It is hardly necessary to follow this subject further, for enough has been said already to make its main features perfectly clear. Still less is it necessary, for our present purpose, to study the history of this emotion during the succeeding centuries. As we have already pointed out, from the end of the fifth century onwards it begins to lose its hold on the popular imagination, and ceases to be a national institution; and when next we find traces of it in literature, we see at once that its nature has entirely altered. Paederastic poetry there is enough and to spare among the Alexandrians, but it is poetry which looks strange indeed by the side of Theognis.[186] What were the causes that led to this change, a change as great as that which about this time came over the relation between man and woman—how far it was due to Persian influence, how far to the employment of professional soldiers instead of the citizen-armies of an earlier period—all these are questions of the greatest interest in themselves, but they cannot be discussed here. The fact remains that that purity and self-devotion which had been the rule in one generation became the exception in the next, and that the downward course was never again fully arrested throughout classical times.
And yet, even the most sensual of the later poets, somehow, sometimes, when speaking of this, rise to strange heights of beauty. Listen to Rhianus:
ἰξῷ Δεξιόνικος ὑπὸ χλωρῇ πλατανίστῳ
κόσσυφον ἀγρεύσας, εἷλε κατὰ πτερύγων·
χὡ μὲν ἀναστενάχων ἀπεκώκυεν ἱερὸς ὄρνις.
ἀλλ’ ἐγώ, ὦ φίλ’ Ἔρως, καὶ θαλεραὶ χάριτες,
εἴην καὶ κίχλη καὶ κόσσυφος, ὡς ἂν ἐκείνου
ἐν χερὶ καὶ φθογγὴν καὶ γλυκὺ δάκρυ βάλω.
(Anth. Pal. xii. 142.)
Listen to Meleager, the last of the Greek poets: