The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter/Greek love
III.
The soldier ordered the catamite to beslaver me with his stinking kisses.
One of the reasons which caused the learned and paradoxical Hardouin to assert that all the works which have been attributed to the ancients, with the exception of the Georgics and the Natural History of Pliny, were the compositions of monks, was doubtless the very frequent repetition of scenes of love for boys, which one notices in most of these writings: this savant was a Jesuit. But this taste is not peculiar to convents; it is to be found among all peoples and in all climates; its origin is lost in the night of the centuries; it is common in the most polished nations and it is common among savage tribes. Profound philosophers have argued in favor of it; poets have sung the objects of this sort of love in their tender and passionate compositions, and these compositions have always been the delight of posterity. What stupid or unfeeling reader can read without emotion that beautiful eclogue of Virgil where Corydon sighs his hopeless love for the beautiful Alexis? The most passionate ode of Horace is that one in which he complains of the harshness of Ligurinus. The tender Tibullus, deceived by his Marathus, brings tears to all who have hearts. The delicate Anacreon, praising his Bathylle, and the valiant Alceus giving himself up after his labors in war to sing of the dark eyes and black hair of Lycus . . . ‘‘with dark eyes and black hair beautiful.” It is not to over-civilized refinements of society which, according to certain misanthropists, degrade nature and corrupt it, that this taste is due; it is found among the south sea islanders, and the evidence of the first Spaniards attests that it was common among the hordes of American Indians before the discovery of the new world. Paw had attempted to explain this as resulting from defects in the formation of the organs of pleasure among the natives; but a peculiar cause is not sufficient explanation for a universal effect.
At the time of the Patriarchs, Greek love was so general that in the four cities, Sodom, Gomorrah, Adama, and Seboim, it was impossible to find ten men exempt from the contagion; that number would have sufficed, said the Lord, to withhold the punishment which he inflicted upon those cities.
It should be noted here that most of the assertions about the morals of the Israelites which are to be found in the Erotica Biblon of Mirabeau are either false or pure guesswork. It is a bizarre method of judging the morals of a people, that of taking their legal code and inferring that the people were accustomed to break all the laws which are forbidden by that code. Nevertheless, that is the method which the author of the Erotica Biblon adopts for portraying the morals of the Jewish people. Again, he has not even understood this code; he has believed that the law against giving one’s seed to the idol Moloch meant giving the human semen; and he is ignorant of the fact that this seed, as spoken of in the Bible, means the children and descendants. Thus it is that the land of Canaan is promised to the seed of Abraham, and the perpetuity of the reign on Sion to that of David. Moloch was a Phœnician deity, the same one to which, in Carthage, they sacrificed children; the Romans believed him to be a reincarnation of their Saturn, but Saturn was an Etruscan divinity who could never have had any connection with the Gods of Phœnicia. He (Mirabeau) has translated “those who polluted the temple” as meaning those who were guilty of some obscenity in the temple; and he does not know that the temple was “polluted” by a thousand acts, declared impure by law, and which were not obscene. The entrance of a woman into a sacred place, less than forty days after her accouchement, or the entrance of a man who had touched an impure animal, constituted a pollution of the House of the Lord. When one wishes to make a parade of erudition he should make some attempt to understand the things which he pretends to make clear to others. Or is it that this Mirabeau was merely careless?
The love of boys was so thoroughly the fashion in Greece that we have today given it the name “Greek Love.” Orestes was regarded as the “good friend” of Pylades and Patroclus as the lover of Achilles. In this taste, the Gods set the example for mortals, and the abduction of Ganymede for the service of the master of thunder, was not the least cause for annoyance given the chaste but over-prudish Juno. Lastly, Hercules was not content with the loves of Omphale and Dejanira, he also loved the beautiful Hylas, who was brought up by the nymphs,
The Greeks boasted, without blushing, of this love, which they considered the only passion worthy of men, and they did blush at loving a woman, intimacy with whom, they said, only rendered her adorers soft and effeminate. In the Dialogue of Plato, entitled “The Banquet,” which is concerned entirely with discussions of the various forms of love, they dismiss love for women as unworthy of occupying the attention of sensible men. One of the speakers, I believe it was Aristophanes, explaining the cause of this fire which we kindle in the bosoms of our loved ones, affirms that the first men were doubles which multiplied their force and their power. This, they abused and, as punishment, Jupiter struck them with lightning and separated them. By their love for each other they came together again to regain their primitive state. But the effeminates sought out only the women because they were only half men, half women; while those whose tastes were masculine and courageous wanted to become double men again.
