[FN#363] Glycon the Courtesan in Athen. xiii. 84 declares that “boys are handsome only when they resemble women,” and so the Learned Lady in The Nights (vol. v. 160) declares “Boys are likened to girls because folks say, Yonder boy is like a girl.” For the superior physical beauty of the human male compared with the female, see The Nights, vol. iv. 15; and the boy’s voice before it breaks excels that of any diva.
[FN#364] “Mascula,” from the priapiscus, the over-development of clitoris (the veretrum muliebre, in Arabic Abu Tartúr, habens cristam), which enabled her to play the man. Sappho (nat. B.C. 612) has been retoillée like Mary Stuart, La Brinvilliers, Marie Antoinette and a host of feminine names which have a savour not of sanctity. Maximus of Tyre (Dissert. xxiv.) declares that the Eros of Sappho was Socratic and that Gyrinna and Atthis were as Alcibiades and Chermides to Socrates: Ovid who could consult documents now lost, takes the same view in the Letter of Sappho to Phaon and in Tristia ii. 265.
Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas?
Suidas supports Ovid. Longinus eulogises the (a term applied only to carnal love) of the far-famed Ode to Atthis:—
Ille mî par esse Deo videtur * * *
(Heureux! qui près de toi pour toi seule soupire * * *
Blest as th’ immortal gods is he, etc.)
By its love symptoms, suggesting that possession is the sole cure for passion, Erasistratus discovered the love of Antiochus for Stratonice. Mure (Hist. of Greek Literature, 1850) speaks of the Ode to Aphrodite (Frag. 1) as “one in which the whole volume of Greek literature offers the most powerful concentration into one brilliant focus of the modes in which amatory concupiscence can display itself.” But Bernhardy, Bode, Richter, K. O. Müller and esp. Welcker have made Sappho a model of purity, much like some of our dull wits who have converted Shakespeare, that most debauched genius, into a good British bourgeois.
[FN#365] The Arabic Sabhákah, the Tractatrix or Subigitatrix who has been noticed in vol. iv. 134. Hence to Lesbianise ( ) and tribassare ( ); the former applied to the love of woman for woman and the latter to its mecanique: this is either natural, as friction of the labia and insertion of the clitoris when unusually developed, or artificial by means of the fascinum, the artificial penis (the Persian “Mayájang”); the patte de chat, the banana-fruit and a multitude of other succedanea. As this feminine perversion is only glanced at in The Nights I need hardly enlarge upon the subject.
[FN#366] Plato (Symp.) is probably mystical when he accounts for such passions by there being in the beginning three species of humanity, men, women and men-women or androgynes. When the latter were destroyed by Zeus for rebellion, the two others were individually divided into equal parts. Hence each division seeks its other half in the same sex, the primitive man prefers men and the primitive woman women. C’est beau, but—is it true? The idea was probably derived from Egypt which supplied the Hebrews with androgynic humanity, and thence it passed to extreme India, where Shiva as Ardhanárí was male on one side and female on the other side of the body, combining paternal and maternal qualities and functions. The first creation of humans (Gen. i. 27) was hermaphrodite (=Hermes and Venus), masculum et fminam creavit eos—male and female created He them—on the sixth day, with the command to increase and multiply (ibid. v. 28), while Eve the woman was created subsequently. Meanwhile, say certain Talmudists, Adam carnally copulated with all races of animals. See L’Anandryne in Mirabeau’s Erotika Biblion, where Antoinette Bourgnon laments the undoubling which disfigured the work of God, producing monsters incapable of independent self-reproduction like the vegetable kingdom.
[FN#367] De la Femme, Paris, 1827.
[FN#368] Die Lustseuche des Alterthum’s, Halle, 1839.