A Problem in Greek Ethics Part 1

A Problem in Greek Ethics.

by John Addington Symonds.

PREFACE.

The following treatise on Greek Love was written in the year 1873, when my mind was occupied with my _Studies of Greek Poets_. I printed ten copies of it privately in 1883. It was only when I read the Terminal Essay appended by Sir Richard Burton to his translation of the _Arabian Nights_ in 1886, that I became aware of M. H. E. Meier's article on Paederastie (Ersch and Gruber's _Encyclopaedie_, Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1837). My treatise, therefore, is a wholly independent production. This makes Meier's agreement (in Section 7 of his article) with the theory I have set forth in Section X. regarding the North h.e.l.lenic origin of Greek Love, and its Dorian character, the more remarkable. That two students, working separately upon the same ma.s.s of material, should have arrived at similar conclusions upon this point strongly confirms the probability of the hypothesis.

J. A. SYMONDS.

A PROBLEM IN GREEK ETHICS.

I.

For the student of s.e.xual inversion, ancient Greece offers a wide field for observation and reflection. Its importance has. .h.i.therto been underrated by medical and legal writers on the subject, who do not seem to be aware that here alone in history have we the example of a great and highly-developed race not only tolerating h.o.m.os.e.xual pa.s.sions, but deeming them of spiritual value, and attempting to utilise them for the benefit of society. Here, also, through the copious stores of literature at our disposal, we can arrive at something definite regarding the various forms a.s.sumed by these pa.s.sions, when allowed free scope for development in the midst of refined and intellectual civilisation. What the Greeks called paiderastia, or boy-love, was a phenomenon of one of the most brilliant periods of human culture, in one of the most highly organised and n.o.bly active nations. It is the feature by which Greek social life is most sharply distinguished from that of any other people approaching the h.e.l.lenes in moral or mental distinction. To trace the history of so remarkable a custom in their several communities, and to ascertain, so far as this is possible, the ethical feeling of the Greeks upon this subject, must be of service to the scientific psychologist. It enables him to approach the subject from another point of view than that usually adopted by modern jurists, psychiatrists, writers on forensic medicine.

II.

The first fact which the student has to notice is that in the Homeric poems a modern reader finds no trace of this pa.s.sion. It is true that Achilles, the hero of the _Iliad_, is distinguished by his friends.h.i.+p for Patroclus no less emphatically than Odysseus, the hero of the _Odyssey_, by lifelong attachment to Penelope, and Hector by love for Andromache. But in the delineation of the friends.h.i.+p of Achilles and Patroclus there is nothing which indicates the pa.s.sionate relation of the lover and the beloved, as they were afterwards recognised in Greek society. This is the more remarkable because the love of Achilles for Patroclus added, in a later age of Greek history, an almost religious sanction of the martial form of paiderastia. In like manner the friends.h.i.+p of Idomeneus for Meriones, and that of Achilles, after the death of Patroclus, for Antilochus, were treated by the later Greeks as paiderastic. Yet, inasmuch as Homer gives no warrant for this interpretation of the tales in question, we are justified in concluding that h.o.m.os.e.xual relations were not prominent in the so-called heroic age of Greece. Had it formed a distinct feature of the society depicted in the Homeric poems, there is no reason to suppose that their authors would have abstained from delineating it. We shall see that Pindar, aeschylus and Sophocles, the poets of an age when paiderastia was prevalent, spoke unreservedly upon the subject.

Impartial study of the _Iliad_ leads us to the belief that the Greeks of the historic period interpreted the friends.h.i.+p of Achilles and Patroclus in accordance with subsequently developed customs. The Homeric poems were the Bible of the Greeks, and formed the staple of their education; nor did they scruple to wrest the sense of the original, reading, like modern Bibliolaters, the sentiments and pa.s.sions of a later age into the text. Of this process a good example is afforded by aeschines in the oration against Timarchus. While discussing this very question of the love of Achilles, he says: "He, indeed, conceals their love, and does not give its proper name to the affection between them, judging that the extremity of their fondness would be intelligible to instructed men among his audience." As an instance the orator proceeds to quote the pa.s.sage in which Achilles laments that he will not be able to fulfil his promise to Mentius by bringing Patroclus home to Opus. He is here clearly introducing the sentiments of an Athenian hoplite who had taken the boy he loved to Syracuse and seen him slain there.

