A Problem in Greek Ethics Part 5

The philosophical ideal of paiderastia in Greece, which bore the names of Socrates and Plato, met with little but contempt. Cicero, in a pa.s.sage which has been echoed by Gibbon, remarked upon, "the thin device of virtue and friends.h.i.+p which amused the philosophers of Athens."[161]

Epicurus criticised the Stoic doctrine of paiderastia by sententiously observing that philosophers only differed from the common race of men in so far as they could better cloak their vice with sophistries. This severe remark seems justified by the opinions ascribed to Zeno by Plutarch, s.e.xtus Empiricus, and Stobaeus.[162] But it may be doubted whether the real drift of the Stoic theory of love, founded on _Adiaphopha_, was understood. Lucian, in the _Amores_,[163] makes Charicles, the advocate of love for women, deride the Socratic ideal as vain nonsense, while Theomnestus, the man of pleasure, to whom the dispute is finally referred, decides that the philosophers are either fools or humbugs.[164] Daphnaeus, in the erotic dialogue of Plutarch, arrives at a similar conclusion; and, in an essay on education, the same author contends that no prudent father would allow the sages to enter into intimacy with his sons.[165] The discredit incurred by philosophers in the later age of Greek culture is confirmed by more than one pa.s.sage in Petronius and Juvenal, while Athenaeus especially inveighs against philosophic lovers as acting against nature.[166] The attempt of the Platonic Socrates to elevate, without altering, the morals of his race may therefore be said fairly to have failed. Like his Republic, his love existed only in heaven.

XVI.

Philip of Macedon, when he p.r.o.nounced the panegyric of the Sacred Band at Chaeronea, uttered the funeral oration of Greek love in its n.o.bler forms. With the decay of military spirit and the loss of freedom, there was no sphere left for that type of comrades.h.i.+p which I attempted to describe in Section IV. The philosophical ideal, to which some cultivated Attic thinkers had aspired, remained unrealised, except, we may perhaps suppose, in isolated instances. Meanwhile, paiderastia as a vice did not diminish. It only grew more wanton and voluptuous. Little, therefore, can be gained by tracing its historical development further, although it is not without interest to note the mode of feeling and the opinion of some later poets and rhetoricians.

The Idyllists are the only poets, if we except a few epigrammatists of the _Anthology_, who preserve a portion of the old heroic sentiment. No true student of Greek literature will have felt that he could strictly censure the paiderastic pa.s.sages of the _Thalysia_, _Ates_, _Hylas_, _Paidika_. They have the ring of genuine and respectable emotion. This may also be said about the two fragments of Bion which begin, _Hespere tas eratas_ and _Olbioi oi phileontes_. The _Duseros_, ascribed without due warrant to Theocritus, is in many respects a beautiful composition, but it lacks the fresh and manly touches of the master's style, and bears the stamp of an unwholesome rhetoric. Why, indeed, should we pity this suicide, and why should the statue of Love have fallen on the object of his admiration? Maximus Tyrius showed more sense when he contemptuously wrote about those men who killed themselves for love of a beautiful lad in Locri:[167] "And in good sooth they deserved to die."

The dialogue, ent.i.tled _Erotes_, attributed to Lucian, deserves a paragraph. More than any other composition of the rhetorical age of Greek literature, it attempts a comprehensive treatment of erotic pa.s.sion, and sums up the teaching of the doctors and the predilections of the vulgar in one treatise.[168] Like many of Lucian's compositions, it has what may be termed a retrospective and resumptive value. That is to say, it represents less the actual feeling of the author and his age than the result of his reading and reflection brought into harmony with his experience. The scene is laid at Cnidus, in the groves of Aphrodite.

The temple and the garden and the statue of Praxiteles are described with a luxury of language which strikes the keynote of the dialogue. We have exchanged the company of Plato, Xenophon, or aeschines for that of a Juvenalian _Graeculus_, a delicate aesthetic voluptuary. Every epithet smells of musk, and every phrase is a provocative. The interlocutors are Callicratides, the Athenian, and Charicles, the Rhodian.

