Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

ATTIc TRAGEDY

of boyishness, that they made him leader of the dances of the boys, naked and with the lyre in his hand (see the yévos LodokdAcovs, and Ath., i, 20). Achilles, the dazzling hero of the Jad, meets us as a beautiful boy in the piece called the Lovers of Achilles, which was probably a satyric drama. It seems probable that the scene of this drama, of which only a few scanty fragments are preserved, was the summit of Pelion or the cave of Cheiron, the famous centaur and tutor of the heroes. The beauty of the boy can be judged by the line: “‘ He hurls glances from his eyes, which wound like spears ’’ (Sophocles, frag. 161). A longer fragment (Soph., frag. 153) of nine lines compares love to a snowball, which melts in the hand of the boys at play. It may be conjectured that Cheiron thereby alludes to his uncertain longing for the boy. Lastly, Thetis fetches her son away from his tutor (Soph., frag. 157, where 7a 7adued is used in an erotic sense), and the satyrs endeavour to console Cheiron for the loss of the loved one. Probably also the satyrs, who formed the Chorus, appeared as lovers of the boy; it has been conjectured that they finally had to withdraw “‘ deceived and tamed ”’. Troilus, known from the Iliad (xxiv, 257), the delicate son of Priam about whose youthful beauty the tragedian Phrynichus has already waxed enthusiastic, appears as the favourite of Achilles in a drama by Sophocles of the same name. All we know of the subject of this piece is that Achilles killed his favourite by mistake during some gymnastic exercises. He was consequently as unfortunate as Apollo, who killed Hyancinthus, the boy whom he dearly loved, by an unlucky accident when hurling the discus. Achilles lamented his death ; a single verse has been preserved from his lament, in which Troilus is called dvSpéras, that is, a boy whose intelligence equals that of a man (Soph., frag. 562). here is no doubt moreover that obscene

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