The sources from which our information has hitherto been
drawn--speeches, poems, biographies, and the dramatic parts of
dialogues--yield more real knowledge about the facts of Athenian
paiderastia than can be found in the speculations of philosophers. In
Aristotle, for instance, paiderastia is almost conspicuous by its
absence. It is true that he speculates upon the Cretan customs in the
_Politics_, mentions the prevalence of boy-love among the Kelts, and
incidentally notices the legends of Diocles and Cleomachus;[151] but he
never discusses the matter as fully as might have been expected from a
philosopher whose speculations covered the whole field of Greek
experience. The chapters on _Philia_, in the _Ethics_, might indeed have
been written by a modern moralist for modern readers, though it is
possible that in his treatment of "friendship with pleasure for its
object," and "friendship with advantage for its object," Aristotle is
aiming at the vicious sort of paiderastia. As regards his silence in
the _Politics_, it is worth noticing that this treatise breaks off at
the very point where we should naturally look for a scientific handling
of the education of the passions; and, therefore, it is possible that we
may have lost the weightiest utterance of Greek philosophy upon the
matter of our enquiry.
Though Aristotle contains but little to the purpose, the case is
different with Plato; nor would it be possible to omit a detailed
examination of the Platonic doctrine on the topic, or to neglect the
attempt he made to analyse and purify a passion, capable, according to
his earlier philosophical speculations, of supplying the starting-point
for spiritual progress.
The first point to notice in the Platonic treatment of paiderastia is
the difference between the ethical opinions expressed in the _Phædrus_,
_Symposium_, _Republic_, _Charmides_, and _Lysis_, on the one hand, and
those expounded in the _Laws_ upon the other. The _Laws_, which are
probably a genuine work of Plato's old age, condemn that passion which,
in the _Phædrus_ and _Symposium_, he exalted as the greatest boon of
human life and as the groundwork of the philosophical temperament; the
ordinary social manifestations of which he described with sympathy in
the _Lysis_ and the _Charmides_; and which he viewed with more than
toleration in the _Republic_. It is not my business to offer a solution
of this contradiction; but I may observe that Socrates, who plays the
part of protagonist in nearly all the other dialogues of Plato, and who,
as we shall see, professed a special cult of love, is conspicuous by his
absence in the _Laws_. It is, therefore, not improbable that the
philosophical idealisation of paiderastia, to which the name of Platonic
love is usually given, should rather be described as Socratic. However
that may be, I think it will be well to deal first with the doctrine put
into the mouth of the Athenian stranger in the _Laws_, and then to pass
on to the consideration of what Socrates is made to say upon the subject
of Greek love in the earlier dialogues.
The position assumed by Plato in the _Laws_ (p. 636) is this: Syssitia
and gymnasia are excellent institutions in their way, but they have a
tendency to degrade natural love in man below the level of the beasts.
Pleasure is only natural when it arises out of the intercourse between
men and women, but the intercourse between men and men, or women and
women, is contrary to nature.[152] The bold attempt at overleaping
Nature's laws was due originally to unbridled lust.
This position is developed in the eighth book (p. 836), where Plato
directs his criticism, not only against what would now be termed the
criminal intercourse between persons of the same sex, but also against
incontinence in general. While framing a law of almost monastic rigour
for the regulation of the sexual appetite, he remains an ancient Greek.
He does not reach the point of view from which women are regarded as the
proper objects of both passion and friendship, as the fit companions of
men in all relations of life; far less does he revert to his earlier
speculations upon the enthusiasm generated by a noble passion. The
modern ideal of marriage and the chivalrous conception of womanhood as
worthy to be worshipped are like unknown to him. Abstinence from the
delights of love, continence except for the sole end of procreation, is
the rule which he proposes to the world.
