Part 8

Upon a topic of great difficulty, which is, however, inseparable from the subject-matter of this inquiry, I shall not attempt to do more than to offer a few suggestions. This is the relation of paiderastia to Greek art. Whoever may have made a study of antique sculpture will not have failed to recognise its healthy human tone, its ethical rightness. There is no partiality for the beauty of the male sex, no endeavour to reserve for the masculine deities the nobler attributes of man's intellectual and moral nature, no extravagant attempt to refine upon masculine qualities by the blending of feminine voluptuousness. Aphrodite and Artemis hold their place beside Erôs and Hermes. Ares is less distinguished by the genius lavished on him than Athene. Hera takes rank with Zeus, the Nymphs with the Fauns, the Muses with Apollo. Nor are even the minor statues, which belong to decorative rather than high art, noticeable for the attribution of sensual beauties to the form of boys. This, which is certainly true of the best age, is, with rare exceptions, true of all the ages of Greek plastic art. No prurient effeminacy degraded, deformed, or unduly confounded, the types of sex idealised in sculpture.

The first reflection which must occur to even prejudiced observers, is that paiderastia did not corrupt the Greek imagination to any serious extent. The license of Paganism found appropriate expression in female forms, but hardly touched the male; nor would it, I think, be possible to demonstrate that obscene works of painting or of sculpture were provided for paiderastic sensualists similar to those pornographic objects which fill the reserved cabinet of the Neapolitan Museum. Thus, the testimony of Greek art might be used to confirm the asseveration of Greek literature, that among free men, at least, and gentle, this passion tended even to purify feelings which, in their lust for women, verged on profligacy. For one androgynous statue of Hermaphroditus or Dionysus there are at least a score of luxurious Aphrodites and voluptuous Bacchantes. Erôs himself, unless he is portrayed according to the Roman type of Cupid, as a mischievous urchin, is a youth whose modesty is no less noticeable than his beauty. His features are not unfrequently shadowed with melancholy, as appears in the so-called Genius of the Vatican, and in many statues which might pass for genii of silence or of sleep as well as love. It would be difficult to adduce a single wanton Erôs, a single image of this god provocative of sensual desires. There is not one before which we could say--The sculptor of that statue had sold his soul to paiderastic lust. Yet Erôs, it may be remembered, was the special patron of paiderastia.

Greek art, like Greek mythology, embodied a finely graduated half-unconscious analysis of human nature. The mystery of procreation was indicated by phalli on the Hermæ. Unbridled appetite found incarnation in Priapus, who, moreover, was never a Greek god, but a Lampsacene adopted from the Asian coast by the Romans. The natural desires were symbolised in Aphrodite Praxis, Kallipugos, or Pandemos. The higher sexual enthusiasm assumed celestial form in Aphrodite Ouranios. Love itself appeared personified in the graceful Erôs of Praxiteles; and how sublimely Pheidias presented this god to the eyes of his worshippers can now only be guessed at from a mutilated fragment among the Elgin marbles. The wild and native instincts, wandering, untutored and untamed, which still connect man with the life of woods and beasts and April hours, received half-human shape in Pan and Silenus, the Satyrs and the Fauns. In this department of semi-bestial instincts we find one solitary instance bearing upon paiderastia. The group of a Satyr tempting a youth at Naples stands alone among numerous similar compositions which have female or hermaphroditic figures, and which symbolise the violent and comprehensive lust of brutal appetite. Further distinctions between the several degrees of love were drawn by the Greek artists. Himeros, the desire that strikes the spirit through the eyes, and Pothos, the longing of souls in separation from the object of their passion, were carved together with Erôs by Scopas for Aphrodite's temple at Megara. Throughout the whole of this series there is no form set aside for paiderastia, as might have been expected if the fancy of the Greeks had idealised a sensual Asiatic passion. Statues of Ganymede carried to heaven by the eagle are, indeed, common enough in Græco-Roman plastic art; yet, even here, there is nothing which indicates the preference for a specifically voluptuous type of male beauty.