Callicratides kept an establishment of _exoleti_; when the down upon their chins had grown beyond the proper point--"when the beard is just sprouting, when youth is in the prime of charm," they were drafted off to farms and country villages. Charicles maintained a harem of dancing-girls and flute-players. The one was "madly pa.s.sionate for lads;" the other no less "mad for women." Charicles undertook the cause of women, Callicratides that of boys. Charicles began. The love of women is sanctioned by antiquity; it is natural; it endures through life; it alone provides pleasure for both s.e.xes. Boys grow bearded, rough, and past their prime. Women always excite pa.s.sion. Then Callicratides takes up his parable. Masculine love combines virtue with pleasure. While the love of women is a physical necessity, the love of boys is a product of high culture and an adjunct of philosophy. Paiderastia may be either vulgar or celestial; the second will be sought by men of liberal education and good manners. Then follow contrasted pictures of the lazy woman and the manly youth. The one provokes to sensuality, the other excites n.o.ble emulation in the ways of virile living. Lucian, summing up the arguments of the two pleaders, decides that Corinth must give way to Athens, adding: "Marriage is open to all men, but the love of boys to philosophers only." This verdict is referred to Theomnestus, a Don Juan of both s.e.xes. He replies that both boys and women are good for pleasure; the philosophical arguments of Callicratides are cant.

This brief abstract of Lucian's dialogue on love indicates the cynicism with which its author viewed the subject, using the whole literature and all the experience of the Greeks to support a thesis of pure hedonism.

The sybarites of Cairo or Constantinople at the present moment might employ the same arguments, except that they would omit the philosophic cant of Callicratides.

There is nothing in extant Greek literature, of a date anterior to the Christian era, which is foul in the same sense as that in which the works of Roman poets (Catullus and Martial), Italian poets (Beccatelli and Baffo), and French poets (Scarron and Voltaire) are foul. Only purblind students will be unable to perceive the difference between the obscenity of the Latin races and that of Aristophanes. The difference, indeed, is wide and radical, and strongly marked. It is the difference between a race naturally gifted with a delicate, aesthetic sense of beauty, and one in whom that sense was always subject to the perturbation, of gross instincts. But with the first century of the new age a change came over even the imagination of the Greeks. Though they never lost their distinction of style, that precious gift of lightness and good taste conferred upon them with their language, they borrowed something of their conquerors' vein. This makes itself felt in the _Anthology_. Straton and Rufinus suffered the contamination of the Roman genius, stronger in political organisation than that of h.e.l.las, but coa.r.s.er and less spiritually tempered in morals and in art. Straton was a native of Sardis, who flourished in the second century. He compiled a book of paiderastic poems, consisting in a great measure of his own and Meleager's compositions, which now forms the twelfth section of the _Palatine Anthology_. This book he dedicated, not to the Muse, but to Zeus; for Zeus was the boy-lover among deities;[169] he bade it carry forth his message of fair youths throughout the world;[170] and he claimed a special inspiration from heaven for singing of one sole subject, paiderastia.[171] It may be said with truth that Straton understood the bent of his own genius. We trace a blunt earnestness of intention in his epigrams, a certainty of feeling and directness of artistic treatment, which show that he had only one object in view.

Meleager has far higher qualities as a poet, and his feeling, as well as his style, is more exquisite. But he wavered between the love of boys and women, seeking in both the satisfaction of emotional yearnings which in the modern world would have marked him as a sentimentalist. The so-called _Mousa Paidike_, "Muse of Boyhood," is a collection of two hundred and fifty-eight short poems, some of them of great artistic merit, in praise of boys and boy-love. The common-places of these epigrams are Ganymede and Eros;[172] we hear but little of Aphrodite--her domain is the other section of the _Anthology_, called Erotika. A very small percentage of these compositions can be described as obscene;[173] none are nasty, in the style of Martial or Ausonius; some are exceedingly picturesque;[174] a few are written in a strain of lofty or of lovely music;[175] one or two are delicate and subtle in their humour.[176] The whole collection supplies good means of judging how the Greeks of the decadence felt about this form of love. _Malakia_ is the real condemnation of this poetry, rather than brutality or coa.r.s.eness. A favourite topic is the superiority of boys over girls.

