Sexual inversion among Greek women offers more difficulties than we met
with in the study of paiderastia. This is due, not to the absence of the
phenomenon, but to the fact that feminine homosexual passions were never
worked into the social system, never became educational and military
agents. The Greeks accepted the fact that certain females are
congenitally indifferent to the male sex, and appetitive of their own
sex. This appears from the myth of Aristophanes in Plato's _Symposium_,
which expresses in comic form their theory of sexual differentiation.
There were originally human beings of three sexes: men, the offspring of
the sun; women, the offspring of the earth; hermaphrodites, the
offspring of the moon. They were round with two faces, four hands, four
feet, and two sets of reproductive organs apiece. In the case of the
third (hermaphroditic or lunar) sex, one set of reproductive organs was
male, the other female. Zeus, on account of the insolence and vigour of
these primitive human creatures, sliced them into halves. Since that
time, the halves of each sort have always striven to unite with their
corresponding halves, and have found some satisfaction in carnal
congress--males with males, females with females, and (in the case of
the lunar or hermaphroditic creatures) males and females with one
another. Philosophically, then, the homosexual passion of female for
female, and of male for male, was placed upon exactly the same footing
as the heterosexual passion of each sex for its opposite. Greek logic
admitted the homosexual female to equal rights with the homosexual male,
and both to the same natural freedom as heterosexual individuals of
either species.
Although this was the position assumed by philosophers, Lesbian passion,
as the Greeks called it, never obtained the same social sanction as
boy-love. It is significant that Greek mythology offers no legends of
the goddesses parallel to those which consecrated paiderastia among the
male deities. Again, we have no recorded example, so far as I can
remember, of noble friendships between women rising into political and
historical prominence. There are no female analogies to Harmodius and
Aristogeiton, Cratinus and Aristodemus. It is true that Sappho and the
Lesbian poetesses gave this female passion an eminent place in Greek
literature. But the Æolian women did not found a glorious tradition
corresponding to that of the Dorian men. If homosexual love between
females assumed the form of an institution at one moment in Æolia, this
failed to strike roots deep into the subsoil of the nation. Later
Greeks, while tolerating, regarded it rather as an eccentricity of
nature, or a vice, than as an honourable and socially useful emotion.
The condition of women in ancient Hellas sufficiently accounts for the
result. There was no opportunity in the harem or the zenana of raising
homosexual passion to the same moral and spiritual efficiency as it
obtained in the camp, the palæstra, and the schools of the philosophers.
Consequently, while the Greeks utilised and ennobled boy-love, they left
Lesbian love to follow the same course of degeneracy as it pursues in
modern times.
In order to see how similar the type of Lesbian love in ancient Greece
was to the form which it assumed in modern Europe, we have only to
compare Lucian's Dialogues with Parisian tales by Catulle Mendès or Guy
de Maupassant. The woman who seduces the girl she loves, is, in the
girl's phrase, "over-masculine," "androgynous." The Megilla of Lucian
insists upon being called Megillos. The girl is a weaker vessel, pliant,
submissive to the virago's sexual energy, selected from the class of
meretricious _ingénues_.
There is an important passage in the _Amores_ of Lucian which proves
that the Greeks felt an abhorrence of sexual inversion among women
similar to that which moderns feel for its manifestation among men.
Charicles, who supports, the cause of normal heterosexual passion,
argues after this wise:
"If you concede homosexual love to males, you must in justice grant
the same to females; you will have to sanction carnal intercourse
between them; monstrous instruments of lust will have to be
permitted, in order that their sexual congress may be carried out;
that obscene vocable, tribad, which so rarely offends our ears--I
blush to utter it--will become rampant, and Philænis will spread
androgynous orgies throughout our harems."
What these monstrous instruments of lust were may be gathered from the
sixth mime of Herodas, where one of them is described in detail.
Philænis may, perhaps, be the poetess of an obscene book on sensual
refinements, to which Athanæus alludes (_Deipnosophistæ_, viii, 335). It
is also possible that Philænis had become the common designation of a
Lesbian lover, a tribad. In the latter periods of Greek literature, as I
have elsewhere shown, certain fixed masks of Attic comedy (corresponding
to the masks of the Italian _Commedia dell' Arte_) created types of
character under conventional names--so that, for example, Cerdo became a
cobbler, Myrtalë a common whore, and possibly Philænis a Lesbian invert.
The upshot of this parenthetical investigation is to demonstrate that,
while the love of males for males in Greece obtained moralisation, and
reached the high position of a recognised social function, the love of
female for female remained undeveloped and unhonoured, on the same level
as both forms of homosexual passion in the modern European world are.