Le Soldat ordonne a embasicetas de m'accabler de ses impurs baisers.
The soldier ordered the catamite to beslaver me with his stinking
kisses.
One of the reasons which caused the learned and paradoxical Hardouin to
assert that all the works which have been attributed to the ancients,
with the exception of the Georgics and the Natural History of Pliny, were
the compositions of monks, was doubtless the very frequent repetition of
scenes of love for boys, which one notices in most of these writings:
this savant was a Jesuit. But this taste is not peculiar to convents; it
is to be found among all peoples and in all climates; its origin is lost
in the night of the centuries; it is common in the most polished nations
and it is common among savage tribes. Profound philosophers have argued
in favor of it; poets have sung the objects of this sort of love in their
tender and passionate compositions, and these compositions have always
been the delight of posterity. What stupid or unfeeling reader can read
without emotion that beautiful eclogue of Virgil where Corydon sighs his
hopeless love for the beautiful Alexis? The most passionate ode of
Horace is that one in which he complains of the harshness of Ligurinus.
The tender Tibullus, deceived by his Marathus, brings tears to all who
have hearts. The delicate Anacreon, praising his Bathylle, and the
valiant Alceus giving himself up after his labors in war to sing of the
dark eyes and black hair of Lycus . . . "with dark eyes and black hair
beautiful." It is not to over-civilized refinements of society which,
according to certain misanthropists, degrade nature and corrupt it, that
this taste is due; it is found among the south sea islanders, and the
evidence of the first Spaniards attests that it was common among the
hordes of American Indians before the discovery of the new world. Paw
had attempted to explain this as resulting from defects in the formation
of the organs of pleasure among the natives; but a peculiar cause is not
sufficient explanation for a universal effect.
At the time of the Patriarchs, Greek love was so general that in the four
cities, Sodom, Gomorrah, Adama, and Seboim, it was impossible to find ten
men exempt from the contagion; that number would have sufficed, said the
Lord, to withhold the punishment which he inflicted upon those cities.
It should be noted here that most of the assertions about the morals of
the Israelites which are to be found in the Erotica Biblon of Mirabeau
are either false or pure guesswork. It is a bizarre method of judging
the morals of a people, that of taking their legal code and inferring
that the people were accustomed to break all the laws which are forbidden
by that code. Nevertheless, that is the method which the author of the
Erotica Biblon adopts for portraying the morals of the Jewish people.
Again, he has not even understood this code; he has believed that the law
against giving one's seed to the idol Moloch meant giving the human
semen; and he is ignorant of the fact that this seed, as spoken of in the
Bible, means the children and descendants. Thus it is that the land of
Canaan is promised to the seed of Abraham, and the perpetuity of the
reign on Sion to that of David. Moloch was a Phoenician deity, the same
one to which, in Carthage, they sacrificed children; the Romans believed
him to be a reincarnation of their Saturn, but Saturn was an Etruscan
divinity who could never have had any connection with the Gods of
Phoenicia. He (Mirabeau) has translated "those who polluted the temple"
as meaning those who were guilty of some obscenity in the temple; and he
does not know that the temple was "polluted" by a thousand acts, declared
impure by law, and which were not obscene. The entrance of a woman into
a sacred place, less than forty days after her accouchement, or the
entrance of a man who had touched an impure animal, constituted a
pollution of the House of the Lord. When one wishes to make a parade of
erudition he should make some attempt to understand the things which he
pretends to make clear to others. Or is it that this Mirabeau was merely
careless?
The love of boys was so thoroughly the fashion in Greece that we have
today given it the name "Greek Love." Orestes was regarded as the "good
friend" of Pylades and Patroclus as the lover of Achilles. In this
taste, the Gods set the example for mortals, and the abduction of
Ganymede for the service of the master of thunder, was not the least
cause for annoyance given the chaste but over-prudish Juno. Lastly,
Hercules was not content with the loves of Omphale and Dejanira, he also
loved the beautiful Hylas, who was brought up by the nymphs.
The Greeks boasted, without blushing, of this love, which they considered
the only passion worthy of men, and they did blush at loving a woman,
intimacy with whom, they said, only rendered her adorers soft and
effeminate. In the Dialogue of Plato, entitled "The Banquet," which is
concerned entirely with discussions of the various forms of love, they
dismiss love for women as unworthy of occupying the attention of sensible
men. One of the speakers, I believe it was Aristophanes, explaining the
cause of this fire which we kindle in the bosoms of our loved ones,
affirms that the first men were doubles which multiplied their force and
their power. This, they abused and, as punishment, Jupiter struck them
with lightning and separated them. By their love for each other they
came together again to regain their primitive state. But the effeminates
sought out only the women because they were only half men, half women;
while those whose tastes were masculine and courageous wanted to become
double men again.
