.[116]

"You all tell me," he argued, "that I am beautiful, and I cannot but believe you; but if I am, and if you feel what I feel when I look on Cleinias, I think that beauty is better worth having than all Persia. I would choose to be blind to everybody else if I could only see Cleinias, and I hate the night because it robs me of his sight. I would rather be the slave of Cleinias than live without him; I would rather toil and suffer danger for his sake than live alone at ease and in safety. I would go through fire with him, as you would with me. In my soul I carry an image of him better made than any sculptor could fashion."