Catullus complain of another youth, Alphenus, as "without faith, insensible, and forgetful of Catullus, the constant and the tender one"; describing Alphenus as a boy "whose seductions have carried me out of my senses, by ties of whose potency you have been boasting."
Tibullus, despite the charms of Delia, of Nemesis, of Neara, and so on, was personally and poetically a pederastic homosexual; with verses that can be painfully modern to uranians. In the Fourth Elegy of the First Book, Tibullus addresses an old terminal Priapus in a garden-alley, begging the stone god to tell him how a man as he grows older still can be attractive to boys—a problem perennially eloquent and difficult to many homosexuals. The grey statue replies with a store of good counsels—tact, shrewdness, patience, devotion, and so on; but emphasizing the common sense of one's not falling in love at all after youth ends.[1] Tibullus is incidentally told that in loving a boy one "must seek to win him by everything that thou canst do to please him—soon he will come under the yoke of thy love." We have warnings and encouragements, in Tibullian hendekasyllabics:
"Avoid thou the throng of such beautiful lads,
For theirs is the reason and right to know love.
Lo, that one shall win thee in reining his horse
Or that one when, shining, his form cleaves the wave;
By boyish assurance yon youth gains thy heart;
Another with cheeks that are soft as a girl’s.
But though he be shy to thee, standing aloof,
Anon wilt thou find how he yields to thy love.
By the patience of men even lions are tamed,
The dropping of water will soften the rock,
The sun ripens slowly cold grapes, on the hills;
Nay the very stars fall …
- ↑ The same sort of wise counsel—but to heterosexuals—is met many centuries later in Racine; where the great French dramatist of the human heart makes his grizzled Mithridates exclaim, in self-rebuke and anger:
"Ah, qu'il eût mieux valu, plus sage et plus heureux,
Et repoussant les traits d'un amour dangereux,
Ne pas laisser remplir d'ardeurs empoisonnées,
Un cœur déjà glacé par le froid des années!"
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