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 Phoenix 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--
"Nature constrains me though I have sound judgment"--
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
_Baptoee_ 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.