This sometimes takes a gross form;[177] but once or twice the treatment of the subject touches a real psychological distinction, as in the following epigram:[178]--

"The love of women is not after my heart's desire; but the fires of male desire have placed me under inextinguishable coals of burning.

The heat there is mightier; for the more powerful is male than female, the keener is that desire."

These four lines give the key to much of the Greek preference for paiderastia. The love of the male, when it has been apprehended and entertained, is more exciting, they thought, more absorbent of the whole nature, than the love of the female. It is, to use another kind of phraseology, more of a mania and more of a disease.

With the _Anthology_ we might compare the curious _Epistolai Erotikai_ of Philostratus.[179] They were in all probability rhetorical compositions, not intended for particular persons; yet they indicate the kind of wooing to which youths were subjected in later h.e.l.las.[180] The discrepancy between the triviality of their subject-matter and the exquisiteness of their diction is striking. The second of these qualities has made them a mine for poets. Ben Jonson, for example, borrowed the loveliest of his lyrics from the following _concetto_:--"I sent thee a crown of roses, not so much honouring thee, though this, too, was my meaning, but wis.h.i.+ng to do some kindness to the roses that they might not wither." Take, again, the phrase: "Well, and love himself is naked, and the graces and the stars;" or this, "O rose, that has a voice to speak with!"--or this metaphor for the footsteps of the beloved, "O rhythms of most beloved feet, O kisses pressed upon the ground!"

While the paiderastia of the Greeks was sinking into grossness, effeminacy, and aesthetic prettiness, the moral instincts of humanity began to a.s.sert themselves in earnest. It became part of the higher doctrine of the Roman Stoics to suppress this form of pa.s.sion.[181] The Christians, from St. Paul onwards, inst.i.tuted an uncompromising crusade against it. Theirs was no mere speculative warfare, like that of the philosophers at Athens. They fought with all the forces of their manhood, with the sword of the Lord and with the excommunications of the Church, to suppress what seemed to them an unutterable scandal. Dio Chrysostom, Clemens Alexandrinus, and Athanasius, are our best authorities for the vices which prevailed in h.e.l.las during the Empire;[182] the Roman law, moreover, proves that the civil governors aided the Church in its attempt to moralise the people on this point.

XVII.

The trans.m.u.tation of h.e.l.las proper into part of the Roman Empire, and the intrusion of Stoicism and Christianity into the sphere of h.e.l.lenic thought and feeling, mark the end of the Greek age. It still remains, however, to consider the relation of this pa.s.sion to the character of the race, and to determine its influence.

In the fifth section of this essay, I a.s.serted that it is now impossible to ascertain whether the Greeks derived paiderastia from any of the surrounding nations, and if so, from which. Homer's silence makes it probable that the contact of h.e.l.lenic with Phnician traders in the post-heroic period led to the adoption by the Greek race of a custom which they speedily a.s.similated and stamped with an h.e.l.lenic character.

At the same time, I suggested in the tenth section that paiderastia, in its more enthusiastic and martial form, may have been developed within the very sanctuary of Greek national existence by the Dorians, matured in the course of their migrations, and systematised after their settlement in Crete and Sparta. That the Greeks themselves regarded Crete as the cla.s.sic ground of paiderastia favours either theory, and suggests a fusion of them both; for the geographical position of this island made it the meeting-place of h.e.l.lenes with the Asiatic races, while it was also one of the earliest Dorian acquisitions.

