A Problem in Greek Ethics Part 4

Eros, in fact, was as much at home in the gymnasia of Athens as Aphrodite in the temples of Corinth; he was the patron of paiderastia, as she of female love. Thus Meleager writes:--

"The Cyprian queen, a woman, hurls the fire that maddens men for females; but Eros himself sways the love of males for males."[122]

Plutarch, again, in the Erotic dialogue, alludes to "Eros, where Aphrodite is not; Eros apart from Aphrodite." These facts relating to the gymnasia justified Cicero in saying, "Mihi quidem haec in Graecorum gymnasiis nata consuetudo videtur; _in quibus isti liberi et concesi sunt amores_." He adds, with a true Roman's antipathy to Greek aesthetics and their flimsy screen for sensuality, "Bene ergo Ennius, _flagitii principium est nudare inter cives corpora_."[123] "To me, indeed, it seems that this custom was generated in the gymnasiums of the Greeks, for there those loves are freely indulged and sanctioned. Ennius therefore very properly observed that the beginning of vice is the habit of stripping the body among citizens."

The Attic gymnasia and schools were regulated by strict laws. We have already seen that adults were not supposed to enter the palaestra; and the penalty for the infringement of this rule by the gymnasiarch was death. In the same way, schools had to be shut at sunset and not opened again before daybreak; nor was a grown-up man allowed to frequent them.

The public chorus teachers of boys were obliged to be above the age of forty.[124] Slaves who presumed to make advances to a free boy were subject to the severest penalties; in like manner they were prohibited from gymnastic exercises. aeschines, from whom we learn these facts, draws the correct conclusion that gymnastics and Greek love were intended to be the special privilege of freemen. Still, in spite of all restrictions, the palaestra was the centre of Athenian profligacy, the place in which not only honourable attachments were formed, but disgraceful bargains also were concluded;[125] and it is not improbable that men like Taureas and Miccus, who opened such places of amus.e.m.e.nt as a private speculation, may have played the part of go-betweens and panders. Their walls, and the plane-trees which grew along their open courts, were inscribed by lovers with the names of boys who had attracted them. To scrawl up, "Fair is Dinomeneus, fair is the boy," was a common custom, as we learn from Aristophanes and from this anonymous epigram in the _Anthology_:[126]--

"I said and once again I said, 'fair, fair'; but still will I go on repeating how fascinating with his eyes is Dositheus. Not upon an oak, nor on a pine-tree, nor yet upon a wall, will I inscribe this word; but love is smouldering in my heart of hearts."

Another attention of the same kind from a lover to a boy was to have a vase or drinking-cup of baked clay made, with a portrait of the youth depicted on its surface, attended by winged genii of health and love.

The word "Fair" was inscribed beneath, and symbols of games were added--a hoop or a fighting-c.o.c.k.[127] Nor must I here omit the custom which induced lovers of a literary turn to praise their friends in prose or verse. Hippothales, in the _Lysis_ of Plato, is ridiculed by his friends for recording the great deeds of the boy's ancestors, and deafening his ears with odes and sonnets. A diatribe on love, written by Lysias with a view to winning Phaedrus, forms the starting-point of the dialogue between that youth and Socrates.[128] We have, besides, a curious panegyrical oration (called _Eroticos Logos_), falsely ascribed to Demosthenes, in honour of a youth, Epicrates, from which some information may be gathered concerning the topics usually developed in these compositions.

Presents were of course a common way of trying to win favour. It was reckoned shameful for boys to take money from their lovers, but fas.h.i.+on permitted them to accept gifts of quails and fighting c.o.c.ks, pheasants, horses, dogs and clothes.[129] There existed, therefore, at Athens frequent temptations for boys of wanton disposition, or for those who needed money to indulge expensive tastes. The speech of aeschines, from which I have already frequently quoted, affords a lively picture of the Greek rake's progress, in which Timarchus is described as having sold his person in order to gratify his gluttony and l.u.s.t and love of gaming.

The whole of this pa.s.sage,[130] it may be observed in pa.s.sing, reads like a description of Florentine manners in a sermon of Savonarola.

