A Problem in Greek Ethics Part 2

Before proceeding to discuss the conditions under which paiderastia existed in Athens, it may be well to pause and to consider the tone adopted with regard to it by some of the earlier Greek poets. Much that is interesting on the subject of the true h.e.l.lenic Eros can be gathered from Theognis, Solon, Pindar, aeschylus, and Sophocles; while the lyrics of Anacreon, Alcaeus, Ibycus, and others of the same period ill.u.s.trate the wanton and illiberal pa.s.sion (_Hybris_) which tended to corrode and undermine the n.o.bler feeling.

It is well known that Theognis and his friend Kurnus were members of the aristocracy of Megara. After Megara had thrown off the yoke of Corinth in the early part of the sixth century, the city first submitted to the democratic despotism of Theagenes, and then for many years engaged in civil warfare. The larger number of the elegies of Theognis are specially intended to instruct Kurnus how he ought to act as an ill.u.s.trious party-leader of the n.o.bles (_Esthloi_) in their contest with the people (_Deiloi_). They consist, therefore, of political and social precepts, and for our present purpose are only important as ill.u.s.trating the educational authority a.s.sumed by a Dorian _Philetor_ over his friend. The personal elegies intermingled with these poems on conduct reveal the very heart of a Greek lover at his early period. Here is one on loyalty:--

"Love me not with words alone, while your mind and thoughts are otherwise, if you really care for me and the heart within you is loyal. But love me with a pure and honest soul, or openly disown and hate me; let the breach between us be avowed. He who hath a single tongue and a double mind is a bad comrade, Kurnus, better as a foe than a friend."[57]

The bitter-sweet of love is well described in the following couplets:--

"Harsh and sweet, alluring and repellent, until it be crowned with completion, is love for young men. If one brings it to perfection, then it is sweet; but if a man pursues and does not love, then it is of all things the most painful."[58]

The same strain is repeated in the lines which begin, "a boy's love is fair to keep, fair to lay aside."[59] As one time Theognis tells his friend that he has the changeable temper of a hawk, the skittishness of a pampered colt.[60] At another he remarks that boys are more constant than women in their affection.[61] His pa.s.sion rises to its n.o.blest height in a poem which deserves to rank with some of Shakespeare's sonnets, and which, like them, has fulfilled its own promise of immortality.[62] In order to appreciate the value of the fame conferred on Kurnus by Theognis, and celebrated in such lofty strains, we must remember that these elegies were sung at banquets. "The fair young men,"

of whom the poet speaks, boy-lovers themselves, chaunted the praise of Kurnus to the sound of flutes, while the cups went round or the lyre was pa.s.sed from hand to hand of merry-making guests. A subject to which Theognis more than once refers is calumny:--

"Often will the folk speak vain things against thee in my ears, and against me in thine. Pay thou no heed to them."[63]

Again, he frequently reminds the boy he loves, whether it be Kurnus or some other, that the bloom of youth is pa.s.sing, and that this is a reason for showing kindness.[64] This argument is urged with what appears like coa.r.s.eness in the following couplet:--

"O boy, so long as thy chin remains smooth, never will I cease from fawning, no, not if it is doomed for me to die."[65]

A couplet, which is also attributed to Solon, shows that paiderastia at this time in Greece was a.s.sociated with manly sports and pleasures:--

"Blest is the man who loves brave steeds of war, Fair boys, and hounds, and stranger guests from far."[66]

Nor must the following be omitted:--

"Blest is the man who loves, and after play, Whereby his limbs are supple made and strong, Retiring to his home, 'twixt sleep and song, Sports with a fair boy on his breast all day."[67]

The following couplet is attributed to him by Plutarch,[68] nor does there seem any reason to doubt its genuineness. The text seems to be corrupt, but the meaning is pretty clear:--

"In the charming season of the flower-time of youth thou shalt love boys, yearning for their thighs and honeyed mouth."

Solon, it may be remembered, thought it wise to regulate the conditions under which the love of free youths might be tolerated.

The general impression produced by a careful reading of Theognis is that he entertained a genuine pa.s.sion for Kurnus, and that he was anxious to train the young man's mind in what he judged the n.o.blest principles.

Love, at the same time, except in its more sensual moments, he describes as bitter-sweet and subject to anxiety. That perturbation of the emotions, which is inseparable from any of the deeper forms of personal attachment, and which the necessary conditions of boy-love exasperated, was irksome to the Greek. It is not a little curious to observe how all the poets of the despotic age resent and fret against the force of their own feeling, differing herein from the singers of chivalry, who idealised the very pains of pa.s.sion.

Of Ibycus, who was celebrated among the ancients as the lyrist of paiderastia,[69] very little has been preserved to us, but that little is sufficient to indicate the fervid and voluptuous style of his art.

His imagery resembles that of Anacreon. The onset of love, for instance, in one fragment is compared to the down-swooping of a Thracian whirlwind; in another the poet trembles at the approach of Eros like an old racehorse who is dragged forth to prove his speed once more.