When we come to ask why this pa.s.sion struck roots so deep into the very heart and brain of the Greek nation, we must reject the favourite hypothesis of climate. Climate is, no doubt, powerful to a great extent in determining the complexion of s.e.xual morality; yet, as regards paiderastia, we have abundant proof that nations both of North and South have, according to circ.u.mstances quite independent of climatic conditions, been both equally addicted and equally averse to this habit. The Etruscan,[183] the Chinese, the ancient Keltic tribes, the Tartar hordes of Timour Khan, the Persians under Moslem rule--races sunk in the sloth of populous cities, as well as the nomadic children of the Asian steppes, have all acquired a notoriety at least equal to that of the Greeks. The only difference between these people and the Greeks in respect to paiderastia is that everything which the Greek genius touched acquired a portion of its distinction, so that what in semi-barbarous society may be ignored as vice, in Greece demands attention as a phase of the spiritual life of a world-historic nation.

Like climate, ethnology must also be eliminated. It is only a superficial philosophy of history which is satisfied with the nomenclature of Semitic, Aryan, and so forth; which imagines that something is gained for the explanation of a complex psychological problem when hereditary affinities have been demonstrated. The deeps of national personality are far more abysmal than this. Granting that climate and descent are elements of great importance, the religious and moral principles, the aesthetic apprehensions, and the customs which determine the character of a race, leave always something still to be a.n.a.lysed. In dealing with Greek paiderastia, we are far more likely to reach a probable solution if we confine our attention to the specific social conditions which fostered the growth of this pa.s.sion in Greece, and to the general habit of mind which permitted its evolution out of the common stuff of humanity, than if we dilate at ease upon the climate of the aegean, or discuss the ethnical complexion of the h.e.l.lenic stock.

In other words, it was the Pagan view of human life and duty which gave scope to paiderastia, while certain special Greek customs aided its development.

The Greeks themselves, quoted more than once above, have put us on the right track in this inquiry. However paiderastia began in h.e.l.las, it was encouraged by gymnastics and syssitia. Youths and boys engaged together in athletic exercises, training their bodies to the highest point of physical attainment, growing critical about the points and proportions of the human form, lived of necessity in an atmosphere of mutual attention. Young men could not be insensible to the grace of boys in whom the bloom of beauty was unfolding. Boys could not fail to admire the strength and goodliness of men displayed in the comeliness of perfected development. Having exercised together in the wrestling-ground, the same young men and boys consorted at the common tables. Their talk fell naturally upon feats of strength and training; nor was it unnatural, in the absence of a powerful religious prohibition, that love should spring from such discourse and intercourse.

The nakedness, which Greek custom permitted in gymnastic games and some religious rites, no doubt contributed to the erotic force of masculine pa.s.sion; and the history of their feeling upon this point deserves notice. Plato, in the _Republic_ (452), observes that "not long ago the Greeks were of the opinion, which is still generally received among the barbarians, that the sight of a naked man was ridiculous and unseemly."

He goes on to mention the Cretans and the Lacedaemonians as the inst.i.tutors of naked games. To these conditions may be added dances in public, the ritual of G.o.ds like Eros, ceremonial processions, and contests for the prize of beauty.

The famous pa.s.sage in the first book of Thucydides (cap. vi.) ill.u.s.trates the same point. While describing the primitive culture of the h.e.l.lenes, he thinks it worth while to mention that the Spartans, who first stripped themselves for running and wrestling, abandoned the girdle which it was usual to wear around the loins. He sees in this habit one of the strongest points of distinction between the Greeks and barbarians. Herodotus insists upon the same point (book i. 10), which is further confirmed by the verse of Ennius: "Flagitii," &c.

The nakedness which Homer (_Iliad_, xxii. 66) and Tyrtaeus (i. 21) describes as shameful and unseemly is that of an old man. Both poets seem to imply that a young man's naked body is beautiful even in death.

