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

Malte HOMOSEXUALITY

pairs of friends, praising those who found the happiness of mutual love, ‘Theseus and Peirithous, Orestes and Pylades, Achilles and Patroclus.

Ill. The Poems of the Anthology

We have already so often had to quote by way of testimony passages from among the thousands of epigrams contained in the Codex Palatinus, that in this summary of homosexual literature only those supplementary ones need be given which furnish anything specially characteristic. ‘Thus Antistius (Anth. Pal., xi, 40): “‘ Cleodemus, Eumenes’ boy, is still small, but tiny as he is, he dances nimbly with the boys. Look! he has even girt on his hips the skin of a dappled fawn and a crown of ivy adorns his yellow hair. Make him big, O kindly Bacchus, so that thy little servant may soon lead holy dances of young men.” The epigram of Lucilius (x1, 217) strikes us as almost modern: ‘“‘ To avoid suspicion, Apollophanes married and walked as a bridegroom through the middle of the market, saymg: ° Tomorrow at once I will have a child. Then when to-morrow came he appeared carrying the suspicion instead of a child.”

The twelfth book of the Palatine Anthology, which is quite exclusively devoted to the love of youths (258 epigrams of nearly 1,300 lines altogether) bears in the MS. the title ‘‘ The boyish Muse of Straton ”’. Besides Straton, whose poems stand at the beginning and end of the collection, nineteen other poets are represented, amongst them good, indeed highsounding names; we have besides thirty-five epigrams without the name of the composer. The book may be called a hymn of Eros; the same subject over and over again, but in as many forms and endless variations as nature itself.

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