Phedre has put into the mouth of Æsop an explanation of that love which would certainly not have been relished by the Greeks. He says that while Prometheus was occupied with modelling his man and woman, he was invited to a feast given by Jupiter, to the Gods; he came back intoxicated and, by mistake, applied the sexual parts of one to the body of the other.
For the rest, the Greeks were all in accord in their profound contempt for women. The theatrical writers, especially, who studied more particularly the general opinions and catered to them in order to obtain the applause of the public, were distinguished by their bitterness against the sex. Euripides maintained that Prometheus deserved to be chained to Mount Caucasus with the vulture gnawing at his entrails, because he had fashioned a being so pernicious and hateful as woman. The shade of Agamemnon, in the Odyssey advised Ulysses not to put any faith in Penelope and did not stop talking until he had enumerated the entire list of the vices of the sex. The first Latin authors imitated the Greeks in their invectives against women; the comedies of Plautus, especially, teem with virulent attacks upon them.
At Rome, however, the great freedom permitted to women, soon brought about other opinions in regard to them; they often played an important rôle in public and private affairs, and the men convinced themselves that, like men, women were capable of the greatest crimes and of the most heroic virtues. The noble stoicism of Arria is not the only example of courageous virtue displayed by the Roman women at a time when crowned monsters governed the empire. The young Paulina opened her veins with her husband, the philosopher, Seneca; Mallonia preferred to die in torments rather than give herself up to the odious he-goat of Capri. Who does not admire the noble independence, the conjugal love, and the matronly virtues of Agrippina, the wife of Germanicus? Moreover, men began to avow their love for women, and we have here occasion to observe the rapid progress of gallantry among the Romans. However, the love for boys was no less universally in vogue in Rome, and Cicero charges, in his letters to Atticus, that the judges who had so scandalously white-washed Clodius of the accusation of having profaned the mysteries of the “Good Goddess,” had been publicly promised the favors of the most illustrious women and the finest young men of the first families. Cæsar himself, in his early youth had yielded to the embraces of Nicomedes, King of Bithynia; moreover, after his triumph over the Gauls, on the solemn occasion when it was customary to twit the victor with all his faults, the soldiers sang: ‘‘Cæsar subdued the Gauls, Nicomedes subdued Cæsar. But Cesar who subdued the Gauls, triumphed, and Nicomedes, who subdued Cæsar did not.’’ Cato said of him that he was loved by the King, in his youth and that, when he was older, he loved the queen and, one day, in the senate, while he was dwelling on I know not what request of the daughter of Nicomedes, and recounting the benefits which Rome owed to that monarch, Cicero silenced him by replying: “We know very well what he has given, and what thou hast given him!” At last, during the time when the first triumvirate divided all the power, a bad joker remarked to Pompey: “I salute thee, O King,” and, addressing Cæsar, “I salute thee, O Queen!” His enemies maintained that he was the husband of all the women and the wife of all the husbands. Catullus, who detested him, always called him “the bald catamite,” in his epigrams: he set forth that his friendship with Mamurra was not at all honorable; he called this Mamurra “pathicus,” a name which they bestowed upon those who looked for favors among mature men or among men who had passed the stage of adolescence.
The masters of the empire never showed any hesitancy in trying and even in overdoing the pleasures which all their subjects permitted themselves. Alas! A crown is such a weighty burden! The road of domination is strewn with so many briars that one would never be able to pass down it if he did not take care that they were pressed down under the roses. The Roman emperors adopted that plan; they longed for pleasures and they took the pleasures which offered themselves without delay and in a spirit of competition. Caligula was so little accustomed to waiting that, while occupied in offering a sacrifice to the Gods, and the figure of a priest having pleased him, he did not take time to finish the sacred ceremonies before taking his pleasure of him.