We have already seen that paiderastia, as it existed in early h.e.l.las, was a martial inst.i.tution, and that it never wholly lost its virile character. This suggests the consideration of another cla.s.s of circ.u.mstances which were in the highest degree conducive to its free development. The Dorians, to begin with, lived like regiments of soldiers in barracks. The duty of training the younger men was thrown upon the elder; so that the close relations thus established in a race which did not positively discountenance the love of male for male rather tended actively to encourage it. Nor is it difficult to understand why the romantic emotions in such a society were more naturally aroused by male companions than by women. Matrimony was not a matter of elective affinity between two persons seeking to spend their lives agreeably and profitably in common, so much as an inst.i.tution used by the State for raising vigorous recruits for the national army. All that is known about the Spartan marriage customs, taken together with Plato's speculations about a community of wives, proves this conclusively. It followed that the relation of the s.e.xes to each other was both more formal and more simple than it is with us; the natural and the political purposes of cohabitation were less veiled by those personal and emotional considerations which play so large a part in modern life. There was less scope for the emergence of pa.s.sionate enthusiasm between men and women, while the full conditions of a spiritual attachment, solely determined by reciprocal inclination, were only to be found in comrades.h.i.+p. In the wrestling-ground, at the common tables, in the ceremonies of religion, at the Pan-h.e.l.lenic games, in the camp, in the hunting-field, on the benches of the council chamber, and beneath the porches of the Agora, men were all in all unto each other. Women meanwhile kept the house at home, gave birth to babies, and reared children till such time as the State thought fit to undertake their training. It is, moreover, well known that the age at which boys were separated from their mothers was tender. Thenceforth they lived with persons of their own s.e.x; their expanding feelings were confined within the sphere of masculine experience until the age arrived when marriage had to be considered in the light of a duty to the commonwealth. How far this tended to influence the growth of sentiment, and to determine its quality, may be imagined.

In the foregoing paragraph I have restricted my attention almost wholly to the Dorians: but what has just been said about the circ.u.mstance of their social life suggests a further consideration regarding paiderastia at large among the Greeks, which takes rank with the weightiest of all.

The peculiar status of Greek women is a subject surrounded with difficulty; yet no man can help feeling that the idealisation of masculine love, which formed so prominent a feature of Greek life in the historic period, was intimately connected with the failure of the race to give their proper sphere in society to women. The Greeks themselves were not directly conscious of this fact; nor can I remember any pa.s.sage in which a Greek has suggested that boy-love flourished precisely upon the special ground which had been wrestled from the right domain of file other s.e.x. Far in advance of the barbarian tribes around them, they could not well discern the defects of their own civilisation; nor was it to be expected that they should have antic.i.p.ated that exaltation of the love of women into a semi-religious cult which was the later product of chivalrous Christianity. We, from the standpoint of a more fully organised society, detect their errors, and p.r.o.nounce that paiderastia was a necessary consequence of their unequal social culture; nor do we fail to notice that, just as paiderastia was a post-Homeric intrusion into Greek life, so women, after the age of the Homeric poems, suffered a corresponding depression in the social scale. In the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, and in the tragedies which deal with the heroic age, they play a part of importance for which the actual conditions of historic h.e.l.las offered no opportunities.

It was at Athens that the social disadvantages of women told with greatest force; and this perhaps may help to explain the philosophic idealisation of boy-love among the Athenians. To talk familiarly with free women on the deepest subjects, to treat them as intellectual companions, or to choose them as a.s.sociates in undertakings of political moment, seems never to have entered the mind of an Athenian. Women were conspicuous by their absence from all places of resort--from the palaestra, the theatre, the Agora, Pnyx, the law-court, the symposium; and it was here, and here alone, that the spiritual energies of the men expanded. Therefore, as the military ardour of the Dorians naturally a.s.sociated itself with paiderastia, so the characteristic pa.s.sion of the Athenians for culture took the same direction. The result in each case was a highly wrought psychical condition, which, however alien to our instincts, must be regarded as an exaltation of the race above its common human needs--as a manifestation of fervid, highly-pitched emotional enthusiasm.

It does not follow from the facts which I have just discussed that, either at Athens or at Sparta, women were excluded from an important position in the home, or that the family in Greece was not the sphere of female influence more active than the extant fragments of Greek literature reveal to us. The women of Sophocles and Euripides, and the n.o.ble ladies described by Plutarch, warn us to be cautious in our conclusions on this topic. The fact, however, remains that in Greece, as in mediaeval Europe, the home was not regarded as the proper sphere for enthusiastic pa.s.sion: both paiderastia and chivalry ignored the family, while the latter even set the matrimonial tie at nought. It is therefore precisely at this point of the family, regarded as a comparatively undeveloped factor in the higher spiritual life of Greeks, that the two problems of paiderastia and the position of women in Greece intersect.