* * * * *
There are three distinct things, Plato argues, which, owing to the
inadequacy of language to represent states of thought, have been
confounded.[153] These are friendship, desire, and a third mixed
species. Friendship is further described as the virtuous affection of
equals in taste, age and station. Desire is always founded on a sense of
contrast. While friendship is "gentle and mutual through life," desire
is "fierce and wild."[154] The true friend seeks to live chastely with
the chaste object of his attachment, whose soul he loves. The lustful
lover longs to enjoy the flower of his youth and cares only for the
body. The third sort is mixed of these; and a lover of this composite
kind is torn asunder by two impulses, "the one commanding him to enjoy
the youth's person, the other forbidding him to do so."[155] The
description of the lover of the third species so exactly suits the
paiderast of nobler quality in Greece, as I conceive him to have
actually existed, that I shall give a full quotation of this
passage:[156]--
"As to the mixed sort, which is made up of them both, there is,
first of all, a difficulty in determining what he who is possessed
by this third love desires; moreover, he is drawn different ways,
and is in doubt between the two principles, the one exhorting him
to enjoy the beauty of the youth, and the other forbidding him; for
the one is a lover of the body and hungers after beauty like ripe
fruit, and would fain satisfy himself without any regard to the
character of the beloved; the other holds the desire of the body to
be a secondary matter, and, looking rather than loving with his
soul, and desiring the soul of the other in a becoming manner,
regards the satisfaction of the bodily love as wantonness; he
reverences and respects temperance and courage and magnanimity and
wisdom, and wishes to live chastely with the chaste object of his
affection."
It is remarkable that Plato, in this analysis of the three sorts of
love, keeps strictly within the bounds of paiderastia. He rejects desire
and the mixed sort of love, reserving friendship (_Philia_) and
ordaining marriage for the satisfaction of the aphrodisiac instinct at a
fitting age, but more particularly for the procreation of children.
Wantonness of every description is to be made as much a sin as incest,
both by law and also by the world's opinion. If Olympian victors, with
an earthly crown in view, learn to live chastely for the preservation of
their strength while training, shall not men, whose contest is for
heavenly prizes, keep their bodies undefiled, their spirits holy?
Socrates, the mystagogue of amorous philosophy, is absent, as I have
observed, from this discussion of the laws. I turn now to those earlier
dialogues in which he expounds the doctrine of Platonic, or, as I should
prefer to call it, Socratic, love. We know from Xenophon, as well as
Plato, that Socrates named his philosophy the Science of Love. The one
thing on which I pride myself, he says, is knowledge of all matters that
pertain to love. It furthermore appears that Socrates thought himself in
a peculiar sense predestined to reform and to ennoble paiderastia.
"Finding this passion at its height throughout the whole of Hellas, but
most especially in Athens, and all places full of evil lovers and of
youths seduced, he felt a pity for both parties. Not being a lawgiver
like Solon, he could not stop the custom by statute, nor correct it by
force, nor again dissuade men from it by his eloquence. He did not,
however, on that account abandon the lovers or the boys to their fate,
but tried to suggest a remedy." This passage, which I have paraphrased
from Maximus Tyrius,[157] sufficiently expresses the attitude assumed
by Socrates in the Platonic dialogue. He sympathises with Greek lovers,
and avows a fervent admiration for beauty in the persons of young men.
At the same time, he declares himself upon the side of temperate and
generous affection and strives to utilise the erotic enthusiasm as a
motive power in the direction of philosophy. This was really nothing
more or less than an attempt to educate the Athenians by appealing to
their own higher instincts. We have seen that paiderastia in the prime
of Hellenic culture, whatever sensual admixture it might have contained,
was a masculine passion. It was closely connected with the love of
political independence, with the contempt for Asiatic luxury, with the
gymnastic sports, and with the intellectual interests which
distinguished Hellenes from barbarians. Partly owing to the social
habits of their cities, and partly to the peculiar notions which they
entertained regarding the seclusion of free women in the home, all the
higher elements of spiritual and mental activity, and the conditions
under which a generous passion was conceivable, had become the exclusive
privileges of men. It was not that women occupied a semi-servile
station, as some students have imagined, or that within the sphere of
the household they were not the respected and trusted helpmates of men.
But circumstances rendered it impossible for them to excite romantic and
enthusiastic passion. The exaltation of the emotions was reserved for
the male sex.
