A Problem in Greek Ethics Part 6

XIX.

s.e.xual 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 h.o.m.os.e.xual pa.s.sions 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 s.e.x, and appet.i.tive of their own s.e.x. This appears from the myth of Aristophanes in Plato's _Symposium_, which expresses in comic form their theory of s.e.xual differentiation.

There were originally human beings of three s.e.xes: 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) s.e.x, 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 h.o.m.os.e.xual pa.s.sion of female for female, and of male for male, was placed upon exactly the same footing as the heteros.e.xual pa.s.sion of each s.e.x for its opposite. Greek logic admitted the h.o.m.os.e.xual female to equal rights with the h.o.m.os.e.xual male, and both to the same natural freedom as heteros.e.xual individuals of either species.

Although this was the position a.s.sumed by philosophers, Lesbian pa.s.sion, 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 G.o.ddesses parallel to those which consecrated paiderastia among the male deities. Again, we have no recorded example, so far as I can remember, of n.o.ble friendships between women rising into political and historical prominence. There are no female a.n.a.logies to Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Cratinus and Aristodemus. It is true that Sappho and the Lesbian poetesses gave this female pa.s.sion an eminent place in Greek literature. But the aeolian women did not found a glorious tradition corresponding to that of the Dorian men. If h.o.m.os.e.xual love between females a.s.sumed the form of an inst.i.tution at one moment in aeolia, 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 h.e.l.las sufficiently accounts for the result. There was no opportunity in the harem or the zenana of raising h.o.m.os.e.xual pa.s.sion to the same moral and spiritual efficiency as it obtained in the camp, the palaestra, and the schools of the philosophers.

Consequently, while the Greeks utilised and enn.o.bled 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 a.s.sumed in modern Europe, we have only to compare Lucian's Dialogues with Parisian tales by Catulle Mendes or Guy de Maupa.s.sant. 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 s.e.xual energy, selected from the cla.s.s of meretricious _ingenues_.

There is an important pa.s.sage in the _Amores_ of Lucian which proves that the Greeks felt an abhorrence of s.e.xual inversion among women similar to that which moderns feel for its manifestation among men.

Charicles, who supports, the cause of normal heteros.e.xual pa.s.sion, argues after this wise:

"If you concede h.o.m.os.e.xual love to males, you must in justice grant the same to females; you will have to sanction carnal intercourse between them; monstrous instruments of l.u.s.t will have to be permitted, in order that their s.e.xual congress may be carried out; that obscene vocable, tribad, which so rarely offends our ears--I blush to utter it--will become rampant, and Philaenis will spread androgynous orgies throughout our harems."

What these monstrous instruments of l.u.s.t were may be gathered from the sixth mime of Herodas, where one of them is described in detail.

Philaenis may, perhaps, be the poetess of an obscene book on sensual refinements, to which Athanaeus alludes (_Deipnosophistae_, viii, 335). It is also possible that Philaenis 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, Myrtale a common wh.o.r.e, and possibly Philaenis 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 h.o.m.os.e.xual pa.s.sion 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 h.e.l.lenic 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 prost.i.tute. 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, l.u.s.t was the deity of the boy-lover on the sh.o.r.es 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 impa.s.sioned 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 n.o.bler 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 enn.o.bling 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 pa.s.sage 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 Euba, as well as Crete, could show the sacred spot where the mystical a.s.sumption of Ganymede was reported to have happened.

[4] _Laws_, i. 636. Cp. _Timaeus_, quoted by Ath., p. 602. Servius, _ad Aen._ x, 325, says that boy-love spread from Crete to Sparta, and thence through h.e.l.las, 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, _l.u.s.tseuche 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 Murs_, _Les Ordures de Paris_; Sir R. Burton's _Terminal Essay_ to the "Arabian Nights;"

Carlier, _Les Deux Prost.i.tutions_, etc.

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

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

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

[13] _Phaedrus_, 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 pa.s.sage 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 Athenaeus, xiii. 602, for the details.

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

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

[24] See Theocr. _Ates_ 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.