Philip of Macedon, when he pronounced the panegyric of the Sacred Band
at Chæronea, uttered the funeral oration of Greek love in its nobler
forms. With the decay of military spirit and the loss of freedom, there
was no sphere left for that type of comradeship which I attempted to
describe in Section IV. The philosophical ideal, to which some
cultivated Attic thinkers had aspired, remained unrealised, except, we
may perhaps suppose, in isolated instances. Meanwhile, paiderastia as a
vice did not diminish. It only grew more wanton and voluptuous. Little,
therefore, can be gained by tracing its historical development further,
although it is not without interest to note the mode of feeling and the
opinion of some later poets and rhetoricians.
The Idyllists are the only poets, if we except a few epigrammatists of
the _Anthology_, who preserve a portion of the old heroic sentiment. No
true student of Greek literature will have felt that he could strictly
censure the paiderastic passages of the _Thalysia_, _Aïtes_, _Hylas_,
_Paidika_. They have the ring of genuine and respectable emotion. This
may also be said about the two fragments of Bion which begin, _Hespere
tas eratas_ and _Olbioi oi phileontes_. The _Duserôs_, ascribed without
due warrant to Theocritus, is in many respects a beautiful composition,
but it lacks the fresh and manly touches of the master's style, and
bears the stamp of an unwholesome rhetoric. Why, indeed, should we pity
this suicide, and why should the statue of Love have fallen on the
object of his admiration? Maximus Tyrius showed more sense when he
contemptuously wrote about those men who killed themselves for love of a
beautiful lad in Locri:[167] "And in good sooth they deserved to die."
The dialogue, entitled _Erotes_, attributed to Lucian, deserves a
paragraph. More than any other composition of the rhetorical age of
Greek literature, it attempts a comprehensive treatment of erotic
passion, and sums up the teaching of the doctors and the predilections
of the vulgar in one treatise.[168] Like many of Lucian's compositions,
it has what may be termed a retrospective and resumptive value. That is
to say, it represents less the actual feeling of the author and his age
than the result of his reading and reflection brought into harmony with
his experience. The scene is laid at Cnidus, in the groves of Aphrodite.
The temple and the garden and the statue of Praxiteles are described
with a luxury of language which strikes the keynote of the dialogue. We
have exchanged the company of Plato, Xenophon, or Æschines for that of a
Juvenalian _Græculus_, a delicate æsthetic voluptuary. Every epithet
smells of musk, and every phrase is a provocative. The interlocutors
are Callicratides, the Athenian, and Charicles, the Rhodian.
Callicratides kept an establishment of _exoleti_; when the down upon
their chins had grown beyond the proper point--"when the beard is just
sprouting, when youth is in the prime of charm," they were drafted off
to farms and country villages. Charicles maintained a harem of
dancing-girls and flute-players. The one was "madly passionate for
lads;" the other no less "mad for women." Charicles undertook the cause
of women, Callicratides that of boys. Charicles began. The love of women
is sanctioned by antiquity; it is natural; it endures through life; it
alone provides pleasure for both sexes. Boys grow bearded, rough, and
past their prime. Women always excite passion. Then Callicratides takes
up his parable. Masculine love combines virtue with pleasure. While the
love of women is a physical necessity, the love of boys is a product of
high culture and an adjunct of philosophy. Paiderastia may be either
vulgar or celestial; the second will be sought by men of liberal
education and good manners. Then follow contrasted pictures of the lazy
woman and the manly youth. The one provokes to sensuality, the other
excites noble emulation in the ways of virile living. Lucian, summing up
the arguments of the two pleaders, decides that Corinth must give way to
Athens, adding: "Marriage is open to all men, but the love of boys to
philosophers only." This verdict is referred to Theomnestus, a Don Juan
of both sexes. He replies that both boys and women are good for
pleasure; the philosophical arguments of Callicratides are cant.
* * * * *
This brief abstract of Lucian's dialogue on love indicates the cynicism
with which its author viewed the subject, using the whole literature and
all the experience of the Greeks to support a thesis of pure hedonism.
The sybarites of Cairo or Constantinople at the present moment might
employ the same arguments, except that they would omit the philosophic
cant of Callicratides.