The shops of the barbers, surgeons, perfumers, and flower-sellers had an evil notoriety, and lads who frequented these resorts rendered themselves liable to suspicion. Thus aeschines accuses Timarchus of having exposed himself for hire in a surgeon's shop at the Peiraeus; while one of Straton's most beautiful epigrams[131] describes an a.s.signation which he made with a boy who had attracted his attention in a garland-weaver's stall. In a fragment from the _Pyraunos_ of Alexis, a young man declares that he found thirty professors of the "voluptuous life of pleasure," in the Cerameicus during a search of three days; while Cratinus and Theopompus might be quoted to prove the ill fame of the monument to Cimon and the hill of Lycabettus.[132]

The last step in the downward descent was when a youth abandoned the roof of his parents or guardians and accepted the hospitality of a lover.[133] If he did this, he was lost.

In connection with this portion of the subject, it may be well to state that the Athenian law recognised contracts made between a man and boy, even if the latter were of free birth, whereby the one agreed to render up his person for a certain period and purpose, and the other to pay a fixed sum of money.[134] The phrase "a boy who has been a prost.i.tute,"

occurs quite naturally in Aristophanes;[135] nor was it thought disreputable for men to engage in these _liaisons_. Disgrace only attached to the free youth who gained a living by prost.i.tution; and he was liable, as we shall see, at law to loss of civil rights.

Public brothels for males were kept in Athens, from which the state derived a portion of its revenues. It was in one of these bad places that Socrates first saw Phaedo.[136] This unfortunate youth was a native of Elis. Taken prisoner in war, he was sold in the public market to a slave-dealer, who then acquired the right by Attic law to prost.i.tute his person and engross his earnings for his own pocket. A friend of Socrates, perhaps Cebes, bought him from his master, and he became one of the chief members of the Socratic circle. His name is given to the Platonic dialogue on immortality, and he lived to found what is called the Eleo-Socratic School. No reader of Plato forgets how the sage, on the eve of his death, stroked the beautiful long hair of Phaedo,[137] and prophesied that he would soon have to cut it short in mourning for his teacher.

Agathocles, the tyrant of Syracuse, is said to have spent his youth in brothels of this sort--by inclination, however, if the reports of his biographers be not calumnious.

From what has been collected on this topic, it will be understood that boys in Athens not unfrequently caused quarrels and street-brawls, and that cases for recovery of damages or breach of contract were brought before the Attic law-courts. The Peiraeus was especially noted for such scenes of violence. The oration of Lysias against Simon is a notable example of the pleadings in a cause of this description.[138] Simon, the defendant, and Lysias, the plaintiff (or some one for whom Lysias had composed the speech) were both of them attached to Theodotus, a boy from Plataea. Theodotus was living with the plaintiff; but the defendant a.s.serted that the boy had signed an agreement to consort with him for the consideration of three hundred drachmae, and, relying on this contract, he had attempted more than once to carry off the boy by force.

Violent altercations, stone-throwings, house-breakings, and encounters of various kinds having ensued, the plaintiff brought an action for a.s.sault and battery against Simon. A modern reader is struck with the fact that he is not at all ashamed of his own relation towards Theodotus. It may be noted that the details of this action throw light upon the historic brawl at Corinth, in which a boy was killed, and which led to the foundation of Syracuse by Archias the Bacchiad.[139]

XIV.

We have seen in the foregoing section that paiderastia at Athens was closely a.s.sociated with liberty, manly sports, severe studies, enthusiasm, self-sacrifice, self-control, and deeds of daring, by those who cared for those things. It has also been made abundantly manifest that no serious moral shame attached to persons who used boys like women, but that effeminate youths of free birth were stigmatised for their indecent profligacy. It remains still to ascertain the more delicate distinctions which were drawn by Attic law and custom in this matter, though what has been already quoted from Pausanias, in the _Symposium_ of Plato, may be taken fairly to express the code of honour among gentlemen.