It should be noticed that the mythology of the Greeks was determined before paiderastia laid hold upon the race. Homer and Hesiod, says Herodotus, made the Hellenic theogony, and Homer and Hesiod knew only of the passions and emotions which are common to all healthy semi-civilised humanity. The artists, therefore, found in myths and poems subject-matter which imperatively demanded a no less careful study of the female than of the male form; nor were beautiful women wanting. Great cities placed their maidens at the disposition of sculptors and painters for the modelling of Aphrodite. The girls of Sparta in their dances suggested groups of Artemis and Oreads. The Hetairai of Corinth presented every detail of feminine perfection freely to the gaze. Eyes accustomed to the "dazzling vision" of a naked athlete were no less sensitive to the virginal veiled grace of the Athenian Canephoroi. The temples of the female deities had their staffs of priestesses, and the oracles their inspired prophetesses. Remembering these facts, remembering also what we read about Æolian ladies who gained fame by poetry, there is every reason to understand how sculptors found it easy to idealise the female form. Nor need we imagine, because Greek literature abounds in references to paiderastia, and because this passion played an important part in Greek history, that therefore the majority of the race were not susceptible in a far higher degree to female charms. On the contrary, our best authorities speak of boy-love as a characteristic which distinguished warriors, gymnasts, poets, and philosophers from the common multitude. As far as regards artists, the anecdotes which are preserved about them turn chiefly upon their preference for women. For one tale concerning the Pantarkes of Pheidias, we have a score relating to the Campaspe of Apelles and the Phryne of Praxiteles.

It may be judged superfluous to have proved that the female form was idealised in sculpture by the Hellenes at least as nobly as the male; nor need we seek elaborate reasons why paiderastia left no perceptible stain upon the art of a race distinguished before all things by the reserve of good taste. At the same time, there can be no reasonable doubt that the artistic temperament of the Greeks had something to do with its wide diffusion and many sided development. Sensitive to every form of loveliness, and unrestrained by moral or religious prohibition, they could not fail to be enthusiastic for that corporeal beauty, unlike all other beauties of the human form, which marks male adolescence no less triumphantly than does the male soprano voice upon the point of breaking. The power of this corporeal loveliness to sway their imagination by its unique æthetic charm is abundantly illustrated in the passages which I have quoted above from the _Charmides_ of Plato and Xenophon's _Symposium_. An expressive Greek phrase, "Youths in their prime of adolescence, but not distinguished by a special beauty," recognises the persuasive influence, separate from that of true beauty, which belongs to a certain period of masculine growth. The very evanescence of this "bloom of youth" made it in Greek eyes desirable, since nothing more clearly characterises the poetic myths which adumbrate their special sensibility than the pathos of a blossom that must fade. When distinction of feature and symmetry of form were added to this charm of youthfulness, the Greeks admitted, as true artists are obliged to do, that the male body displays harmonies of proportion and melodies of outline more comprehensive, more indicative of strength expressed in terms of grace, than that of women.[184] I guard myself against saying--more seductive to the senses, more soft, more delicate, more undulating. The superiority of male beauty does not consist in these attractions, but in the symmetrical development of all the qualities of the human frame, the complete organisation of the body as the supreme instrument of vital energy. In the bloom of adolescence the elements of feminine grace, suggested rather than expressed, are combined with virility to produce a perfection which is lacking to the mature and adult excellence of either sex. The Greek lover, if I am right in the idea which I have formed of him, sought less to stimulate desire by the contemplation of sensual charms than to attune his spirit with the spectacle of strength at rest in suavity. He admired the chastened lines, the figure slight but sinewy, the limbs well-knit and flexible, the small head set upon broad shoulders, the keen eyes, the austere reins, and the elastic movement of a youth made vigorous by exercise. Physical perfection of this kind suggested to his fancy all that he loved best in moral qualities. Hardihood, self-discipline, alertness of intelligence, health, temperance, indomitable spirit, energy, the joy of active life, plain living and high thinking--these qualities the Greeks idealised, and of these, "the lightning vision of the darling," was the living incarnation. There is plenty in their literature to show that paiderastia obtained sanction from the belief that a soul of this sort would be found within the body of a young man rather than a woman. I need scarcely add that none but a race of artists could be lovers of this sort, just as none but a race of poets were adequate to apprehend the chivalrous enthusiasm for woman as an object of worship.

