"Love, the virginal, gleaming and radiant with desire."
_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.