In the _Plutus_,[140] Aristophanes is careful to divide "boys with lovers," into "the good," and "the strumpets." This distinction will serve as basis for the following remarks. A very definite line was drawn by the Athenians between boys who accepted the addresses of their lovers because they liked them or because they were ambitious of comrades.h.i.+p with men of spirit, and those who sold their bodies for money. Minute inquiry was never inst.i.tuted into the conduct of the former cla.s.s; else Alcibiades could not have made his famous declaration about Socrates,[141] nor would Plato in the _Phaedrus_ have regarded an occasional breach of chast.i.ty, under the compulsion of violent pa.s.sion, as a venial error.[142] The latter, on the other hand, besides being visited with universal censure, were disqualified by law from exercising the privileges of the franchise, from undertaking emba.s.sies, from frequenting the Agora, and from taking part in public festivals, under the penalty of death. aeschines, from whom we learn the wording of this statute, adds:[143] "This law he pa.s.sed with regard to youths who sin with facility and readiness against their own bodies." He then proceeds to define the true nature of prost.i.tution, prohibited by law to the citizens of Athens. It is this: "Any one who acts in this way towards a single man, provided he do it with payment, seems to me to be liable to the reproach in question."[144] The whole discussion turns upon the word _Misthos_. The orator is cautious to meet the argument that a written contract was necessary in order to construct a case of _Hetaireia_ at law.[145] In the statute, he observes, there is no mention of "contract"

or "deed in writing." The offence has been sufficiently established "when in any way whatever payment has been made."

In order to ill.u.s.trate the feeling of the Athenians with regard to making profit out of paiderastic relations, I may perhaps be permitted to interrupt the a.n.a.lysis of aeschines by referring to Xenophon's character (_Anab._ si, 6, 21) of the Strategus Menon. The whole tenor of his judgment is extremely unfavourable toward this man, who invariable pursued selfish and mean aims, debasing virtuous qualities like ambition and industry in the mere pursuit of wealth and power. He was, in fact, devoid of chivalrous feeling, good taste, and honour. About his behaviour as a youth, Xenophon writes: "With Ariaeus, the barbarian, because this man was partial to handsome youths, he became extremely intimate while he was still in the prime of adolescence; moreover, he had Tharypas for his beloved, he being beardless and Tharypas a man with a beard." His crime seems to have been that he prost.i.tuted himself to the barbarian Ariaeus in order to advance his interest, and, probably with the same view, flattered the effeminate vanity of an elder man by pretending to love him out of the right time or season. Plutarch (_Pyrrhus_) mentions this Tharypas as the first to introduce h.e.l.lenic manners among the Molossi.

When more than one lover was admitted, the guilt was aggravated. "It will then be manifest that he has not only acted the strumpet, but that he has been a common prost.i.tute. For he who does this indifferently, and with money, and for money, seems to have incurred that designation."

Thus the question finally put to the Areopagus, in which court the case against Timarchus was tried, ran as follows, in the words of aeschines:[146] "To which of these two cla.s.ses will you reckon Timarchus--to those who have had a lover, or to those who have been prost.i.tutes?" In his rhetorical exposition, aeschines defines the true character of the virtuous _Eromenos_. Frankly admitting his own partiality for beautiful young men, he argues after this fas.h.i.+on:[147]

"I do not attach any blame to love. I do not take away the character of handsome lads. I do not deny that I have often loved, and had many quarrels and jealousies in this matter. But I establish this as an irrefutable fact, that, while the love of beautiful and temperate youths does honour to humanity and indicates a generous temper, the buying of the person of a free boy for debauchery is a mark of insolence and ill-breeding. To be loved is an honour: to sell yourself is a disgrace."

He then appeals to the law which forbade slaves to love, thereby implying that this was the privilege and pride of free men. He alludes to the heroic deed of Aristogeiton and to the great example of Achilles.