In reviewing the external circ.u.mstances which favoured paiderastia, it may be added, as a minor cause, that the leisure in which the Greeks lived, supported by a crowd of slaves, and attending chiefly to their physical and mental culture, rendered them peculiarly liable to pre-occupations of pa.s.sion and pleasure-seeking. In the early periods, when war was incessant, this abundance of spare time bore less corrupt fruit than during the stagnation into which the Greeks, enslaved by Macedonia and Rome, declined.

So far, I have been occupied in the present section with the specific conditions of Greek society which may be regarded as determining the growth of paiderastia. With respect to the general habit of mind which caused the Greeks, in contradistinction to the Jews and Christians, to tolerate this form of feeling, it will be enough here to remark that Paganism could have nothing logically to say against it. The further consideration of this matter I shall reserve for the next division of my essay, contenting myself for the moment with the observation that Greek religion and the instincts of the Greek race offered no direct obstacle to the expansion of a habit which was strongly encouraged by the circ.u.mstances I have just enumerated.

XVIII.

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 s.e.x, no endeavour to reserve for the masculine deities the n.o.bler 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 Eros 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 s.e.x 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 p.o.r.nographic objects which fill the reserved cabinet of the Neapolitan Museum. Thus, the testimony of Greek art might be used to confirm the a.s.severation of Greek literature, that among free men, at least, and gentle, this pa.s.sion tended even to purify feelings which, in their l.u.s.t 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. Eros 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 pa.s.s for genii of silence or of sleep as well as love. It would be difficult to adduce a single wanton Eros, a single image of this G.o.d provocative of sensual desires. There is not one before which we could say--The sculptor of that statue had sold his soul to paiderastic l.u.s.t. Yet Eros, it may be remembered, was the special patron of paiderastia.

Greek art, like Greek mythology, embodied a finely graduated half-unconscious a.n.a.lysis of human nature. The mystery of procreation was indicated by phalli on the Hermae. Unbridled appet.i.te found incarnation in Priapus, who, moreover, was never a Greek G.o.d, but a Lampsacene adopted from the Asian coast by the Romans. The natural desires were symbolised in Aphrodite Praxis, Kallipugos, or Pandemos.

The higher s.e.xual enthusiasm a.s.sumed celestial form in Aphrodite Ouranios. Love itself appeared personified in the graceful Eros of Praxiteles; and how sublimely Pheidias presented this G.o.d to the eyes of his wors.h.i.+ppers 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-b.e.s.t.i.a.l 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 l.u.s.t of brutal appet.i.te.

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 pa.s.sion, were carved together with Eros 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 pa.s.sion. Statues of Ganymede carried to heaven by the eagle are, indeed, common enough in Graeco-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 h.e.l.lenic theogony, and Homer and Hesiod knew only of the pa.s.sions 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 aeolian 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 pa.s.sion 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 mult.i.tude. 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 h.e.l.lenes at least as n.o.bly 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 aethetic charm is abundantly ill.u.s.trated in the pa.s.sages 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 s.e.x. 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 wors.h.i.+p.

The morality of the Greeks, as I have tried elsewhere to prove, was aesthetic. 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 att.i.tude.

In like manner, the religion of the Greeks was aesthetic. They a.n.a.lysed the world of objects and the soul of man, unconsciously perhaps, but effectively, and called their generalisations by the names of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses. That these were beautiful and filled with human energy was enough to arouse in them the sentiments of wors.h.i.+p. 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 G.o.d who idealised one part of man's nature to the exclusion of the rest--had never pa.s.sed into the sphere of Greek conceptions. When, therefore, paiderastia became a fact of their consciousness, they reasoned thus: If man loves boys, G.o.d 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 Danae 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 Danae 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.