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

MaLe HOMOSEXUALITY

finished his speech, perhaps the most beautiful ever written in the Greek or any other language, than Alcibiades, coming slightly intoxicated from another banquet into the festive room, delivers the famous panegyric on Socrates, which overflows just as much with an enthusiasm glowing with passion for the beloved creature, as it lifts him up to the height of super-sensuous intellectuality and almost superhuman self-control.

By comparison with the Symposion, the Platonic dialogue Alcibiades seems colourless. It is connected with the love of Socrates for Alcibiades, the spoilt and idolized favourite of all, and develops the idea that a future counsellor of the people has first to decide with himself what is fitting and to their advantage.

The subject of the love of boys is also treated of in the Phedrus of Plato, named after the favourite of his youth. Under the towering plane-tree on the bank of the stream Ilissus, at midday, with the grasshoppers chirping around them, the dialogue takes place, which, gradually mounting higher and higher, leads at last to the Socratic definition of Eros, that pzdophilia represents the demand for the originally beautiful and the world of ideas.

Whether the Eraste (‘The Lovers’’) is rightly attributed to Plato is not yet with certainty decided. It is named after the favourite one of two boys, with whom Socrates holds a conversation on the thesis that a smattering of various knowledge is by no means synonymous with true philosophical education.

A very favourite subject in philosophical literature is the examination of the question, whether the love of a man for a woman should always be preferred to the love of a man for a boy. Of the numerous passages devoted to this problem the treatise that has come down to us under Lucian’s name, no doubt inaccurately, is to be mentioned in the first placethe Erotes: that is, the two kinds of love.

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