The morality of the Greeks, as I have tried elsewhere to prove, was æsthetic. They regarded humanity as a part of a good and beautiful universe, nor did they shrink from any of their normal instincts. To find the law of human energy, the measure of man's natural desires, the right moment for indulgence and for self-restraint, the balance which results in health, the proper limit for each several function which secures the harmony of all, seem to them the aim of ethics. Their personal code of conduct ended in "modest self-restraint:" not abstention, but selection and subordination ruled their practice. They were satisfied with controlling much that more ascetic natures unconditionally suppress. Consequently, to the Greeks, there was nothing at first sight criminal in paiderastia. To forbid it as a hateful and unclean thing did not occur to them. Finding it within their hearts, they chose to regulate it, rather than to root it out. It was only after the inconveniences and scandals to which paiderastia gave rise had been forced upon their notice, that they felt the visitings of conscience and wavered in their fearless attitude.

In like manner, the religion of the Greeks was æsthetic. They analysed the world of objects and the soul of man, unconsciously perhaps, but effectively, and called their generalisations by the names of gods and goddesses. That these were beautiful and filled with human energy was enough to arouse in them the sentiments of worship. The notion of a single Deity who ruled the human race by punishment and favour, hating certain acts while he tolerated others--in other words, a God who idealised one part of man's nature to the exclusion of the rest--had never passed into the sphere of Greek conceptions. When, therefore, paiderastia became a fact of their consciousness, they reasoned thus: If man loves boys, God loves boys also. Homer and Hesiod forgot to tell us about Ganymede and Hyacinth and Hylas. Let these lads be added to the list of Danaë and Semele and Io. Homer told us that, because Ganymede was beautiful, Zeus made him the serving-boy of the immortals. We understand the meaning of that tale. Zeus loved him. The reason why he did not leave him here on earth like Danaë was that he could not beget sons upon his body and people the earth with heroes. Do not our wives stay at home and breed our children? "Our favourite youths" are always at our side.

XIX.

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.

XX.

Greece merged into Rome; but, though the Romans aped the arts and manners of the Greeks, they never truly caught the Hellenic spirit. Even Virgil only trod the court of the Gentiles of Greek culture. It was not, therefore, possible that any social custom so peculiar as paiderastia should flourish on Latin soil. Instead of Cleomenes and Epameinondas, we find at Rome, Nero, the bride of Sporus, and Commodus the public prostitute. Alcibiades is replaced by the Mark Antony of Cicero's _Philippic_. Corydon, with artificial notes, takes up the song of Ageanax. The melodies of Meleager are drowned in the harsh discords of Martial. Instead of love, lust was the deity of the boy-lover on the shores of Tiber.

In the first century of the Roman Empire, Christianity began its work of reformation. When we estimate the effect of Christianity, we must bear in mind that the early Christians found Paganism disorganised and humanity rushing to a precipice of ruin. Their first efforts were directed toward checking the sensuality of Corinth, Athens, Rome, the capitals of Syria and Egypt. Christian asceticism, in the corruption of the Pagan systems, led logically to the cloister and the hermitage. The component elements of society had been disintegrated by the Greeks in their decadence, and by the Romans in their insolence of material prosperity. To the impassioned followers of Christ, nothing was left but separation from nature, which had become incurable in its monstrosity of vices. But the convent was a virtual abandonment of social problems.

From this policy of despair, this helplessness to cope with evil, and this hopelessness of good on earth, emerged a new and nobler synthesis, the merit of which belongs in no small measure to the Teutonic converts to the Christian faith. The Middle Ages proclaimed, through chivalry, the truth, then for the first time fully apprehended, that woman is the mediating and ennobling element in human life. Not in escape into the cloister, not in the self-abandonment to vice, but in the fellow-service of free men and women must be found the solution of social problems. The mythology of Mary gave religious sanction to the chivalrous enthusiasm; and a cult of woman sprang into being, to which, although it was romantic and visionary, we owe the spiritual basis of our domestic and civil life. The _modus vivendi_ of the modern world was found.