Homer stood in a double relation to the historical Greeks. On the one hand, he determined their development by the influence of his ideal characters. On the other, he underwent from them interpretations which varied with the spirit of each successive century. He created the national temperament, but received in turn the influx of new thoughts and emotions occurring in the course of its expansion. It is, therefore, highly important, on the threshold of this inquiry, to determine the nature of that Achilleian friends.h.i.+p to which the panegyrists and apologists of the custom make such frequent reference.

III.

The ideal of character in Homer was what the Greeks called heroic; what we should call chivalrous. Young men studied the _Iliad_ as our ancestors studied the Arthurian romances, finding there a pattern of conduct raised almost too high above the realities of common life for imitation, yet stimulative of enthusiasm and exciting to the fancy.

Foremost among the paragons of heroic virtue stood Achilles, the splendour of whose achievements in the Trojan war was only equalled by the pathos of his friends.h.i.+p. The love for slain Patroclus broke his mood of sullen anger, and converted his brooding sense of wrong into a lively thirst for vengeance. Hector, the slayer of Patroclus, had to be slain by Achilles, the comrade of Patroclus. No one can read the _Iliad_ without observing that its action virtually turns upon the conquest which the pa.s.sion of friends.h.i.+p gains over the pa.s.sion of resentment in the breast of the chief actor. This the Greek students of Homer were not slow to see; and they not unnaturally selected the friends.h.i.+p of Achilles for their ideal of manly love. It was a powerful and masculine emotion, in which effeminacy had no part, and which by no means excluded the ordinary s.e.xual feelings. Companions.h.i.+p in battle and the chase, in public and in private affairs of life, was the communion proposed by Achilleian friends--not luxury or the delights which feminine attractions offered. The tie was both more spiritual and more energetic than that which bound man to woman. Such was the type of comrades.h.i.+p delineated by Homer; and such, in spite of the modifications suggested by later poets, was the conception retained by the Greeks of this heroic friends.h.i.+p. Even aeschines, in the place above quoted, lays stress upon the mutual loyalty of Achilles and Patroclus as the strongest bond of their affection: "regarding, I suppose, their loyalty and mutual goodwill as the most touching feature of their love."[1]

IV.

Thus the tale of Achilles and Patroclus sanctioned among the Greeks a form of masculine love, which, though afterwards connected with paiderastia properly so-called, we are justified in describing as heroic, and in regarding as one of the highest products of their emotional life. It will be seen, when we come to deal with the historical manifestations of this pa.s.sion, that the heroic love which took its name from Homer's Achilles existed as an ideal rather than an actual reality. This, however, is equally the case with Christianity and chivalry. The facts of feudal history fall below the high conception which hovered like a dream above the knights and ladies of the Middle Ages; nor has the spirit of the Gospel been realised, in fact, by the most Christian nations. Still we are not on that account debarred from speaking of both chivalry and Christianity as potent and effective forces.

V.

Homer, then, knew nothing of paiderastia, though the _Iliad_ contained the first and n.o.blest legend of heroic friends.h.i.+p. Very early, however, in Greek history boy-love, as a form of sensual pa.s.sion, became a national inst.i.tution. This is proved abundantly by mythological traditions of great antiquity, by legendary tales connected with the founding of Greek cities, and by the primitive customs of the Dorian tribes. The question remains how paiderastia originated among the Greeks, and whether it was introduced or indigenous.

The Greeks themselves speculated on this subject, but they arrived at no one definite conclusion. Herodotus a.s.serts that the Persians learned the habit, in its vicious form, from the Greeks;[2] but, even supposing this a.s.sertion to be correct, we are not justified in a.s.suming the same of all barbarians who were neighbours of the Greeks; since we know from the Jewish records and from a.s.syrian inscriptions that the Oriental nations were addicted to this as well as other species of sensuality. Moreover, it might with some strain on language be maintained that Herodotus, in the pa.s.sage above referred to, did not allude to boy-love in general, but to the peculiarly h.e.l.lenic form of it which I shall afterwards attempt to characterise.

A prevalent opinion among the Greeks ascribed the origin of paiderastia to Crete; and it was here that the legend of Zeus and Ganymede was localised.[3] "The Cretans," says Plato,[4] "are always accused of having invented the story of Ganymede and Zeus, which is designed to justify themselves in the enjoyment of such pleasures by the practice of the G.o.d whom they believe to have been their lawgiver."