Finally, he draws up a list of well-known and respected citizens whose loves were notorious, and compares them with a parallel list of persons infamous for their debauchery. What remains in the peroration to this invective traverses the same ground. Some phrases may be quoted which ill.u.s.trate the popular feeling of the Athenians. Timarchus is stigmatised[148] as, "the man and male who, in spite of this, has debauched his body by womanly acts of l.u.s.t," and again as, "one who against the law of nature has given himself to lewdness." It is obvious here that aeschines, the self-avowed boy-lover, while seeking to crush his opponent by flinging effeminacy and unnatural behaviour in his teeth, a.s.sumes at the same time that honourable paiderastia implies no such disgrace. Again, he observes that it is as easy to recognise a pathic by his impudent behaviour as a gymnast by his muscles. Lastly, he bids the judges force intemperate lovers to abstain from free youths, and satisfy their l.u.s.ts upon the persons of foreigners and aliens.[149]

The whole matter at this distance of time is obscure, nor can we hope to apprehend the full force of distinctions drawn by a Greek orator appealing to a Greek audience. We may, indeed, fairly presume that, as is always the case with popular ethics, considerable confusion existed in the minds of the Athenians themselves, and that, even for them, to formulate the whole of their social feelings on this topic consistently, would have been impossible. The main point, however, seems to be that at Athens it was held honourable to love free boys with decency; that the conduct of lovers between themselves, within the limits of recognised friends.h.i.+p, was not challenged; and that no particular shame attached to profligate persons so long as they refrained from tampering with the sons of citizens.[150]

XV.

The sources from which our information has. .h.i.therto been drawn--speeches, poems, biographies, and the dramatic parts of dialogues--yield more real knowledge about the facts of Athenian paiderastia than can be found in the speculations of philosophers. In Aristotle, for instance, paiderastia is almost conspicuous by its absence. It is true that he speculates upon the Cretan customs in the _Politics_, mentions the prevalence of boy-love among the Kelts, and incidentally notices the legends of Diocles and Cleomachus;[151] but he never discusses the matter as fully as might have been expected from a philosopher whose speculations covered the whole field of Greek experience. The chapters on _Philia_, in the _Ethics_, might indeed have been written by a modern moralist for modern readers, though it is possible that in his treatment of "friends.h.i.+p with pleasure for its object," and "friends.h.i.+p with advantage for its object," Aristotle is aiming at the vicious sort of paiderastia. As regards his silence in the _Politics_, it is worth noticing that this treatise breaks off at the very point where we should naturally look for a scientific handling of the education of the pa.s.sions; and, therefore, it is possible that we may have lost the weightiest utterance of Greek philosophy upon the matter of our enquiry.

Though Aristotle contains but little to the purpose, the case is different with Plato; nor would it be possible to omit a detailed examination of the Platonic doctrine on the topic, or to neglect the attempt he made to a.n.a.lyse and purify a pa.s.sion, capable, according to his earlier philosophical speculations, of supplying the starting-point for spiritual progress.

The first point to notice in the Platonic treatment of paiderastia is the difference between the ethical opinions expressed in the _Phaedrus_, _Symposium_, _Republic_, _Charmides_, and _Lysis_, on the one hand, and those expounded in the _Laws_ upon the other. The _Laws_, which are probably a genuine work of Plato's old age, condemn that pa.s.sion which, in the _Phaedrus_ and _Symposium_, he exalted as the greatest boon of human life and as the groundwork of the philosophical temperament; the ordinary social manifestations of which he described with sympathy in the _Lysis_ and the _Charmides_; and which he viewed with more than toleration in the _Republic_. It is not my business to offer a solution of this contradiction; but I may observe that Socrates, who plays the part of protagonist in nearly all the other dialogues of Plato, and who, as we shall see, professed a special cult of love, is conspicuous by his absence in the _Laws_. It is, therefore, not improbable that the philosophical idealisation of paiderastia, to which the name of Platonic love is usually given, should rather be described as Socratic. However that may be, I think it will be well to deal first with the doctrine put into the mouth of the Athenian stranger in the _Laws_, and then to pa.s.s on to the consideration of what Socrates is made to say upon the subject of Greek love in the earlier dialogues.

The position a.s.sumed by Plato in the _Laws_ (p. 636) is this: Syssitia and gymnasia are excellent inst.i.tutions in their way, but they have a tendency to degrade natural love in man below the level of the beasts.

Pleasure is only natural when it arises out of the intercourse between men and women, but the intercourse between men and men, or women and women, is contrary to nature.[152] The bold attempt at overleaping Nature's laws was due originally to unbridled l.u.s.t.