A remarkable thing is that among almost all peoples, the baths are the places where the prostitution of men by their own sex is the most common. We see in Catullus that the “cinedi” (catamites), a noun which my chaste pen refuses to translate into French, haunted the baths incessantly to carry out their practices. Among the Orientals, of all modern peoples who have retained this taste most generally, this same fact holds good. It was at the bath that Tiberius, impotent through old age and debauchery, was made young again by the touch little children applied to his breasts; these children he called “little fishes,” they sucked his withered breasts, his infected mouth, his livid lips, and finally his virile parts. Hideous spectacle of a tyrant disgraced by nature and struggling against her maledictions! But in vain did he invent new pleasures, in vain did he take part in these scenes in which groups of young men by threes and fours assumed all sorts of lascivious postures, and were at the same time active and passive; the sight of these indulgences of the “sprintriæ” (for that is the name which was given them) did not enable him to resuscitate his vigor any more than the glamor of the throne or the servile submission of the senate served to mitigate his remorse.
But of all the emperors, the ones who carried their taste for young boys to the greatest lengths were, Nero, Domitian and Hadrian. The first publicly wedded the young eunuch Sporus, whom he had had operated upon so that he might serve him like a young woman. He paid court to the boy as he would to a woman and another of his favorites dressed himself up in a veil and imitated the lamentations which women were accustomed to utter on nuptial nights. The second consecrated the month of September to his favorite and the third loved Antinous passionately and caused him to be deified after death.
The most ample proof of the universality of the taste for young boys among the Romans is found in the Epithalamium of Manilius and Julia, by Catullus, and it might be cause for surprise that this has escaped all the philologists, were it not a constant thing that men frequently reading about these centuries fail to perceive the most palpable facts in their authors, just as they pass over the most striking phenomena of nature without observing them. It appears, from this epithalamium, that young men, before their marriage, had a favorite selected from among their slaves and that this favorite was charged with the distribution of nuts among his comrades, on the day, they in turn, treated him with contempt and hooted him. Here follows an exact translation of this curious bit. The favorite could not refuse the nuts to the slaves when by giving them it appeared that he owned that his master had put away his love for him.
In festal jest, from Fescennine,
Nor yet deny their nuts to boys,
He-Concubine! who learns in fine
His lordling’s love is fled.
He-Concubine! wast fain full long
With nuts to play: now pleased as thrall
Be thou to swell Talasios’ throng:
He-Concubine throw nuts.
He-whore! Thy Lord’s delight the while:
Now shall hair-curling chattel scrape
Thy cheeks: poor wretch, ah! poor and vile:—
He-Concubine, throw nuts.”
and further on, addressing the husband:
(Anointed bridegroom!) hardly fain
Hast e’er refrained; now do refrain!
O Hymen Hymenaeus io,
O Hymen Hymenaeus!
Be known to thee, but wedded wights
No more deem lawful such delights.
O Hymen Hymenaeus io,
O Hymen Hymenaeus.”
(LXI. Burton, tr.)
The Christian religion strongly prohibits this love; the theologians put it among the sins which directly offend against the Holy Ghost. I have not the honor of knowing just why this thing arouses his anger so much more than anything else; doubtless there are reasons. But the wrath of this honest person has not prevented the Christians from having their “pathici,” just as they have in countries where they are authorized by the reigning deities. We have even noticed that they are the priests of the Lord and especially the monks who practice this profession most generally amongst us. The children of Loyola have acquired well-merited renown in this matter: when they painted “Pleasure” they never failed to represent him wearing trousers. Those disciples of Joseph Calasanz who took their places in the education of children, followed their footsteps with zeal and fervor. Lastly, the cardinals, who have a close acquaintance with the Holy Ghost, are so prejudiced in favor of Greek love that they have made it the fashion in the Holy City of Rome; this leads me to wonder whether the Holy Ghost has changed His mind in regard to this matter and is no longer shocked by it; or whether the theologians were not mistaken in assuming an aversion against sodomy which He never had. The cardinals who are on such familiar terms with him would know better than to give all their days over to this pleasure if He really objected to it.
I shall terminate this over-long note with an extract from a violent diatribe against this love which Lucian puts into the mouth of Charicles. He is addressing Callicratidas, a passionate lover of young boys, with whom he had gone to visit the temple of Venus at Cnidus.