In another pa.s.sage,[5] Plato speaks of the custom that prevailed before the time of Laius--in terms which show his detestation of a vice that had gone far toward corrupting Greek society. This sentence indicates the second theory of the later Greeks upon this topic. They thought that Laius, the father of dipus, was the first to practise _Hybris_, or lawless l.u.s.t, in this form, by the rape committed on Chrysippus, the son of Pelops.[6] To this crime of Laius, the Scholiast to the _Seven against Thebes_ attributes all the evils which afterwards befell the royal house of Thebes, and Euripides made it the subject of a tragedy.

In another but less prevalent Saga the introduction of paiderastia is ascribed to Orpheus.

It is clear from these conflicting theories that the Greeks themselves had no trustworthy tradition on the subject. Nothing, therefore, but speculative conjecture is left for the modern investigator. If we need in such a matter to seek further than the primal instincts of human nature, we may suggest that, like the orgiastic rites of the later h.e.l.lenic cultus, paiderastia in its crudest form was transmitted to the Greeks from the East. Its prevalence in Crete, which, together with Cyprus, formed one of the princ.i.p.al links between Phnicia and h.e.l.las proper, favours this view. Paiderastia would, on this hypothesis, like the wors.h.i.+p of the Paphian and Corinthian Aphrodite, have to be regarded as in part an Oriental importation.[7] Yet, if we adopt any such solution of the problem, we must not forget that in this, as in all similar cases, whatever the Greeks received from adjacent nations, they distinguished with the qualities of their own personality. Paiderastia in h.e.l.las a.s.sumed h.e.l.lenic characteristics, and cannot be confounded with any merely Asiatic form of luxury. In the tenth section of this Essay I shall return to the problem, and advance my own conjecture as to the part played by the Dorians in the development of paiderastia into a custom.

It is enough for the present to remark that, however introduced, the vice of boy-love, as distinguished from heroic friends.h.i.+p, received religious sanction at an early period. The legend of the rape of Ganymede was invented, according to the pa.s.sage recently quoted from Plato, by the Cretans with the express purpose of investing their pleasures with a show of piety. This localisation of the religious sanction of paiderastia in Crete confirms the hypothesis of Oriental influence; for one of the notable features of Graeco Asiatic wors.h.i.+p was the consecration of sensuality in the Phallus cult, the _Hiero douloi_ (temple slaves, or _bayaderes_) of Aphrodite, and the eunuchs of the Phrygian mother. Homer tells the tale of Ganymede with the utmost simplicity. The boy was so beautiful that Zeus suffered him not to dwell on earth, but translated him to heaven and appointed him the cupbearer of the immortals. The sensual desire which made the king of G.o.ds and men prefer Ganymede to Leda, Io, Danae, and all the maidens whom he loved and left on earth, is an addition to the Homeric version of the myth. In course of time the tale of Ganymede, according to the Cretan reading, became the nucleus around which the paiderastic a.s.sociations of the Greek race gathered, just as that of Achilles formed the main point in their tradition of heroic friends.h.i.+p. To the Romans and the modern nations the name of Ganymede, debased to Catamitus, supplied a term of reproach, which sufficiently indicates the nature of the love of which he became eventually the eponym.

VI.

Resuming the results of the last four sections, we find two separate forms of masculine pa.s.sion clearly marked in early h.e.l.las--a n.o.ble and a base, a spiritual and a sensual. To the distinction between them the Greek conscience was acutely sensitive; and this distinction, in theory at least, subsisted throughout their history. They wors.h.i.+pped Eros, as they wors.h.i.+pped Aphrodite, under the twofold t.i.tles of Ouranios (celestial) and Pandemos (vulgar, or _volvivaga_); and, while they regarded the one love with the highest approval, as the source of courage and greatness of soul, they never publicly approved the other.