FINIS.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Compare the fine rhetorical passage in Max. Tyr., _Dissert._, xxiv. 8, ed. Didot, 1842.

[2] i. 135.

[3] Numerous localities, however, claimed this distinction. See Ath., xiii. 601. Chalkis in Euboea, as well as Crete, could show the sacred spot where the mystical assumption of Ganymede was reported to have happened.

[4] _Laws_, i. 636. Cp. _Timæus_, quoted by Ath., p. 602. Servius, _ad Aen._ x, 325, says that boy-love spread from Crete to Sparta, and thence through Hellas, and Strabo mentions its prevalence among the Cretans (x. 483). Plato (Rep. v. 452) speaks of the Cretans as introducing naked athletic sports.

[5] _Laws_, viii. 863.

[6] See Ath., xiii. 602. Plutarch, in the Life of Pelopidas (Clough, vol. ii. p. 219), argues against this view.

[7] See Rosenbaum, _Lustseuche im Alterthume_, p. 118.

[8] Max. Tyr., _Dissert._, ix.

[9] See Sismondi, vol. ii. p. 324, Symonds, _Renaissance in Italy_, _Age of the Despots_, p. 435; Tardieu, _Attentats aux Moeurs_, _Les Ordures de Paris_; Sir R. Burton's _Terminal Essay_ to the "Arabian Nights;" Carlier, _Les Deux Prostitutions_, etc.

[10] I say almost, because something of the same sort appeared in Persia at the time of Saadi.

[11] Plato, in the _Phædrus_, the _Symposium_, and the _Laws_, is decisive on the mixed nature of paiderastia.

[12] Theocr., _Paidika_, probably an Æolic poem of much older date.

[13] _Phædrus_, p. 252, Jowett's translation.

[14] Page 178, Jowett.

[15] Clough, vol. ii. p. 218.

[16] Book vii. 4, 7.

[17] We may compare a passage from the _Symposium_ ascribed to Xenophon, viii. 32.

[18] Page 182, Jowett.

[19] Plutarch, _Eroticus_, cap. xvii. p. 791, 40, Reiske.

[20] Lang's translation, p. 63.

[21] See Athenæus, xiii. 602, for the details.

[22] See Athenæus, xiii. 602, who reports an oracle in praise of these lovers.

[23] Ar., _Pol._, ii. 9.

[24] See Theocr. _Aïtes_ and the _Scholia_.

[25] See Plutarch's _Eroticus_, 760, 42, where the story is reported on the faith of Aristotle.

[26] _Pelopidas_, Clough's trans., vol. ii. 218.

[27] Cap. xvi. p. 760, 21.

[28] Cap. xxiii. p. 768, 53. Compare Max. Tyr., _Dissert._, xxiv. 1. See too the chapter on Tyrannicide in Ar. Pol., viii. (v.) 10.

[29] Clough's trans., vol. v. p. 118.

[30] _Hellenics_, bk. ix. cap. xxvi.

[31] Suidas, under the heading _Paidika_, tells of two lovers who both died in battle, fighting each to save the other.

[32] See, for example, _Æschines against Timarchus_, 59.

[33] Trans. by Sir G. C. Lewis, vol. ii. pp. 309-313.

[34] _Symp._ 182 A.

[35] i. 132.

[36] _De Rep._, iv. 4.

[37] I need hardly point out the parallel between this custom and the marriage customs of half-civilised communities.

[38] The general opinion of the Greeks with regard to the best type of Dorian love is well expressed by Maximus Tyrius, _Dissert._, xxvi. 8. "It is esteemed a disgrace to a Cretan youth to have no lover. It is a disgrace for a Cretan youth to tamper with the boy he loves. O custom, beautifully blent of self-restraint and passion! The man of Sparta loves the lad of Lacedæmon, but loves him only as one loves a fair statue; and many love one, and one loves many."

[39] _Laws_, i. 636.

[40] _Pol._, ii. 7, 4.

[41] Lib. 13,602, E.

[42] It is not unimportant to note in this connection that paiderastia of no ignoble type still prevails among the Albanian mountaineers.