This position is developed in the eighth book (p. 836), where Plato directs his criticism, not only against what would now be termed the criminal intercourse between persons of the same s.e.x, but also against incontinence in general. While framing a law of almost monastic rigour for the regulation of the s.e.xual appet.i.te, he remains an ancient Greek.

He does not reach the point of view from which women are regarded as the proper objects of both pa.s.sion and friends.h.i.+p, as the fit companions of men in all relations of life; far less does he revert to his earlier speculations upon the enthusiasm generated by a n.o.ble pa.s.sion. The modern ideal of marriage and the chivalrous conception of womanhood as worthy to be wors.h.i.+pped are like unknown to him. Abstinence from the delights of love, continence except for the sole end of procreation, is the rule which he proposes to the world.

There are three distinct things, Plato argues, which, owing to the inadequacy of language to represent states of thought, have been confounded.[153] These are friends.h.i.+p, desire, and a third mixed species. Friends.h.i.+p is further described as the virtuous affection of equals in taste, age and station. Desire is always founded on a sense of contrast. While friends.h.i.+p is "gentle and mutual through life," desire is "fierce and wild."[154] The true friend seeks to live chastely with the chaste object of his attachment, whose soul he loves. The l.u.s.tful lover longs to enjoy the flower of his youth and cares only for the body. The third sort is mixed of these; and a lover of this composite kind is torn asunder by two impulses, "the one commanding him to enjoy the youth's person, the other forbidding him to do so."[155] The description of the lover of the third species so exactly suits the paiderast of n.o.bler quality in Greece, as I conceive him to have actually existed, that I shall give a full quotation of this pa.s.sage:[156]--

"As to the mixed sort, which is made up of them both, there is, first of all, a difficulty in determining what he who is possessed by this third love desires; moreover, he is drawn different ways, and is in doubt between the two principles, the one exhorting him to enjoy the beauty of the youth, and the other forbidding him; for the one is a lover of the body and hungers after beauty like ripe fruit, and would fain satisfy himself without any regard to the character of the beloved; the other holds the desire of the body to be a secondary matter, and, looking rather than loving with his soul, and desiring the soul of the other in a becoming manner, regards the satisfaction of the bodily love as wantonness; he reverences and respects temperance and courage and magnanimity and wisdom, and wishes to live chastely with the chaste object of his affection."

It is remarkable that Plato, in this a.n.a.lysis of the three sorts of love, keeps strictly within the bounds of paiderastia. He rejects desire and the mixed sort of love, reserving friends.h.i.+p (_Philia_) and ordaining marriage for the satisfaction of the aphrodisiac instinct at a fitting age, but more particularly for the procreation of children.

Wantonness of every description is to be made as much a sin as incest, both by law and also by the world's opinion. If Olympian victors, with an earthly crown in view, learn to live chastely for the preservation of their strength while training, shall not men, whose contest is for heavenly prizes, keep their bodies undefiled, their spirits holy?

Socrates, the mystagogue of amorous philosophy, is absent, as I have observed, from this discussion of the laws. I turn now to those earlier dialogues in which he expounds the doctrine of Platonic, or, as I should prefer to call it, Socratic, love. We know from Xenophon, as well as Plato, that Socrates named his philosophy the Science of Love. The one thing on which I pride myself, he says, is knowledge of all matters that pertain to love. It furthermore appears that Socrates thought himself in a peculiar sense predestined to reform and to enn.o.ble paiderastia.

"Finding this pa.s.sion at its height throughout the whole of h.e.l.las, but most especially in Athens, and all places full of evil lovers and of youths seduced, he felt a pity for both parties. Not being a lawgiver like Solon, he could not stop the custom by statute, nor correct it by force, nor again dissuade men from it by his eloquence. He did not, however, on that account abandon the lovers or the boys to their fate, but tried to suggest a remedy." This pa.s.sage, which I have paraphrased from Maximus Tyrius,[157] sufficiently expresses the att.i.tude a.s.sumed by Socrates in the Platonic dialogue. He sympathises with Greek lovers, and avows a fervent admiration for beauty in the persons of young men.