Phedre has put into the mouth of AEsop an explanation of that love which
would certainly not have been relished by the Greeks. He says that while
Prometheus was occupied with modelling his man and woman, he was invited
to a feast given by Jupiter, to the Gods; he came back intoxicated and,
by mistake, applied the sexual parts of one to the body of the other.
For the rest, the Greeks were all in accord in their profound contempt
for women. The theatrical writers, especially, who studied more
particularly the general opinions and catered to them in order to obtain
the applause of the public, were distinguished by their bitterness
against the sex. Euripides maintained that Prometheus deserved to be
chained to Mount Caucasus with the vulture gnawing at his entrails,
because he had fashioned a being so pernicious and hateful as woman. The
shade of Agamemnon, in the Odyssey advised Ulysses not to put any faith
in Penelope and did not stop talking until he had enumerated the entire
list of the vices of the sex. The first Latin authors imitated the
Greeks in their invectives against women; the comedies of Plautus,
especially, teem with virulent attacks upon them.
At Rome, however, the great freedom permitted to women, soon brought
about other opinions in regard to them; they often played an important
role in public and private affairs, and the men convinced themselves
that, like men, women were capable of the greatest crimes and of the most
heroic virtues. The noble stoicism of Arria is not the only example of
courageous virtue displayed by the Roman women at a time when crowned
monsters governed the empire. The young Paulina opened her veins with
her husband, the philosopher, Seneca; Mallonia preferred to die in
torments rather than give herself up to the odious he-goat of Capri.
Who does not admire the noble independence, the conjugal love, and the
matronly virtues of Agrippina, the wife of Germanicus?
Moreover, men began to avow their love for women, and we have here
occasion to observe the rapid progress of gallantry among the Romans.
However, the love for boys was no less universally in vogue in Rome, and
Cicero charges, in his letters to Atticus, that the judges who had so
scandalously white-washed Clodius of the accusation of having profaned
the mysteries of the "Good Goddess," had been publicly promised the
favors of the most illustrious women and the finest young men of the
first families. Caesar himself, in his early youth had yielded to the
embraces of Nicomedes, King of Bithynia; moreover, after his triumph over
the Gauls, on the solemn occasion when it was customary to twit the
victor with all his faults, the soldiers sang: "Caesar subdued the Gauls,
Nicomedes subdued Caesar. But Caesar who subdued the Gauls, triumphed,
and Nicomedes, who subdued Caesar did not." Cato said of him that he was
loved by the King, in his youth and that, when he was older, he loved the
queen and, one day, in the senate, while he was dwelling on I know not
what request of the daughter of Nicomedes, and recounting the benefits
which Rome owed to that monarch, Cicero silenced him by replying: "We
know very well what he has given, and what thou hast given him!" At
last, during the time when the first triumvirate divided all the power,
a bad joker remarked to Pompey: "I salute thee, O King," and, addressing
Caesar, "I salute thee, O Queen!" His enemies maintained that he was the
husband of all the women and the wife of all the husbands. Catullus, who
detested him, always called him "the bald catamite," in his epigrams: he
set forth that his friendship with Mamurra was not at all honorable; he
called this Mamurra "pathicus," a name which they bestowed upon those who
looked for favors among mature men or among men who had passed the stage
of adolescence.
The masters of the empire never showed any hesitancy in trying and even
in overdoing the pleasures which all their subjects permitted themselves.
Alas! A crown is such a weighty burden! The road of domination is
strewn with so many briars that one would never be able to pass down it
if he did not take care that they were pressed down under the roses. The
Roman emperors adopted that plan; they longed for pleasures and they took
the pleasures which offered themselves without delay and in a spirit of
competition. Caligula was so little accustomed to waiting that, while
occupied in offering a sacrifice to the Gods, and the figure of a priest
having pleased him, he did not take time to finish the sacred ceremonies
before taking his pleasure of him.
A remarkable thing is that among almost all peoples, the baths are the
places where the prostitution of men by their own sex is the most common.
We see in Catullus that the "cinaedi" (catamites), a noun which my chaste
pen refuses to translate into French, haunted the baths incessantly to
carry out their practices. Among the Orientals, of all modern peoples
who have retained this taste most generally, this same fact holds good.