It is true, as will appear in the sequel of this essay, that boy-love in its grossest form was tolerated in historic h.e.l.las with an indulgence which it never found in any Christian country, while heroic comrades.h.i.+p remained an ideal hard to realise, and scarcely possible beyond the limits of the strictest Dorian sect. Yet the language of philosophers, historians, poets and orators is unmistakable. All testify alike to the discrimination between vulgar and heroic love in the Greek mind. I purpose to devote a separate section of this inquiry to the investigation of these ethical distinctions. For the present, a quotation from one of the most eloquent of the later rhetoricians will sufficiently set forth the contrast, which the Greek race never wholly forgot:[8]--

"The one love is mad for pleasure; the other loves beauty. The one is an involuntary sickness; the other is a sought enthusiasm. The one tends to the good of the beloved; the other to the ruin of both. The one is virtuous; the other incontinent in all its acts.

The one has its end in friends.h.i.+p; the other in hate. The one is freely given; the other is bought and sold. The one brings praise; the other blame. The one is Greek; the other is barbarous. The one is virile; the other effeminate. The one is firm and constant; the other light and variable. The man who loves the one love is a friend of G.o.d, a friend of law, fulfilled of modesty, and free of speech. He dares to court his friend in daylight, and rejoices in his love. He wrestles with him in the playground and runs with him in the race, goes afield with him to the hunt, and in battle fights for glory at his side. In his misfortune he suffers, and at his death he dies with him. He needs no gloom of night, no desert place, for this society. The other lover is a foe to heaven, for he is out of tune and criminal; a foe to law, for he transgresses law.

Cowardly, despairing, shameless, haunting the dusk, lurking in desert places and secret dens, he would fain be never seen consorting with his friend, but shuns the light of day, and follows after night and darkness, which the shepherd hates, but the thief loves."

And again, in the same dissertation, Maximus Tyrius speaks to like purpose, clothing his precepts in imagery:--

"You see a fair body in bloom and full of promise of fruit. Spoil not, defile not, touch not the blossom. Praise it, as some wayfarer may praise a plant--even so by Phbus' altar have I seen a young palm shooting toward the sun. Refrain from Zeus and Phbus' tree; wait for the fruit-season and thou shall love more righteously."

With the baser form of paiderastia I shall have little to do in this essay. Vice of this kind does not vary to any great extent, whether we observe it in Athens or in Rome, in Florence of the sixteenth or in Paris of the nineteenth century;[9] nor in h.e.l.las was it more noticeable than elsewhere, except for its comparative publicity. The n.o.bler type of masculine love developed by the Greeks is, on the contrary, almost unique in[10] the history of the human race. It is that which more than anything else distinguishes the Greeks from the barbarians of their own time, from the Romans and from modern men in all that appertains to the emotions. The immediate subject of the ensuing inquiry will, therefore, be that mixed form of paiderastia upon which the Greeks prided themselves, which had for its heroic ideal the friends.h.i.+p of Achilles and Patroclus, but which in historic times exhibited a sensuality unknown to Homer.[11] In treating of this unique product of their civilisation I shall use the terms _Greek Love_, understanding thereby a pa.s.sionate and enthusiastic attachment subsisting between man and youth, recognised by society and protected by opinion, which, though it was not free from sensuality, did not degenerate into mere licentiousness.

VII.

Before reviewing the authors who deal with this subject in detail, or discussing the customs of the several Greek states, it will be well to ill.u.s.trate in general the nature of this love, and to collect the princ.i.p.al legends and historic tales which set it forth.

Greek love was, in its origin and essence, military. Fire and valour, rather than tenderness or tears, were the external outcome of this pa.s.sion; nor had _Malachia_, effeminacy, a place in its vocabulary. At the same time it was exceedingly absorbing. "Half my life," says the lover, "lives in thine image, and the rest is lost. When thou art kind, I spend the day like a G.o.d; when thy face is turned aside, it is very dark with me."[12] Plato, in his celebrated description of a lover's soul, writes:[13]--

"Wherever she thinks that she will behold the beautiful one, thither in her desire she runs. And when she has seen him, and bathed herself with the waters of desire, her constraint is loosened and she is refreshed, and has no more pangs and pains; and this is the sweetest of all pleasures at the time, and is the reason why the soul of the lover will never forsake his beautiful one, whom he esteems above all; he has forgotten mother and brethren and companions, and he thinks nothing of the neglect and loss of his property. The rules and proprieties of life, on which he formerly prided himself, he now despises, and is ready to sleep like a servant, wherever he is allowed, as near as he can to his beautiful one, who is not only the object of his wors.h.i.+p, but the only physician who can heal him in his extreme agony."