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

PROSE

name some writings which were more especially occupied with the subject.

Under the name of Demosthenes a treatise called Erotikos has survived, which, obviously influenced by Plato’s Phedrus, represents an enthusiastic eulogy in letter-form of a boy named Epicrates. However agreeable and worth reading this little work may be, it is, nevertheless, as philological criticism has shown, not the work of the great orator. ‘The most important homosexual prose work in ancient Greek literature is, of course, the Symposion (‘ Banquet’) of Plato, written several years after the festive meal which the tragic writer Agathon had given to his friends Socrates, Phzedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, and Aristophanes, on the occasion of his dramatic victory in 416 B.c. After the eatables had been removed and the drinking begins, on the proposal of Pheedrus the importance and power of Eros is chosen as a subject of conversation. Thus this most beautiful writing of Plato, which is so rich in colouring and so stimulatingly illustrated and profoundly treated from so many different standpoints, assumes the form of a hymn of Eros unique in the literature of the world. By means of an ingeniously invented myth, Aristophanes defines love as the search of the one half of the once uniform original man (separated in two parts by the god) for its other part. The culminating point is the speech of Socrates, who defines love as the urge for immortality, which fructifies the body of women with the seed of children and the soul of boys and youths with wisdom and virtue. In the definition of Socrates, Eros attains the highest imaginable ideal: the sensual and spiritual melt in a wonderful harmony, from which with logical accuracy the demand results, that the really good teacher must also be a good pzdophil (lover of boys), that is, that teacher and pupil must do their best by mutual love and common effort to reach the greatest perfection possible. No sooner has Socrates

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