At the same time, he declares himself upon the side of temperate and generous affection and strives to utilise the erotic enthusiasm as a motive power in the direction of philosophy. This was really nothing more or less than an attempt to educate the Athenians by appealing to their own higher instincts. We have seen that paiderastia in the prime of h.e.l.lenic culture, whatever sensual admixture it might have contained, was a masculine pa.s.sion. It was closely connected with the love of political independence, with the contempt for Asiatic luxury, with the gymnastic sports, and with the intellectual interests which distinguished h.e.l.lenes from barbarians. Partly owing to the social habits of their cities, and partly to the peculiar notions which they entertained regarding the seclusion of free women in the home, all the higher elements of spiritual and mental activity, and the conditions under which a generous pa.s.sion was conceivable, had become the exclusive privileges of men. It was not that women occupied a semi-servile station, as some students have imagined, or that within the sphere of the household they were not the respected and trusted helpmates of men.

But circ.u.mstances rendered it impossible for them to excite romantic and enthusiastic pa.s.sion. The exaltation of the emotions was reserved for the male s.e.x.

Socrates, therefore, sought to direct and moralise a force already existing. In the _Phaedrus_ he describes the pa.s.sion of love between man and boy as a madness, not different in quality from that which inspires poets; and, after painting that fervid picture of the lover, he declares that the true object of a n.o.ble life can only be attained by pa.s.sionate friends, bound together in the chains of close yet temperate comrades.h.i.+p, seeking always to advance in knowledge, self-restraint, and intellectual illumination. The doctrine of the _Symposium_ is not different, except that Socrates here takes a higher flight. The same love is treated as the method whereby the soul may begin her mystic journey to the region of essential beauty, truth, and goodness. It has frequently been remarked that Plato's dialogues have to be read as poems, even more than as philosophical treatises; and if this be true at all, it is particularly true of both the _Phaedrus_ and the _Symposium_.

The lesson which both essays seem intended to inculcate is this: love, like poetry and prophecy, is a divine gift, which diverts men from the common current of their lives; but in the right use of this gift lies the secret of all human excellence. The pa.s.sion which grovels in the filth of sensual grossness may be transformed into a glorious enthusiasm, a winged splendour, capable of soaring to the contemplation of eternal verities. How strange will it be, when once those heights of intellectual intuition have been scaled, to look down again to earth and view the _Meirakidia_ in whom the soul first recognised the form of beauty![158] There is a deeply-rooted mysticism, an impenetrable soofyism, in the Socratic doctrine of Eros.

In the _Phaedrus_, the _Symposium_, the _Charmides_, the _Lysis_, and the _Republic_, Plato dramatised the real Socrates, while he gave liberal scope to his own personal sympathy for paiderastia.[159] In the _Laws_, if we accept this treatise as the work of his old age, he discarded the Socratic mask, and wrote a kind of palinode, which indicates more moral growth than pure disapprobation of the paiderastic pa.s.sion. I have already tried to show that the point of view in the _Laws_ is still Greek: that their author has not pa.s.sed beyond the sphere of h.e.l.lenic ethics. He has only become more ascetic in his rule of conduct as the years advanced, importing the _rumores senum severiorum_ into his discourse, and recognising the imperfection of that halting-point between the two logical extremes of Pagan license and monastic asceticism which in the fervour of his greener age he advocated. As a young man, Plato felt sympathy for love so long as it was paiderastic and not spent on women; he even condoned a lapse through warmth of feeling into self-indulgence. As an old man, he denounced carnal pleasure of all kinds, and sought to limit the amative instincts to the one sole end of procreation.

It has so happened that Plato's name is still connected with the ideal of pa.s.sion purged from sensuality. Much might be written about the parallel between the _mania_ of the _Phaedrus_ and the _joy_ of mediaeval amorists. Nor would it be unprofitable to trace the points of contact between the love described by Dante in the _Vita Nuova_ and the paiderastia exalted to the heavens by Plato.[160] The spiritual pa.s.sion for Beatrice, which raised the Florentine poet above vile things, and led him by the philosophic paths of the _Convito_ to the beatific vision of the _Paradiso_, bears no slight resemblance to the _Eros_ of the _Symposium_. Yet we know that Dante could not have studied Plato's works; and the specific love which Plato praised he sternly stigmatised.