It was at the bath that Tiberius, impotent through old age and
debauchery, was made young again by the touch little children applied to
his breasts; these children he called "'little fishes," they sucked his
withered breasts, his infected mouth, his livid lips, and finally his
virile parts. Hideous spectacle of a tyrant disgraced by nature and
struggling against her maledictions! But in vain did he invent new
pleasures, in vain did he take part in these scenes in which groups of
young men by threes and fours assumed all sorts of lascivious postures,
and were at the same time active and passive; the sight of these
indulgences of the "sprintriae" (for that is the name which was given
there) did not enable him to resuscitate his vigor any more than the
glamor of the throne or the servile submission of the senate served to
mitigate his remorse.
But of all the emperors, the ones who carried their taste for young boys
to the greatest lengths were, Nero, Domitian and Hadrian. The first
publicly wedded the young eunuch Sporus, whom he had had operated upon so
that he might serve him like a young woman. He paid court to the boy as
he would to a woman and another of his favorites dressed himself up in a
veil and imitated the lamentations which women were accustomed to utter
on nuptial nights. The second consecrated the month of September to his
favorite and the third loved Antinous passionately and caused him to be
deified after death.
The most ample proof of the universality of the taste for young boys
among the Romans is found in the Epithalamium of Manilius and Julia, by
Catullus, and it might be cause for surprise that this has escaped all
the philologists, were it not a constant thing that men frequently
reading about these centuries fail to perceive the most palpable facts
in their authors, just as they pass over the most striking phenomena of
nature without observing them. It appears, from this epithalamium, that
young men, before their marriage, had a favorite selected from among
their slaves and that this favorite was charged with the distribution of
nuts among his comrades, on the day, they in turn, treated him with
contempt and hooted him. Here follows an exact translation of this
curious bit. The favorite could not refuse the nuts to the slaves when
by giving them it appeared that he owned that his master had put away his
love for hire.
"Lest longer mute tongue stays that
In festal jest, from Fescennine,
Nor yet deny their nuts to boys,
He-Concubine! who learns in fine
His lordling's love is fled.
Throw nuts to boys thou idle all
He-Concubine! wast fain full long
With nuts to play: now pleased as thrall
Be thou to swell Talasios' throng
He-Concubine throw nuts.
Wont thou as peasant-girls to jape
He-whore! Thy Lord's delight the while:
Now shall hair-curling chattel scrape
Thy cheeks: poor wretch, ah' poor and vile:--
He-Concubine, throw nuts."
and further on, addressing the husband:
"'Tis said from smooth-faced ingle train
(Anointed bridegroom!) hardly fain
Hast e'er refrained; now do refrain!
O Hymen Hymenaeus io,
O Hymen Hymenaeus!
We know that naught save licit rites
Be known to thee, but wedded wights
No more deem lawful such delights.
O Hymen Hymenaeus io,
O Hymen Hymenaeus."
(LXI. Burton, tr.)
The Christian religion strongly prohibits this love; the theologians put
it among the sins which directly offend against the Holy Ghost. I have
not the honor of knowing just why this thing arouses his anger so much
more than anything else; doubtless there are reasons. But the wrath of
this honest person has not prevented the Christians from having their
"pathici," just as they have in countries where they are authorized by
the reigning deities. We have even noticed that they are the priests of
the Lord and especially the monks who practice this profession most
generally amongst us. The children of Loyola have acquired well-merited
renown in this matter: when they painted "Pleasure" they never failed to
represent him wearing trousers. Those disciples of Joseph Calasanz who
took their places in the education of children, followed their footsteps
with zeal and fervor. Lastly, the cardinals, who have a close
acquaintance with the Holy Ghost, are so prejudiced in favor of Greek
love that they have made it the fashion in the Holy City of Rome; this
leads me to wonder whether the Holy Ghost has changed His mind in regard
to this matter and is no longer shocked by it; or whether the theologians
were not mistaken in assuming an aversion against sodomy which He never
had. The cardinals who are on such familiar terms with him would know
better than to give all their days over to this pleasure if He really
objected to it.
I shall terminate this over-long note with an extract from a violent
diatribe against this love which Lucian puts into the mouth of Charicles.
He is addressing Callicratidas, a passionate lover of young boys, with
whom he had gone to visit the temple of Venus at Cnidus.
