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

History OF GREEK LOVE

conversation held by Socrates with Xenophon, in which a warning is given even against kissing a youth: “ Do not beautiful boys with their kisses inspire you with something fearful, even though you cannot see it? Do you not know that that animal called Beautiful and Blooming, is much more dangerous than poisonous spiders? ‘These can only hurt by contact, but the other animal, without any contact, pours in its poison that clouds the understanding, even from a great distance, if one only looks at it. Therefore, my dear Xenophon, I advise you, when you see a beautiful boy, to take flight as rapidly as possible.” Further expressions of the same kind may be found in Kiefer.

On the other hand, it must not be concealed that Greek antiquity itself did not believe so readily in the pzdophilia of Socrates as being only of an intellectual kind; and that is the decisive point so far as we are concerned, for men living in—or so near to—the relevant time were in a very advantageous position for passing an essentially better judgment than is possible for us with our still very fragmentary knowledge. In the Clouds, certainly, the humorous comedy of Aristophanes, in which Socrates is made fun of in every conceivable way, there is no single word from which one might conclude that the master was addicted to coarsely sensual pzedophilia.

To sum up: Socrates, as a Hellene, certainly always had an open eye for boyish and youthful beauty ; intimate companionship with the ephebi was also indispensable for him; but he himself as far as possible abstained from giving any practical bodily proof of his affection. He was even capable of renouncing the sensual, since his incomparable art of regulating the souls of youths and of leading them towards the greatest possible perfection, offered sufficient compensation. ‘This power of abstinence he also sought to place before others as an ideal; that he would have required it from all

455