The harmony between Greek and mediaeval mysticism in this matter of the emotions rests on something permanent in human nature, common alike to paiderastia and to chivalrous enthusiasm for woman.

It would be well worth raising here the question whether there was not something special both in the Greek consciousness itself, and also in the conditions under which it reached maturity, which justified the Socratic attempt to idealise paiderastia. Placed upon the borderland of barbarism, divided from the Asiatic races by an acute but narrow line of demarcation, the Greeks had arrived at the first free notion of the spirit in its disentanglement from matter and from symbolism. But this notion of the spirit was still aesthetic, rather than strictly ethical or rigorously scientific. In the Greek G.o.ds, intelligence is perfected and character is well defined; but these G.o.ds are always concrete persons, with corporeal forms adapted to their spiritual essence. The interpenetration of spiritual and corporeal elements in a complete personality, the transfusion of intellectual and emotional faculties throughout a physical organism exactly suited to their adequate expression, marks Greek religion and Greek art. What the Greeks wors.h.i.+pped in their ritual, what they represented in their sculpture, was always personality--the spirit and the flesh in amity and mutual correspondence; the spirit burning through the flesh and moulding it to individual forms; the flesh providing a fit dwelling for the spirit which controlled and fas.h.i.+oned it. Only philosophers, among the Greeks, attempted to abstract the spirit as a self-sufficient, independent, conscious ent.i.ty; and these philosophers were few, and what they wrote or spoke had little direct influence upon the people. This being the mental att.i.tude of the Greek race, it followed as a necessity that their highest emotional aspirations, their purest personal service, should be devoted to clear and radiant incarnations of the spirit in a living person. They had never been taught to regard the body with a sense of shame, but rather to admire it as the temple of the spirit, and to accept its needs and instincts with natural acquiescence. Male beauty disengaged for them the pa.s.sion it inspired from service of domestic, social, civic duties. The female form aroused desire, but it also suggested maternity and obligations of the household. The male form was the most perfect image of the deity, self-contained, subject to no necessities of impregnation, determined in its action only by the laws of its own reason and its own volition.

Quite a different order of ideas governed the ideal adopted by mediaeval chivalry. The spirit in its self-sufficingness, detached from the body, antagonistic to the body, had been divinised by Christianity. Woman, regarded as a virgin and at the same time a mother, the maiden-mother of G.o.d made man, had been exalted to the throne of heaven. The wors.h.i.+p of woman became, by a natural and logical process, the correlative in actual human life for that wors.h.i.+p of the incarnate Deity which was the essence of religion. A remarkable point in mediaeval love is that the sensual appet.i.tes were, theoretically at least, excluded from the homage paid to woman. It was not the wife or the mistress, but the lady, who inspired the knight. Dante had children by Gemma, Petrarch had children by an unknown concubine, but it was the sainted Beatrice, it was the unattainable Laura, who received the homage of Dante and of Petrarch.

In like manner, the sensual appet.i.tes were, theoretically at least, excluded from Platonic paiderastia. It was the divine in human flesh--"the radiant sight of the beloved," to quote from Plato; "the fairest and most intellectual of earthly bodies," to borrow a phrase from Maximus Tyrius--it was this which stimulated the Greek lover, just as a similar incarnation of divinity inspired the chivalrous lover. Thus we might argue that the Platonic conception of paiderastia furnishes a close a.n.a.logue to the chivalrous devotion to women, due regard being paid to the differences which existed between the plastic ideal of Greek religion and the romantic ideal of mediaeval Christianity. The one veiled sodomy, the other adultery. That in both cases the conception was rarely realised in actual life only completes the parallel.

To pursue this inquiry further is, however, alien to my task. It is enough to have indicated the psychological agreement in respect of purified affection which underlay two such apparently antagonistic ideals of pa.s.sion. Few modern writers, when they speak with admiration or contempt of Platonic love, reflect that in its origin this phrase denoted an absorbing pa.s.sion for young men. The Platonist, as appears from numerous pa.s.sages in the Platonic writings, would have despised the Petrarchist as a vulgar woman-lover. The Petrarchist would have loathed the Platonist as a moral Pariah. Yet Platonic love, in both its Attic and its mediaeval manifestations, was one and the same thing.