Of the genuine Anacreon we possess more numerous and longer fragments, and the names of his favourites, Cleobulus, Smerdies, Leucaspis, are famous. The general tone of his love-poems is relaxed and Oriental, and his language abounds in phrases indicative of sensuality. The following may be selected:--

"Cleobulus I love, for Cleobulus I am mad, Cleobulus I watch and wors.h.i.+p with my gaze."[70]

Again:--

"O boy, with the maiden's eyes, I seek and follow thee, but thou heedest not, nor knowest that thou art my soul's charioteer."

In another place he speaks of[71]--

"Love, the virginal, gleaming and radiant with desire."

_Syneban_ (to pa.s.s the time of youth with friends) is a word which Anacreon may be said to have made current in Greek. It occurs twice in his fragments,[72] and exactly expresses the luxurious enjoyment of youthful grace and beauty which appear to have been his ideal of love.

We are very far here from the Achilleian friends.h.i.+p of the _Iliad_. Yet, occasionally, Anacreon uses images of great force to describe the attack of pa.s.sion, as when he says that love has smitten him with a huge axe, and plunged him in a wintry torrent.[73]

It must be remembered that both Anacreon and Ibycus were court poets, singing in the palaces of Polycrates and Hippias. The youths they celebrated were probably little better than the _exoleti_ of a Roman Emperor.[74] This cannot be said exactly of Alcaeus, whose love for black-eyed Lycus was remembered by Cicero and Horace. So little, however, is left of his erotic poems that no definite opinion can be formed about them. The authority of later Greek authors justifies our placing him upon the list of those who helped to soften and emasculate the character of Greek love by their poems.[75]

Two Athenian drinking-songs preserved by Athenaeus,[76] which seem to bear the stamp of the lyric age, may here be quoted. They serve to ill.u.s.trate the kind of feeling to which expression was given in public by friends and boy-lovers:--

"Would I were a lovely heap of ivory, and that lovely boys carried me into the Dionysian chorus."[77]

This is marked by a very delicate, though naf, fancy. The next is no less eminent for its sustained, impa.s.sioned, simple, rhythmic feeling:--

"Drink with me, be young with me, love with me, wear crowns with me, with me when I am mad be mad, with me when I am temperate be sober."

The greatest poet of the lyric age, the lyrist _par excellence_ Pindar, adds much to our conception of Greek love at this period. Not only is the poem to Theoxenos, whom he loved, and in whose arms he is said to have died in the theatre at Argos, one of the most splendid achievements of his art;[78] but its choice of phrase, and the curious parallel which it draws between the free love of boys and the servile love of women, help us to comprehend the serious intensity of this pa.s.sion. "The flas.h.i.+ng rays of his forehead," and "is storm-tossed with desire," and "the young-limbed bloom of boys," are phrases which it is impossible adequately to translate. So, too, are the images by which the heart of him who does not feel the beauty of Theoxenos is said to have been forged with cold fire out of adamant, while the poet himself is compared to wax wasting under the sun's rays. In Pindar, pa.s.sing from Ibycus and Anacreon, we ascend at once into a purer and more healthful atmosphere, fraught, indeed, with pa.s.sion and pregnant with storm, but no longer simply sensual. Taken as a whole, the Odes of Pindar, composed for the most part in the honour of young men and boys, both beautiful and strong, are the work of a great moralist as well as a great artist. He never fails to teach by precept and example; he does not, as Ibycus is reported to have done, adorn his verse with legends of Ganymede and t.i.thonus, for the sake of insinuating compliments. Yet no one shared in fuller measure the Greek admiration for health and grace and vigour of limb. This is obvious in the many radiant pictures of masculine perfection he has drawn, as well as in the images by which he loves to bring the beauty-bloom of youth to mind. The true h.e.l.lenic spirit may be better studied in Pindar than in any other poet of his age; and after we have weighed his high morality, sound counsel, and reverence for all things good, together with the pa.s.sion he avows, we shall have done something toward comprehending the inner nature of Greek love.

XII.

The treatment of paiderastia upon the Attic stage requires separate considerations. Nothing proves the popular acceptance and national approval of Greek love more forcibly to modern minds than the fact that the tragedians like aeschylus and Sophocles made it the subject of their dramas. From a notice in Athenaeus it appears that Stesichorus, who first gave dramatic form to lyric poetry, composed interludes upon paiderastic subjects.[79] But of these it is impossible to speak, since their very t.i.tles have been lost. What immediately follows, in the narrative of Athenaeus, will serve as text for what I have to say upon this topic.

"And aeshylus, that mighty poet, and Sophocles, brought masculine loves into the theatre through their tragedies. Wherefore some are wont to call tragedy a paiderast; and the spectators welcome such." Nothing, unfortunately, remains of the plays which justified this language but a few fragments cited by Aristophanes, Plutarch, Lucian, and Athenaeus. To examine these will be the business of this section.

