[93] Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, art. ‘Amour Socratique,’ (Œuvres, vii. 81). Cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses, x. 84 sq.
In ancient Greece, also, not only homosexual intercourse but actual inversion, seems to have been very common; and although this, like every form of love, must have contained a congenital element, there can be little doubt, I think, that it was largely due to external circumstances of a social character. It may, in the first place, be traced to the methods of training the youth. In Sparta it seems to have been the practice for every youth of good character to have his lover, or “inspirator,”[94] and for every well-educated man to be the lover of some youth.[95] The relations between the “inspirator” and the “listener” were extremely intimate: at home the youth was constantly under the eyes of his lover, who was supposed to be to him a model and pattern of life;[96] in battle they stood near one another and their fidelity and affection were often shown till death;[97] if his relatives were absent, the youth might be represented in the public assembly by his lover;[98] and for many faults, particularly want of ambition, the lover could be punished instead of the “listener.”[99] This ancient custom prevailed with still greater force in Crete, which island was hence by many persons considered to be the place of its birth.[100] Whatever may have been the case originally, there can be no doubt that in later times the relations between the youth and his lover implied unchaste intercourse.[101] And in other Greek states the education of the youth was accompanied by similar consequences. At an early age the boy was taken away from his mother, and spent thenceforth all his time in the company of men, until he reached the age when marriage became for him a civic duty.[102] According to Plato, the gymnasia and common meals among the youth “seem always to have had a tendency to degrade the ancient and natural custom of love below the level, not only of man, but of the beasts.”[103] Plato also mentions the effect which these habits had on the sexual instincts of the men: when they reached manhood they were lovers of youths and not naturally inclined to marry or beget children, but, if at all, they did so only in obedience to the law.[104] Is not this, in all probability, an instance of acquired inversion? But besides the influence of education there was another factor which, co-operating with it, favoured the development of homosexual tendencies, namely, the great gulf which mentally separated the sexes. Nowhere else has the difference in culture between men and women been so immense as in the fully developed Greek civilisation. The lot of a wife in Greece was retirement and ignorance. She lived in almost absolute seclusion, in a separate part of the house, together with her female slaves, deprived of all the educating influence of male society, and having no place at those public spectacles which were the chief means of culture.[105] In such circumstances it is not difficult to understand that men so highly intellectual as those of Athens regarded the love of women as the offspring of the common Aphrodite, who “is of the body rather than of the soul.”[106] They had reached a stage of mental culture at which the sexual instinct normally has a craving for refinement, at which the gratification of mere physical lust appears brutal. In the eyes of the most refined among them those who were inspired by the heavenly Aphrodite loved neither women nor boys, but intelligent beings whose reason was beginning to be developed, much about the time at which their beards began to grow.[107] In present China we meet with a parallel case. Dr. Matignon observes:—“Il y a tout lieu de supposer que certains Chinois, raffinés au point de vue intellectuel, recherchent dans la pédérastie la satisfaction des sens et de l’esprit. La femme chinoise est peu cultivée, ignorante même, quelle que soit sa condition, honnête femme ou prostituée. Or le Chinois a souvent l’âme poétique: il aime les vers, la musique, les belles sentences des philosophes, autant de choses qu’il ne peut trouver chez le beau sexe de l’Empire du Milieu.”[108] So also it seems that the ignorance and dullness of Muhammedan women, which is a result of their total lack of education and their secluded life, is a cause of homosexual practices; Moors are sometimes heard to defend pederasty on the plea that the company of boys, who have always news to tell, is so much more entertaining than the company of women.
[94] Servius, In Vergilii Æneidos, x. 325. For the whole subject of pederasty among the Dorians see Mueller, History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, ii. 307 sq.
[95] Aelian, Varia historia, iii. 10.
[96] Mueller, op. cit. ii. 308.
[97] Xenophon, Historia Græca, iv. 8. 39.
[98] Plutarch, Lycurgus, xxv. 1.
[99] Ibid. xviii. 8. Aelian, op. cit. iii. 10.
[100] Aelian, op. cit. iii. 9. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistæ, xiii. 77, p. 601.
[101] Cf. Symonds, ‘Die Homosexualität in Griechenland,’ in Havelock Ellis and Symonds, Das konträre Geschlechtsgefühl, p. 55.