"O Venus, my queen! to thee I call; lend me your aid while I plead your
cause. For everything over which you deign to shed, be it ever so
little, the persuasion of your charms, reaches absolute perfection, above
all, erotic discourses need your presence, for you are their lawful
mother. In your womanhood, defend the cause of woman, and grant to men
to remain men as they have been born. At the beginning of my discourse,
I call as witness to the truth of my arguments the first mother of all
created things, the source of all generation, the holy Nature of this
universe, who, gathering into one and uniting the elements of the
world--earth, air, fire and water--and mingling them together, gave life
to everything that breathes. Knowing that we are a compound of
perishable matter, and that the span of life assigned to each of us was
short, she contrived that the death of one should be the birth of
another, and meted out to the dying, by way of compensation, the coming
into being of others, that by mutual succession we might live forever.
But, as it was impossible for anything to be born from a single thing
alone, she created two different sexes, and bestowed upon the male the
power of emitting semen, making the female the receptacle of generation.
Having inspired both with mutual desires, she joined them together,
ordaining, as a sacred law of necessity, that each sex should remain
faithful to its own nature--that the female should not play the male
unnaturally, nor the male degrade himself by usurping the functions of
the female. Thus intercourse of men with women has preserved the human
race by never-ending succession: no man can boast of having been created
by man alone; two venerable names are held in equal honor, and men
revere their mother equally with their father. At first, when men were
filled with heroic thoughts, they reverenced those virtues which bring
us nearer to the Gods, obeyed the laws of Nature, and, united to women
of suitable age, became the sires of noble offspring. But, by degrees,
human life, degenerating from that nobility of sentiment, sank to the
lowest depths of pleasure, and began to carve out strange and corrupt
ways in the search after enjoyment. Then sensuality, daring all,
violated the laws of Nature herself. Who was it who first looked upon
the male as female, violating him by force or villainous persuasion?
One sex entered one bed, and men had the shamelessness to look at one
another without a blush for what they did or for what they submitted to,
and, sowing seed, as it were, upon barren rocks, they enjoyed a
short-lived pleasure at the cost of undying shame.
"Some pushed their cruelty so far as to outrage Nature with the
sacrilegious knife, and, after depriving men of their virility, found in
them the height of pleasure. These miserable and unhappy creatures, that
they may the longer serve the purposes of boys, are stunted in their
manhood, and remain a doubtful riddle of a double sex, neither preserving
that boyhood in which they were born, nor possessing that manhood which
should be theirs. The bloom of their youth withers away in a premature
old age: while yet boys they suddenly become old, without any interval of
manhood. For impure sensuality, the mistress of every vice, devising one
shameless pleasure after another, insensibly plunges into unmentionable
debauchery, experienced in every form of brutal lust. "Whereas, if each
would abide by the laws prescribed by Providence, we should be satisfied
with intercourse with women, and our lives would be undefiled by shameful
practices. Consider the animals, which cannot corrupt by innate
viciousness, how they observe the law of Nature in all its purity.
He-lions do not lust after he-lions, but, in due season, passion excites
them towards the females of their species: the bull that rules the herd
mounts cows, and the ram fills the whole flock of ewes with the seed of
generation. Again, boars mate with sows, he-wolves with shewolves,
neither the birds that fly through the air, nor the fish that inhabit the
deep, or any living creatures upon earth desire male intercourse, but
amongst them the laws of Nature remain unbroken. But you men, who boast
idly of your wisdom, but are in reality worthless brutes, what strange
disease provokes you to outrage one another unnaturally? What blind
folly fills your minds, that you commit the two-fold error of avoiding
what you should pursue, and pursuing what you should avoid? If each and
all were to pursue such evil courses, the race of human beings would
become extinct on earth. And here comes in that wonderful Socratic
argument, whereby the minds of boys, as yet unable to reason clearly, are
deceived, for a ripe intellect could not be misled. These followers of
Socrates pretend to love the soul alone, and, being ashamed to profess
love for the person, call themselves lovers of virtue, whereat I have
often been moved to laughter. How comes it, O grave philosophers, that
you hold in such slight regard a man who, during a long life, has given
proofs of merit, and of that virtue which old age and white hairs become?