“O Venus, my queen! to thee I call; lend me your aid while I plead your cause. For everything over which you deign to shed, be it ever so little, the persuasion of your charms, reaches absolute perfection; above all, erotic discourses need your presence, for you are their lawful mother. In your womanhood, defend the cause of woman, and grant to men to remain men as they have been born. At the beginning of my discourse, I call as witness to the truth of my arguments the first mother of all created things, the source of all generation, the holy Nature of this universe, who, gathering into one and uniting the elements of the world—earth, air, fire and water—and mingling them together, gave life to everything that breathes. Knowing that we are a compound of perishable matter, and that the span of life assigned to each of us was short, she contrived that the death of one should be the birth of another, and meted out to the dying, by way of compensation, the coming into being of others, that by mutual succession we might live forever. But, as it was impossible for anything to be born from a single thing alone, she created two different sexes, and bestowed upon the male the power of emitting semen, making the female the receptacle of generation. Having inspired both with mutual desires, she joined them together, ordaining, as a sacred law of necessity, that each sex should remain faithful to its own nature—that the female should not play the male unnaturally, nor the male degrade himself by usurping the functions of the female. Thus intercourse of men with women has preserved the human race by never-ending succession: no man can boast of having been created by man alone; two venerable names are held in equal honor, and men revere their mother equally with their father. At first, when men were filled with heroic thoughts, they reverenced those virtues which bring us nearer to the Gods, obeyed the laws of Nature, and, united to women of suitable age, became the sires of noble offspring. But, by degrees, human life, degenerating from that nobility of sentiment, sank to the lowest depths of pleasure, and began to carve out strange and corrupt ways in the search after enjoyment. Then sensuality, daring all, violated the laws of Nature herself. Who was it who first looked upon the male as female, violating him by force or villainous persuasion? One sex entered one bed, and men had the shamelessness to look at one another without a blush for what they did or for what they submitted to, and, sowing seed, as it were, upon barren rocks, they enjoyed a short-lived pleasure at the cost of undying shame.
“Some pushed their cruelty so far as to outrage Nature with the sacrilegious knife, and, after depriving men of their virility, found in them the height of pleasure. These miserable and unhappy creatures, that they may the longer serve the purposes of boys, are stunted in their manhood, and remain a doubtful riddle of a double sex, neither preserving that boyhood in which they were born, nor possessing that manhood which should be theirs. The bloom of their youth withers away in a premature old age: while yet boys they suddenly become old, without any interval of manhood. For impure sensuality, the mistress of every vice, devising one shameless pleasure after another, insensibly plunges into unmentionable debauchery, experienced in every form of brutal lust.
“Whereas, if each would abide by the laws prescribed by Providence, we should be satisfied with intercourse with women, and our lives would be undefiled by shameful practices. Consider the animals, which cannot corrupt by innate viciousness, how they observe the law of Nature in all its purity. He-lions do not lust after he-lions, but, in due season, passion excites them towards the females of their species: the bull that rules the herd mounts cows, and the ram fills the whole flock of ewes with the seed of generation. Again, boars mate with sows, he-wolves with she-wolves, neither the birds that fly through the air, nor the fish that inhabit the deep, or any living creatures upon earth desire male intercourse, but amongst them the laws of Nature remain unbroken. But you men, who boast idly of your wisdom, but are in reality worthless brutes, what strange disease provokes you to outrage one another unnaturally? What blind folly fills your minds, that you commit the two-fold error—of avoiding what you should pursue, and pursuing what you should avoid? If each and all were to pursue such evil courses, the race of human beings would become extinct on earth. And here comes in that wonderful Socratic argument, whereby the minds of boys, as yet unable to reason clearly, are deceived, for a ripe intellect could not be misled. These followers of Sccrates pretend to love the soul alone, and, being ashamed to profess love for the person, call themselves lovers of virtue, whereat I have often been moved to laughter. How comes it, O grave philosophers, that you hold in such slight regard a man who, during a long life, has given proofs of merit, and of that virtue which old age and white hairs become? How is it that the affections of the philosophers are all in a flutter after the young, who cannot yet make up their minds which path of life to take? Is there a law, then, that all ugliness is to be condemned as vice, and that everything that is beautiful is to be extolled without further examination? But, according to Homer, the great interpreter of truth—‘One man is meaner than another in looks, but God crowns his words with beauty, and his hearers gaze upon him with delight, while he speaks unfalteringly with winning modesty, and is conspicuous amongst the assembled folk, who look upon him as a God when he walks through the city.’ And again he says: ‘Your beauteous form is destitute of intelligence; the wise Ulysses is praised more highly than the handsome Nireus.’ How then comes it that the love of wisdom, justice, and the other virtues, which are the heritage of the full-grown man, possess no attraction for you, while the beauty of boys excites the most vehement passion! What! should one love Phædrus, remembering Lysias, whom he betrayed? Could one love the beauty of Alcibiades, who mutilated the statues of the Gods, and, in the midst of a debauch, betrayed the mysteries of the rites of Eleusis? Who would venture to declare himself his admirer, after Athens was abandoned, and Decelea fortified by the enemy—the admirer of one whose sole aim in life was tyranny? But, as the divine Plato says, as long as his chin was beardless, he was beloved by all; but, when he passed from boyhood to manhood, when his imperfect intelligence had reached its maturity, he was hated by all. Why, then, giving modest names to immodest sentiments, do men call personal beauty virtue, being in reality lovers of youth rather than lovers of wisdom? However, it is not my intention to speak evil of distinguished men. But, to descend from graver topics to the mere question of enjoyment, I will prove that connection with women is far more enjoyable than connection with boys. In the first place, the longer enjoyment lasts, the more delight it affords; too rapid pleasure passes quickly away, and it is over before it is thoroughly appreciated; but, if it lasts, it is thereby enhanced. Would to heaven that grudging Destiny had allotted us a longer lease of life, and that we could enjoy perpetual health without any sorrow to spoil our pleasure; then would our life be one continual feast. But, since jealous Fortune has grudged us greater blessings, those enjoyments that last the longest are the sweetest. Again, a woman, from puberty to middle age, until the last wrinkles furrow her face, is worth embracing and fit for intercourse; and, even though the prime of her beauty be past, her experience can speak more eloquently than the love of boys.
“I should consider anyone who attempted to have intercourse with a youth of twenty years to be the slave of unnatural lust. The limbs of such, like those of a man, are hard and coarse; their chins, formerly so smooth, are rough and bristly, and their well-grown thighs are disfigured with hairs. As for their other parts, I leave those of you who have experience to decide. On the other hand, a woman’s charms are always enhanced by an attractive complexion, flowing locks, dark as hyacinths, stream down her back and adorn her shoulders, or fall over her ears and temples, more luxuriant than the parsley in the fields. The rest of her person, without a hair upon it, shines more brilliantly than amber or Sidonian crystal. Why should we not pursue those pleasures which are mutual, which cause equal enjoyment to those who receive and to those who afford them? For we are not, like animals, fond of solitary lives, but, united in social relations, we consider these pleasures sweeter, and those pains easier to bear, which we share with others. Hence, a common table was instituted, the mediator of friendship. When we minister to the wants of the belly, we do not drink Thasian wine, or consume costly food by ourselves alone, but in company: for our pleasures and enjoyments are increased when shared with others. In like manner, the intercourse of men with women causes enjoyment to each in turn, and both are alike delighted; unless we accept the judgment of Tiresias, who declared that the woman’s pleasure was twice as great as the man’s. I think that those who are not selfish should not consider how they may best secure the whole enjoyment for themselves, but should share what they have with others. Now, in the case of boys, no one would be mad enough to assert that this is the case; for, while he who enjoys their person reaches the height of pleasure—at least, according to his way of thinking—the object of his passion at first feels pain, even to tears, but when, by repetition, the pain becomes less keen, while he no longer hurts him, he will feel no pleasure himself. To mention something still more curious—as is fitting within the precincts of Venus—you may make the same use of a woman as of a boy, and thereby open a double avenue to enjoyment; but the male can never afford the same enjoyment as the female.
“Therefore, if you are convinced by my arguments, let us, men and women, keep ourselves apart, as if a wall divided us; but, if it is becoming for men to have intercourse with men, for the future let women have intercourse with women. Come, O new generation, inventor of strange pleasures! As you have devised new methods to satisfy male lust, grant the same privilege to women; let them have intercourse with one another like men, girding themselves with the infamous instruments of lust, an unholy imitation of a fruitless union; in a word, let our wanton Tribads reign unchecked, and let our women’s chambers be disgraced by hermaphrodites. Far better that a woman, in the madness of her lust, should usurp the nature of a man, than that man’s noble nature should be so degraded as to play the woman!