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.
* * * * *
It would not be 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]