VII. GREEK FRIENDSHIP

Stranger than this strange entente between prostitution and philosophy is the placid acceptance of sexual inversion. The chief rivals of the hetairai are the boys of Athens; and the courtesans, scandalized to the very depths of their pockets, never tire of denouncing the immorality of homosexual love. Merchants import handsome lads to be sold to the highest bidder, who will use them first as concubines and later as slaves;⁸⁰ and only a negligible minority of males think it amiss that the effeminate young aristocrats of the city should arouse and assuage the ardor of aging men. In this matter of genders Sparta is as careless as Athens; when Alcman wishes to compliment some girls he calls them his “female boy-friends.”⁸¹ Athenian law disfranchises those who receive homosexual attentions,⁸² but public opinion tolerates the practice humorously; in Sparta and Crete no stigma of any kind is attached to it;⁸³ in Thebes it is accepted as a valuable source of military organization and bravery. The greatest heroes in the fond remembrance of Athens are Harmodius and Aristogeiton, tyrannicides and lovers; the most popular in Athens in his day is Alcibiades, who boasts of the men who love him; as late as Aristotle “Greek lovers” plight their troth at the tomb of Iolaus, comrade of Heracles;⁸⁴ and Aristippus describes Xenophon, leader of armies and hardheaded man of the world, as infatuated with young Cleinias.⁸⁵ The attachment of a man to a boy, or of a boy to a boy, shows in Greece all the symptoms of romantic love—passion, piety, ecstasy, jealousy, serenading, brooding, moaning, and sleeplessness.⁸⁶ When Plato, in the Phaedrus, talks of human love, he means homosexual love; and the disputants in his Symposiumagree on one point—that love between man and man is nobler and more spiritual than love between man and woman.⁸⁷ A similar inversion appears among the women, occasionally among the finest, as in Sappho, frequently among the courtesans; the auletrides love one another more passionately than they love their patrons, and the pornaiaare hothouses of Lesbian romance.⁸⁸

How shall we explain the popularity of this perversion in Greece? Aristotle attributes it to fear of overpopulation,⁸⁹ and this may account for part of the phenomenon; but there is obviously a connection between the prevalence of both homosexuality and prostitution in Athens, and the seclusion of women. After the age of six the boys of Periclean Athens are taken from the gynaeceum in which respectable women spend their lives, and are brought up chiefly in companionship with other boys, or men; little opportunity is given them, in their formative and almost neutral period, to know the attractiveness of the tender sex. The life of the common mess hall in Sparta, of the agora, gymnasium, ‘and palaestra in Athens, and the career of the ephebos, show the youth only the male form; even art does not announce the physical beauty of woman until Praxiteles. In married life the men seldom find mental companionship at home; the rarity of education among women creates a gulf between the sexes, and men seek elsewhere the charms that they have not permitted their wives to acquire. To the Athenian citizen his home is not a castle but a dormitory; from morning to evening, in a great number of cases, he lives in the city, and rarely has social contacts with respectable women other than his wife and daughters. Greek society is unisexual, and misses the disturbance, grace, and stimulation that the spirit and charm of women will give to Renaissance Italy and Enlightenment France.