The transmutation of Hellas proper into part of the Roman Empire, and
the intrusion of Stoicism and Christianity into the sphere of Hellenic
thought and feeling, mark the end of the Greek age. It still remains,
however, to consider the relation of this passion to the character of
the race, and to determine its influence.
In the fifth section of this essay, I asserted that it is now impossible
to ascertain whether the Greeks derived paiderastia from any of the
surrounding nations, and if so, from which. Homer's silence makes it
probable that the contact of Hellenic with Phoenician traders in the
post-heroic period led to the adoption by the Greek race of a custom
which they speedily assimilated and stamped with an Hellenic character.
At the same time, I suggested in the tenth section that paiderastia, in
its more enthusiastic and martial form, may have been developed within
the very sanctuary of Greek national existence by the Dorians, matured
in the course of their migrations, and systematised after their
settlement in Crete and Sparta. That the Greeks themselves regarded
Crete as the classic ground of paiderastia favours either theory, and
suggests a fusion of them both; for the geographical position of this
island made it the meeting-place of Hellenes with the Asiatic races,
while it was also one of the earliest Dorian acquisitions.
When we come to ask why this passion struck roots so deep into the very
heart and brain of the Greek nation, we must reject the favourite
hypothesis of climate. Climate is, no doubt, powerful to a great extent
in determining the complexion of sexual morality; yet, as regards
paiderastia, we have abundant proof that nations both of North and South
have, according to circumstances quite independent of climatic
conditions, been both equally addicted and equally averse to this
habit. The Etruscan,[183] the Chinese, the ancient Keltic tribes, the
Tartar hordes of Timour Khan, the Persians under Moslem rule--races sunk
in the sloth of populous cities, as well as the nomadic children of the
Asian steppes, have all acquired a notoriety at least equal to that of
the Greeks. The only difference between these people and the Greeks in
respect to paiderastia is that everything which the Greek genius touched
acquired a portion of its distinction, so that what in semi-barbarous
society may be ignored as vice, in Greece demands attention as a phase
of the spiritual life of a world-historic nation.
Like climate, ethnology must also be eliminated. It is only a
superficial philosophy of history which is satisfied with the
nomenclature of Semitic, Aryan, and so forth; which imagines that
something is gained for the explanation of a complex psychological
problem when hereditary affinities have been demonstrated. The deeps of
national personality are far more abysmal than this. Granting that
climate and descent are elements of great importance, the religious and
moral principles, the æsthetic apprehensions, and the customs which
determine the character of a race, leave always something still to be
analysed. In dealing with Greek paiderastia, we are far more likely to
reach a probable solution if we confine our attention to the specific
social conditions which fostered the growth of this passion in Greece,
and to the general habit of mind which permitted its evolution out of
the common stuff of humanity, than if we dilate at ease upon the climate
of the Ægean, or discuss the ethnical complexion of the Hellenic stock.
In other words, it was the Pagan view of human life and duty which gave
scope to paiderastia, while certain special Greek customs aided its
development.
The Greeks themselves, quoted more than once above, have put us on the
right track in this inquiry. However paiderastia began in Hellas, it was
encouraged by gymnastics and syssitia. Youths and boys engaged together
in athletic exercises, training their bodies to the highest point of
physical attainment, growing critical about the points and proportions
of the human form, lived of necessity in an atmosphere of mutual
attention. Young men could not be insensible to the grace of boys in
whom the bloom of beauty was unfolding. Boys could not fail to admire
the strength and goodliness of men displayed in the comeliness of
perfected development. Having exercised together in the
wrestling-ground, the same young men and boys consorted at the common
tables. Their talk fell naturally upon feats of strength and training;
nor was it unnatural, in the absence of a powerful religious
prohibition, that love should spring from such discourse and
intercourse.
The nakedness, which Greek custom permitted in gymnastic games and some
religious rites, no doubt contributed to the erotic force of masculine
passion; and the history of their feeling upon this point deserves
notice. Plato, in the _Republic_ (452), observes that "not long ago the
Greeks were of the opinion, which is still generally received among the
barbarians, that the sight of a naked man was ridiculous and unseemly."
He goes on to mention the Cretans and the Lacedæmonians as the
institutors of naked games. To these conditions may be added dances in
public, the ritual of gods like Erôs, ceremonial processions, and
contests for the prize of beauty.
The famous passage in the first book of Thucydides (cap. vi.)
illustrates the same point. While describing the primitive culture of
the Hellenes, he thinks it worth while to mention that the Spartans, who
first stripped themselves for running and wrestling, abandoned the
girdle which it was usual to wear around the loins. He sees in this
habit one of the strongest points of distinction between the Greeks and
barbarians. Herodotus insists upon the same point (book i. 10), which is
further confirmed by the verse of Ennius: "Flagitii," &c.
The nakedness which Homer (_Iliad_, xxii. 66) and Tyrtæus (i. 21)
describes as shameful and unseemly is that of an old man. Both poets
seem to imply that a young man's naked body is beautiful even in death.