* * * * *
There is nothing in extant Greek literature, of a date anterior to the
Christian era, which is foul in the same sense as that in which the
works of Roman poets (Catullus and Martial), Italian poets (Beccatelli
and Baffo), and French poets (Scarron and Voltaire) are foul. Only
purblind students will be unable to perceive the difference between the
obscenity of the Latin races and that of Aristophanes. The difference,
indeed, is wide and radical, and strongly marked. It is the difference
between a race naturally gifted with a delicate, æsthetic sense of
beauty, and one in whom that sense was always subject to the
perturbation, of gross instincts. But with the first century of the new
age a change came over even the imagination of the Greeks. Though they
never lost their distinction of style, that precious gift of lightness
and good taste conferred upon them with their language, they borrowed
something of their conquerors' vein. This makes itself felt in the
_Anthology_. Straton and Rufinus suffered the contamination of the Roman
genius, stronger in political organisation than that of Hellas, but
coarser and less spiritually tempered in morals and in art. Straton was
a native of Sardis, who flourished in the second century. He compiled a
book of paiderastic poems, consisting in a great measure of his own and
Meleager's compositions, which now forms the twelfth section of the
_Palatine Anthology_. This book he dedicated, not to the Muse, but to
Zeus; for Zeus was the boy-lover among deities;[169] he bade it carry
forth his message of fair youths throughout the world;[170] and he
claimed a special inspiration from heaven for singing of one sole
subject, paiderastia.[171] It may be said with truth that Straton
understood the bent of his own genius. We trace a blunt earnestness of
intention in his epigrams, a certainty of feeling and directness of
artistic treatment, which show that he had only one object in view.
Meleager has far higher qualities as a poet, and his feeling, as well as
his style, is more exquisite. But he wavered between the love of boys
and women, seeking in both the satisfaction of emotional yearnings which
in the modern world would have marked him as a sentimentalist. The
so-called _Mousa Paidiké_, "Muse of Boyhood," is a collection of two
hundred and fifty-eight short poems, some of them of great artistic
merit, in praise of boys and boy-love. The common-places of these
epigrams are Ganymede and Erôs;[172] we hear but little of
Aphrodite--her domain is the other section of the _Anthology_, called
Erotika. A very small percentage of these compositions can be described
as obscene;[173] none are nasty, in the style of Martial or Ausonius;
some are exceedingly picturesque;[174] a few are written in a strain of
lofty or of lovely music;[175] one or two are delicate and subtle in
their humour.[176] The whole collection supplies good means of judging
how the Greeks of the decadence felt about this form of love. _Malakia_
is the real condemnation of this poetry, rather than brutality or
coarseness. A favourite topic is the superiority of boys over girls.
This sometimes takes a gross form;[177] but once or twice the treatment
of the subject touches a real psychological distinction, as in the
following epigram:[178]--
"The love of women is not after my heart's desire; but the fires of
male desire have placed me under inextinguishable coals of burning.
The heat there is mightier; for the more powerful is male than
female, the keener is that desire."
These four lines give the key to much of the Greek preference for
paiderastia. The love of the male, when it has been apprehended and
entertained, is more exciting, they thought, more absorbent of the whole
nature, than the love of the female. It is, to use another kind of
phraseology, more of a mania and more of a disease.
With the _Anthology_ we might compare the curious _Epistolai Erotikai_
of Philostratus.[179] They were in all probability rhetorical
compositions, not intended for particular persons; yet they indicate the
kind of wooing to which youths were subjected in later Hellas.[180] The
discrepancy between the triviality of their subject-matter and the
exquisiteness of their diction is striking. The second of these
qualities has made them a mine for poets. Ben Jonson, for example,
borrowed the loveliest of his lyrics from the following _concetto_:--"I
sent thee a crown of roses, not so much honouring thee, though this,
too, was my meaning, but wishing to do some kindness to the roses that
they might not wither." Take, again, the phrase: "Well, and love himself
is naked, and the graces and the stars;" or this, "O rose, that has a
voice to speak with!"--or this metaphor for the footsteps of the
beloved, "O rhythms of most beloved feet, O kisses pressed upon the
ground!"
While the paiderastia of the Greeks was sinking into grossness,
effeminacy, and æsthetic prettiness, the moral instincts of humanity
began to assert themselves in earnest. It became part of the higher
doctrine of the Roman Stoics to suppress this form of passion.[181] The
Christians, from St. Paul onwards, instituted an uncompromising crusade
against it. Theirs was no mere speculative warfare, like that of the
philosophers at Athens. They fought with all the forces of their
manhood, with the sword of the Lord and with the excommunications of the
Church, to suppress what seemed to them an unutterable scandal. Dio
Chrysostom, Clemens Alexandrinus, and Athanasius, are our best
authorities for the vices which prevailed in Hellas during the
Empire;[182] the Roman law, moreover, proves that the civil governors
aided the Church in its attempt to moralise the people on this point.