And on my bosom thou shalt sleep the long night through.
ἐπὶ δὲ στήθεος ἐννυχεύσεις. Surely no one save Sappho has touched so closely the heart of love and poetry.
IV.—The Milesian Tales
The chief characteristic of Ionian literature is a certain softness, a kind of laxity of morals corresponding to a looseness of political organisation. The Ionian man was a convinced believer in freedom—for himself; but he was by no means a believer in the discipline which alone makes freedom possible. Both in sexual matters and in politics, his desire for freedom and his desire for pleasure were constantly at cross-purposes. He wished to be independent of women; but he was not meant by nature to be a monk, and he purchased his apparent freedom by yielding to a sensuality far more degrading than that of women’s love. He wished to be independent of Persia; but he was not a born soldier, and he finally bought a pretence of autonomy by the payment of tribute to a Persian satrap, forfeiting his manhood for the sake of peace.
The Ionians were, indeed, a strange medley of qualities, and with them intellectual activity stood in sharp contrast with moral and physical sloth. They were essentially a race of city dwellers; for them the charm of the country and of nature had little attraction, and their civilisation found its most perfect expression during the seventh and sixth centuries in the splendid luxury of such towns as the Ionian Miletus, in Asia Minor, and the Achæan Sybaris, in South Italy. The two cities were closely connected by ties of trade and social intercourse, and in both places material prosperity led quickly to moral corruption, and voluptuousness became the rule of life. Like Buenos Ayres to-day, Miletus and Sybaris were trading ports founded in a new country, and the rapid growth of riches discouraged the manlier virtues. The mixture of races was a danger, the climate favoured voluptuous pleasures, and the bracing stimulus of war was, until too late, absent. The moral and sexual degradation that resulted from this unbridled pursuit of pleasure found its expression, as we have seen, in literature. The tale of Ganymede, the episode of the tricked husband in the Iliad, and the catalogue of women in Simonides, are fair samples of Ionian thought. No one of the three has any moral value; indeed, a strict Puritan would probably refuse to let them soil his lips; but they are at least decent enough to be written down in a literary form, and to pass muster, if they are not too closely examined.
There was, however, another and even less creditable class of story of which literary historians tell us little, but which, probably, was first invented in such towns as Miletus and Sybaris in the seventh and sixth centuries, during the time of their greatest prosperity—the so-called Milesian Tales. Usually circulating by word of mouth, they endured for centuries, and occasionally make a furtive appearance in history, but their significance in sexual morality has not always been appreciated. In dealing with them as literature we are confronted with a threefold difficulty: firstly, many of the most typical specimens of this style were never written down at all; secondly, most of the stories that found a footing in literature were blotted out by the righteous indignation of Christian moralists; thirdly, in the case of the few that do survive, it is neither possible nor desirable to introduce them to a modern audience. But, though they are the least estimable part of our inheritance from ancient literature, their influence on ancient morals was very great, and their tendency was so definitely to ruin any reasonable conception of sex relationships that they force themselves into notice.
Though sometimes written in prose, their natural medium was the iambic measure, invented by Archilochus, and they were meant both for a male and female audience. Iambus the jester, Pierrot, has his female counterpart in Iambë, Pierrette, who appears in the Homeric hymn to Demeter, and by her capers forces the sad goddess to smile once more. This is, perhaps, the one justification of the tales; in their more innocent form they were intended to purge away that feeling of melancholy of which, as the precursor of madness, the Greeks were so much afraid, by exciting the emotion of laughter; just as tragedy effects the same purpose by exciting the emotions of pity and fear. But this sort of humour in Athens and Ionia soon degenerated into coarseness, and Iambë, her name now changed to Baubo, as we see her in the ritual statuette, a woman sitting on a pig, played a prominent and a shameful part in the Eleusinian mysteries of Demeter. The worship of the sorrowing mother—Mater Dolorosa—was made the cloak for nameless obscenities, and the influence of religion was added to that of literature to degrade men’s conception of women. These were the sort of verses and images to which Aristotle alludes in the Seventh Book of the Politics; and this is one of the reasons for Plato’s objection to poetry; better no literature at all, he thinks, than literature degraded to these ends.
The worst type of Milesian or Sybaritic tale was definitely meant to stimulate the animal passions, and owed little to any qualities of humour or imagination. The sense of artistic fitness which the Athenians always possessed kept this kind of stories out of written literature during the great period, and confined them to the gossip of the perfumers’ and barbers’ shops. But as soon as the decadence began, these ‘Ionian poems,’ as Athenæus calls them, became a recognised branch of letters, and we hear of their chief practitioners, writers of ‘facetiæ,’ the ‘Hilarodoi,’ the ‘Simodoi,’ and the ‘Lysiodoi.’