Socrates, therefore, sought to direct and moralise a force already
existing. In the _Phædrus_ he describes the passion of love between man
and boy as a madness, not different in quality from that which inspires
poets; and, after painting that fervid picture of the lover, he declares
that the true object of a noble life can only be attained by passionate
friends, bound together in the chains of close yet temperate
comradeship, seeking always to advance in knowledge, self-restraint, and
intellectual illumination. The doctrine of the _Symposium_ is not
different, except that Socrates here takes a higher flight. The same
love is treated as the method whereby the soul may begin her mystic
journey to the region of essential beauty, truth, and goodness. It has
frequently been remarked that Plato's dialogues have to be read as
poems, even more than as philosophical treatises; and if this be true at
all, it is particularly true of both the _Phædrus_ and the _Symposium_.
The lesson which both essays seem intended to inculcate is this: love,
like poetry and prophecy, is a divine gift, which diverts men from the
common current of their lives; but in the right use of this gift lies
the secret of all human excellence. The passion which grovels in the
filth of sensual grossness may be transformed into a glorious
enthusiasm, a winged splendour, capable of soaring to the contemplation
of eternal verities. How strange will it be, when once those heights of
intellectual intuition have been scaled, to look down again to earth and
view the _Meirakidia_ in whom the soul first recognised the form of
beauty![158] There is a deeply-rooted mysticism, an impenetrable
soofyism, in the Socratic doctrine of Erôs.
In the _Phædrus_, the _Symposium_, the _Charmides_, the _Lysis_, and the
_Republic_, Plato dramatised the real Socrates, while he gave liberal
scope to his own personal sympathy for paiderastia.[159] In the _Laws_,
if we accept this treatise as the work of his old age, he discarded the
Socratic mask, and wrote a kind of palinode, which indicates more moral
growth than pure disapprobation of the paiderastic passion. I have
already tried to show that the point of view in the _Laws_ is still
Greek: that their author has not passed beyond the sphere of Hellenic
ethics. He has only become more ascetic in his rule of conduct as the
years advanced, importing the _rumores senum severiorum_ into his
discourse, and recognising the imperfection of that halting-point
between the two logical extremes of Pagan license and monastic
asceticism which in the fervour of his greener age he advocated. As a
young man, Plato felt sympathy for love so long as it was paiderastic
and not spent on women; he even condoned a lapse through warmth of
feeling into self-indulgence. As an old man, he denounced carnal
pleasure of all kinds, and sought to limit the amative instincts to the
one sole end of procreation.
It has so happened that Plato's name is still connected with the ideal
of passion purged from sensuality. Much might be written about the
parallel between the _mania_ of the _Phædrus_ and the _joy_ of mediæval
amorists. Nor would it be unprofitable to trace the points of contact
between the love described by Dante in the _Vita Nuova_ and the
paiderastia exalted to the heavens by Plato.[160] The spiritual passion
for Beatrice, which raised the Florentine poet above vile things, and
led him by the philosophic paths of the _Convito_ to the beatific vision
of the _Paradiso_, bears no slight resemblance to the _Erôs_ of the
_Symposium_. Yet we know that Dante could not have studied Plato's
works; and the specific love which Plato praised he sternly stigmatised.
The harmony between Greek and mediæval mysticism in this matter of the
emotions rests on something permanent in human nature, common alike to
paiderastia and to chivalrous enthusiasm for woman.
It would be well worth raising here the question whether there was not
something special both in the Greek consciousness itself, and also in
the conditions under which it reached maturity, which justified the
Socratic attempt to idealise paiderastia. Placed upon the borderland of
barbarism, divided from the Asiatic races by an acute but narrow line of
demarcation, the Greeks had arrived at the first free notion of the
spirit in its disentanglement from matter and from symbolism. But this
notion of the spirit was still æsthetic, rather than strictly ethical or
rigorously scientific. In the Greek gods, intelligence is perfected and
character is well defined; but these gods are always concrete persons,
with corporeal forms adapted to their spiritual essence. The
interpenetration of spiritual and corporeal elements in a complete
personality, the transfusion of intellectual and emotional faculties
throughout a physical organism exactly suited to their adequate
expression, marks Greek religion and Greek art. What the Greeks
worshipped in their ritual, what they represented in their sculpture,
was always personality--the spirit and the flesh in amity and mutual
correspondence; the spirit burning through the flesh and moulding it to
individual forms; the flesh providing a fit dwelling for the spirit
which controlled and fashioned it. Only philosophers, among the Greeks,
attempted to abstract the spirit as a self-sufficient, independent,
conscious entity; and these philosophers were few, and what they wrote
or spoke had little direct influence upon the people. This being the
mental attitude of the Greek race, it followed as a necessity that their
highest emotional aspirations, their purest personal service, should be
devoted to clear and radiant incarnations of the spirit in a living
person. They had never been taught to regard the body with a sense of
shame, but rather to admire it as the temple of the spirit, and to
accept its needs and instincts with natural acquiescence. Male beauty
disengaged for them the passion it inspired from service of domestic,
social, civic duties. The female form aroused desire, but it also
suggested maternity and obligations of the household. The male form was
the most perfect image of the deity, self-contained, subject to no
necessities of impregnation, determined in its action only by the laws
of its own reason and its own volition.
Quite a different order of ideas governed the ideal adopted by mediæval
chivalry. The spirit in its self-sufficingness, detached from the body,
antagonistic to the body, had been divinised by Christianity. Woman,
regarded as a virgin and at the same time a mother, the maiden-mother of
God made man, had been exalted to the throne of heaven. The worship of
woman became, by a natural and logical process, the correlative in
actual human life for that worship of the incarnate Deity which was the
essence of religion. A remarkable point in mediæval love is that the
sensual appetites were, theoretically at least, excluded from the homage
paid to woman. It was not the wife or the mistress, but the lady, who
inspired the knight. Dante had children by Gemma, Petrarch had children
by an unknown concubine, but it was the sainted Beatrice, it was the
unattainable Laura, who received the homage of Dante and of Petrarch.
In like manner, the sensual appetites were, theoretically at least,
excluded from Platonic paiderastia. It was the divine in human
flesh--"the radiant sight of the beloved," to quote from Plato; "the
fairest and most intellectual of earthly bodies," to borrow a phrase
from Maximus Tyrius--it was this which stimulated the Greek lover, just
as a similar incarnation of divinity inspired the chivalrous lover. Thus
we might argue that the Platonic conception of paiderastia furnishes a
close analogue to the chivalrous devotion to women, due regard being
paid to the differences which existed between the plastic ideal of Greek
religion and the romantic ideal of mediæval Christianity. The one veiled
sodomy, the other adultery. That in both cases the conception was rarely
realised in actual life only completes the parallel.
To pursue this inquiry further is, however, alien to my task. It is
enough to have indicated the psychological agreement in respect of
purified affection which underlay two such apparently antagonistic
ideals of passion. Few modern writers, when they speak with admiration
or contempt of Platonic love, reflect that in its origin this phrase
denoted an absorbing passion for young men. The Platonist, as appears
from numerous passages in the Platonic writings, would have despised the
Petrarchist as a vulgar woman-lover. The Petrarchist would have loathed
the Platonist as a moral Pariah. Yet Platonic love, in both its Attic
and its mediæval manifestations, was one and the same thing.
The philosophical ideal of paiderastia in Greece, which bore the names
of Socrates and Plato, met with little but contempt. Cicero, in a
passage which has been echoed by Gibbon, remarked upon, "the thin device
of virtue and friendship which amused the philosophers of Athens."[161]
Epicurus criticised the Stoic doctrine of paiderastia by sententiously
observing that philosophers only differed from the common race of men in
so far as they could better cloak their vice with sophistries. This
severe remark seems justified by the opinions ascribed to Zeno by
Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, and Stobæus.[162] But it may be doubted
whether the real drift of the Stoic theory of love, founded on
_Adiaphopha_, was understood. Lucian, in the _Amores_,[163] makes
Charicles, the advocate of love for women, deride the Socratic ideal as
vain nonsense, while Theomnestus, the man of pleasure, to whom the
dispute is finally referred, decides that the philosophers are either
fools or humbugs.[164] Daphnæus, in the erotic dialogue of Plutarch,
arrives at a similar conclusion; and, in an essay on education, the same
author contends that no prudent father would allow the sages to enter
into intimacy with his sons.[165] The discredit incurred by philosophers
in the later age of Greek culture is confirmed by more than one passage
in Petronius and Juvenal, while Athenæus especially inveighs against
philosophic lovers as acting against nature.[166] The attempt of the
Platonic Socrates to elevate, without altering, the morals of his race
may therefore be said fairly to have failed. Like his Republic, his love
existed only in heaven.