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

EROTIC IN GREEK LITERATURE

the orator Andocides succeeded in reversing the political verdict that had been given against him ; he knew his fellow-citizens’ unruly need for beauty, and accordingly, as Plutarch (Moralia, 8356, confirmed by the inscription CIA., 553, 21) relates, he equipped, from his ample means acquired abroad by lucky business transactions, a choir of boys in a most splendid manner, and so took all hearts by storm.

We must next mention the “ erotic letter” of the orator Lysias, which Plato has inserted in his dialogue Phedrus, with the paradoxical subject that the reward of love should be given to one who does not love rather than to one who does. Other erotic letters of Lysias have also in part come down to us, and it seems as though he were the first to introduce this class of letter that later became so popular. The most famous of his speeches were those Against Eratosthenes and the speech in defence of a married man who, being outwitted most cunningly by the rascally Eratosthenes, had expiated the injury done to his honour as a husband by the murder of the adulterer.

That philosophy also grappled with the problem of love to a continuously greater extent and sought to probe the mystery of its nature, is both probable in itself and confirmed by philosophical written works. For love, as Plutarch once says, is “ a riddle hard to understand and hard to solve” (in Stobzus, Florilegium, 64, 31 5 aimypa Svoedperov Kal SvaluTov), although no doubt philosophical speculation, corresponding to the Greek attitude, busied itself with the male Eros rather than with the female Aphrodite.

Of the writings of Plato, so far as they are occupied with erotic problems, the dialogues, Charmides, Lysis, Symposion, and Phedrus will be discussed later, as they are either entirely or at least in great part devoted to the homosexual question.

As time went on interest in the problem of

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