Part 5 (1/2)
The philosophical ideal of paiderastia in Greece, which bore the names of Socrates and Plato, met with little but contempt. Cicero, in a pa.s.sage which has been echoed by Gibbon, remarked upon, ”the thin device of virtue and friends.h.i.+p 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, s.e.xtus Empiricus, and Stobaeus.[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] Daphnaeus, 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 pa.s.sage in Petronius and Juvenal, while Athenaeus 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.
XVI.
Philip of Macedon, when he p.r.o.nounced the panegyric of the Sacred Band at Chaeronea, uttered the funeral oration of Greek love in its n.o.bler forms. With the decay of military spirit and the loss of freedom, there was no sphere left for that type of comrades.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sages of the _Thalysia_, _Ates_, _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 _Duseros_, 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, ent.i.tled _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 pa.s.sion, 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 aeschines for that of a Juvenalian _Graeculus_, a delicate aesthetic 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 pa.s.sionate 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 s.e.xes. Boys grow bearded, rough, and past their prime. Women always excite pa.s.sion. 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 n.o.ble 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 s.e.xes. 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, aesthetic 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 h.e.l.las, but coa.r.s.er 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 Paidike_, ”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 Eros;[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 coa.r.s.eness. 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 h.e.l.las.[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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 aesthetic prettiness, the moral instincts of humanity began to a.s.sert themselves in earnest. It became part of the higher doctrine of the Roman Stoics to suppress this form of pa.s.sion.[181] The Christians, from St. Paul onwards, inst.i.tuted 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 h.e.l.las 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.
XVII.
The trans.m.u.tation of h.e.l.las proper into part of the Roman Empire, and the intrusion of Stoicism and Christianity into the sphere of h.e.l.lenic thought and feeling, mark the end of the Greek age. It still remains, however, to consider the relation of this pa.s.sion to the character of the race, and to determine its influence.
In the fifth section of this essay, I a.s.serted 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 h.e.l.lenic with Phnician traders in the post-heroic period led to the adoption by the Greek race of a custom which they speedily a.s.similated and stamped with an h.e.l.lenic 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 cla.s.sic 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 h.e.l.lenes with the Asiatic races, while it was also one of the earliest Dorian acquisitions.
When we come to ask why this pa.s.sion 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 s.e.xual morality; yet, as regards paiderastia, we have abundant proof that nations both of North and South have, according to circ.u.mstances 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 aesthetic apprehensions, and the customs which determine the character of a race, leave always something still to be a.n.a.lysed. 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 pa.s.sion 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 aegean, or discuss the ethnical complexion of the h.e.l.lenic 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 h.e.l.las, 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.