The tragedy of the _Myrmidones_, which formed part of a trilogy by aeschylus upon the legend of Achilles, must have been popular at Athens, for Aristophanes quotes it no less than four times--twice in the _Frogs_, once in the _Birds_, and once in the _Ecclesiazusae_. We can reconstruct its general plan from the lines which have come down to us on the authority of the writers above mentioned.[80] The play opened with an anapaestic speech of the chorus, composed of the clansmen of Achilles, who upbraided him for staying idle in his tent while the Achaians suffered at the hands of Hector. Achilles replied with the metaphor of the eagle stricken by an arrow winged from one of his own feathers. Then the emba.s.sy of Phnix arrived, and Patroclus was sent forth to battle. Achilles, meanwhile, engaged in a game of dice; and while he was thus employed Antilochus entered with the news of the death of Patroclus. The next fragment brings the whole scene vividly before our eyes.

"Wail for me, Antilochus, rather than for the dead man--for me, Achilles, who still live." After this, the corpse of Patroclus was brought upon the stage, and the son of Peleus poured forth a lamentation over his friend. The _Threnos_ of Achilles on this occasion was very celebrated among the ancients. One pa.s.sage of unmeasured pa.s.sion, which described the love which subsisted between the two heroes, has been quoted, with varieties of reading, by Lucian, Plutarch, and Athenaeus.[81] Lucian says: "Achilles, bewailing the death of Patroclus with unhusbanded pa.s.sion, broke forth into the truth in self-abandonment to woe." Athenaeus gives the text as follows:--

"Hadst thou no reverence for the unsullied holiness of thighs, O thou ungrateful for the showers of kisses given."

What we have here chiefly to notice is the change which the tale of Achilles had undergone since Homer.[82] Homer represented Patroclus as older in years than the son of Peleus, but inferior to him in station; nor did he hint which of the friends was the _Erastes_ of the other.

That view of their comrades.h.i.+p had not occurred to him. aeschylus makes Achilles the lover; and for this distortion of the Homeric legend he was severely criticised by Plato.[83] At the same time, as the two lines quoted from the _Threnos_ prove, he treated their affection from the point of view of post-Homeric paiderastia.

Sophocles also wrote a play upon the legend of Achilles, which bears for its t.i.tle _Achilles' Loves_. Very little is left of this drama; but Hesychius has preserved one phrase which ill.u.s.trates the Greek notion that love was an effluence from the beloved person through the eyes into the lover's soul,[84] while Stobaeus quotes the beautiful simile by which love is compared to a piece of ice held in the hand by children.[85]

Another play of Sophocles, the _Niobe_, is alluded to by Plutarch and by Athenaeus for the paiderastia which it contained. Plutarch's words are these:[86] "When the children of Niobe, in Sophocles, are being pierced and dying, one of them cries out, appealing to no other rescuer or ally than his lover: Ho! comrade, up and aid me!" Finally, Athenaeus quotes a single line from the _Colchian Women_ of Sophocles, which alludes to Ganymede, and runs as follows:[87] "Inflaming with his thighs the royalty of Zeus."

Whether Euripides treated paiderastia directly in any of his plays is not quite certain, though the t.i.tle _Chrysippus_, and one fragment preserved from that tragedy--

"Nature constrains me though I have sound judgment"--

justify us in believing that he made the crime of Laius his subject. It may be added that a pa.s.sage in Cicero confirms this belief.[88] The t.i.tle of another tragedy, _Peirithous_, seems in like manner to point at friends.h.i.+p; while a beautiful quotation from the _Dictys_ sufficiently indicates the high moral tone a.s.sumed by Euripides in treating of Greek love. It runs as follows:--"He was my friend; and never may love lead me to folly, nor to Kupris. There is, in truth, another kind of love--love for the soul, righteous, temperate, and good. Surely men ought to have made this law, that only the temperate and chaste should love and send Kupris, daughter of Zeus, a-begging." The philosophic ideal of comrades.h.i.+p is here vitalised by the dramatic vigour of the poet; nor has the h.e.l.lenic conception of pure affection for "a soul, just, upright, temperate and good," been elsewhere more pithily expressed. The Euripidean conception of friends.h.i.+p, it may further be observed, is n.o.bly personified in Pylades, who plays a generous and self-devoted part in the three tragedies of _Electra_, _Orestes_, and _Iphigenia in Tauris_.

Having collected these notices of tragedies which dealt with boy-love, it may be well to add a word upon comedies in the same relation. We hear of a _Paidika_ by Sophron, a _Malthakoi_ by the older Cratinus, a _Bapte_ by Empolis, in which Alcibiades and his society were satirised.

_Paiderastes_ is the t.i.tle of plays by Diphilis and Antiphanes; _Ganymedes_ of plays of Alkaeus, Antiphanes and Eubulus.

What has been quoted from aeschylus and Sophocles sufficiently establishes the fact that paiderastia was publicly received with approbation on the tragic stage. This should make us cautious in rejecting the stories which are told about the love adventures of Sophocles.[89] Athenaeus calls him a lover of lads, nor is it strange if, in the age of Pericles, and while he was producing the _Achilles'

Loves_, he should have shared the tastes of which his race approved.