How is it that the affections of the philosophers are all in a flutter
after the young; who cannot yet make up their minds which path of life to
take? Is there a law, then, that all ugliness is to be condemned as
vice, and that everything that is beautiful is to be extolled without
further examination? But, according to Homer, the great interpreter of
truth--'One man is meaner than another in looks, but God crowns his words
with beauty, and his hearers gaze upon him with delight, while he speaks
unfalteringly with winning modesty, and is conspicuous amongst the
assembled folk, who look upon him as a God when he walks through the
city.' And again he says: 'Your beauteous form is destitute of
intelligence; the wise Ulysses is praised more highly than the handsome
Nireus.' How then comes it that the love of wisdom, justice, and the
other virtues, which are the heritage of the full-grown man, possess no
attraction for you, while the beauty of boys excites the most vehement
passion! What! should one love Phoedrus, remembering Lysias, whom he
betrayed? Could one love the beauty of Alcibiades, who mutilated the
statues of the Gods, and, in the midst of a debauch, betrayed the
mysteries of the rites of Eleusis? Who would venture to declare himself
his admirer, after Athens was abandoned, and Decelea fortified by the
enemy--the admirer of one whose sole aim in life was tyranny? But, as
the divine Plato says, as long as his chin was beardless, he was beloved
by all; but, when he passed from boyhood to manhood, when his imperfect
intelligence had reached its maturity, he was hated by all. Why, then,
giving modest names to immodest sentiments, do men call personal beauty
virtue, being in reality lovers of youth rather than lovers of wisdom?
However, it is not my intention to speak evil of distinguished men. But,
to descend from graver topics to the mere question of enjoyment, I will
prove that connection with women is far more enjoyable than connection
with boys. In the first place, the longer enjoyment lasts, the more
delight it affords; too rapid pleasure passes quickly away, and it is
over before it is thoroughly appreciated; but, if it lasts, it is thereby
enhanced. Would to heaven that grudging Destiny had allotted us a longer
lease of life, and that we could enjoy perpetual health without any
sorrow to spoil our pleasure; then would our life be one continual feast.
But, since jealous Fortune has grudged us greater blessings, those
enjoyments that last the longest are the sweetest. Again, a woman, from
puberty to middle age, until the last wrinkles furrow her face, is worth
embracing and fit for intercourse; and, even though the prime of her
beauty be past, her experience can speak more eloquently than the love of
boys.
"I should consider anyone who attempted to have intercourse with a youth
of twenty years to be the slave of unnatural lust. The limbs of such,
like those of a man, are hard and coarse; their chins, formerly so
smooth, are rough and bristly, and their well-grown thighs are disfigured
with hairs. As for their other parts, I leave those of you who have
experience to decide. On the other hand, a woman's charms are always
enhanced by an attractive complexion, flowing locks, dark as hyacinths,
stream down her back and adorn her shoulders, or fall over her ears and
temples, more luxuriant than the parsley in the fields. The rest of her
person, without a hair upon it, shines more brilliantly than amber or
Sidonian crystal. Why should we not pursue those pleasures which are
mutual, which cause equal enjoyment to those who receive and to those who
afford them? For we are not, like animals, fond of solitary lives, but,
united in social relations, we consider these pleasures sweeter, and
those pains easier to bear, which we share with others. Hence, a common
table was instituted, the mediator of friendship. When we minister to
the wants of the belly, we do not drink Thasian wine, or consume costly
food by ourselves alone, but in company: for our pleasures and enjoyments
are increased when shared with others. In like manner, the intercourse
of men with women causes enjoyment to each in turn, and both are alike
delighted; unless we accept the judgment of Tiresias, who declared that
the woman's pleasure was twice as great as the man's. I think that those
who are not selfish should not consider how they may best secure the
whole enjoyment for themselves, but should share what they have with
others. Now, in the case of boys, no one would be mad enough to assert
that this is the case; for, while he who enjoys their person reaches the
height of pleasure--at least, according to his way of thinking--the
object of his passion at first feels pain, even to tears, but when, by
repetition, the pain becomes less keen, while he no longer hurts him, he
will feel no pleasure himself. To mention something still more curious
--as is fitting within the precincts of Venus--you may make the same use
of a woman as of a boy, and thereby open a double avenue to enjoyment;
but the male can never afford the same enjoyment as the female.
"Therefore, if you are convinced by my arguments, let us, men and women,
keep ourselves apart, as if a wall divided us; but, if it is becoming for
men to have intercourse with men, for the future let women have
intercourse with women. Come, O new generation, inventor of strange
pleasures! As you have devised new methods to satisfy male lust, grant
the same privilege to women; let them have intercourse with one another
like men, girding themselves with the infamous instruments of lust, an
unholy imitation of a fruitless union; in a word, let our wanton Tribads
reign unchecked, and let our women's chambers be disgraced by
hermaphrodites. Far better that a woman, in the madness of her lust,
should usurp the nature of a man, than that man's noble nature should be
so degraded as to play the woman!"