We have already seen that paiderastia, as it existed in early Hellas,
was a martial institution, and that it never wholly lost its virile
character. This suggests the consideration of another class of
circumstances which were in the highest degree conducive to its free
development. The Dorians, to begin with, lived like regiments of
soldiers in barracks. The duty of training the younger men was thrown
upon the elder; so that the close relations thus established in a race
which did not positively discountenance the love of male for male rather
tended actively to encourage it. Nor is it difficult to understand why
the romantic emotions in such a society were more naturally aroused by
male companions than by women. Matrimony was not a matter of elective
affinity between two persons seeking to spend their lives agreeably and
profitably in common, so much as an institution used by the State for
raising vigorous recruits for the national army. All that is known about
the Spartan marriage customs, taken together with Plato's speculations
about a community of wives, proves this conclusively. It followed that
the relation of the sexes to each other was both more formal and more
simple than it is with us; the natural and the political purposes of
cohabitation were less veiled by those personal and emotional
considerations which play so large a part in modern life. There was less
scope for the emergence of passionate enthusiasm between men and women,
while the full conditions of a spiritual attachment, solely determined
by reciprocal inclination, were only to be found in comradeship. In the
wrestling-ground, at the common tables, in the ceremonies of religion,
at the Pan-hellenic games, in the camp, in the hunting-field, on the
benches of the council chamber, and beneath the porches of the Agora,
men were all in all unto each other. Women meanwhile kept the house at
home, gave birth to babies, and reared children till such time as the
State thought fit to undertake their training. It is, moreover, well
known that the age at which boys were separated from their mothers was
tender. Thenceforth they lived with persons of their own sex; their
expanding feelings were confined within the sphere of masculine
experience until the age arrived when marriage had to be considered in
the light of a duty to the commonwealth. How far this tended to
influence the growth of sentiment, and to determine its quality, may be
imagined.
In the foregoing paragraph I have restricted my attention almost wholly
to the Dorians: but what has just been said about the circumstance of
their social life suggests a further consideration regarding paiderastia
at large among the Greeks, which takes rank with the weightiest of all.
The peculiar status of Greek women is a subject surrounded with
difficulty; yet no man can help feeling that the idealisation of
masculine love, which formed so prominent a feature of Greek life in the
historic period, was intimately connected with the failure of the race
to give their proper sphere in society to women. The Greeks themselves
were not directly conscious of this fact; nor can I remember any passage
in which a Greek has suggested that boy-love flourished precisely upon
the special ground which had been wrestled from the right domain of file
other sex. Far in advance of the barbarian tribes around them, they
could not well discern the defects of their own civilisation; nor was it
to be expected that they should have anticipated that exaltation of the
love of women into a semi-religious cult which was the later product of
chivalrous Christianity. We, from the standpoint of a more fully
organised society, detect their errors, and pronounce that paiderastia
was a necessary consequence of their unequal social culture; nor do we
fail to notice that, just as paiderastia was a post-Homeric intrusion
into Greek life, so women, after the age of the Homeric poems, suffered
a corresponding depression in the social scale. In the _Iliad_ and the
_Odyssey_, and in the tragedies which deal with the heroic age, they
play a part of importance for which the actual conditions of historic
Hellas offered no opportunities.
It was at Athens that the social disadvantages of women told with
greatest force; and this perhaps may help to explain the philosophic
idealisation of boy-love among the Athenians. To talk familiarly with
free women on the deepest subjects, to treat them as intellectual
companions, or to choose them as associates in undertakings of political
moment, seems never to have entered the mind of an Athenian. Women were
conspicuous by their absence from all places of resort--from the
palæstra, the theatre, the Agora, Pnyx, the law-court, the symposium;
and it was here, and here alone, that the spiritual energies of the men
expanded. Therefore, as the military ardour of the Dorians naturally
associated itself with paiderastia, so the characteristic passion of the
Athenians for culture took the same direction. The result in each case
was a highly wrought psychical condition, which, however alien to our
instincts, must be regarded as an exaltation of the race above its
common human needs--as a manifestation of fervid, highly-pitched
emotional enthusiasm.
It does not follow from the facts which I have just discussed that,
either at Athens or at Sparta, women were excluded from an important
position in the home, or that the family in Greece was not the sphere of
female influence more active than the extant fragments of Greek
literature reveal to us. The women of Sophocles and Euripides, and the
noble ladies described by Plutarch, warn us to be cautious in our
conclusions on this topic. The fact, however, remains that in Greece, as
in mediæval Europe, the home was not regarded as the proper sphere for
enthusiastic passion: both paiderastia and chivalry ignored the family,
while the latter even set the matrimonial tie at nought. It is therefore
precisely at this point of the family, regarded as a comparatively
undeveloped factor in the higher spiritual life of Greeks, that the two
problems of paiderastia and the position of women in Greece intersect.
In reviewing the external circumstances which favoured paiderastia, it
may be added, as a minor cause, that the leisure in which the Greeks
lived, supported by a crowd of slaves, and attending chiefly to their
physical and mental culture, rendered them peculiarly liable to
pre-occupations of passion and pleasure-seeking. In the early periods,
when war was incessant, this abundance of spare time bore less corrupt
fruit than during the stagnation into which the Greeks, enslaved by
Macedonia and Rome, declined.
So far, I have been occupied in the present section with the specific
conditions of Greek society which may be regarded as determining the
growth of paiderastia. With respect to the general habit of mind which
caused the Greeks, in contradistinction to the Jews and Christians, to
tolerate this form of feeling, it will be enough here to remark that
Paganism could have nothing logically to say against it. The further
consideration of this matter I shall reserve for the next division of my
essay, contenting myself for the moment with the observation that Greek
religion and the instincts of the Greek race offered no direct obstacle
to the expansion of a habit which was strongly encouraged by the
circumstances I have just enumerated.