Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/208

 The first great Caesar indeed was so well-known for some of his male amours that the coarse personal taunts which they stimulated under public circumstances, and such attacks as the ribaldry of Catullus, appear never to have been challenged. Julius Caesar presents also the type of a soldier who was passively homosexual, as plain allusions indicate; and the peculiar gentleness of his temperament is significant. That he was dionistic to strong bisexuality of the impulses is pointed out by the historic charge that he was "every man's woman and every woman's man". The subjection of Pompey to homosexual (apparently quite pederastic) favourites is depicted in the account of the great warrior's passion for the young freedman Demetrius—"the person who had most influence with Pompey, a youth not without understanding, but who abused his good-fortune"—although Pompey himself often made young Demetrius less an object of odium "because he submitted without complaint to the caprices of Demetrius", allowing to the petted boy all sorts of uncivil liberties, even with formal guests.

The German and Gothic nations were not lacking in warrior uranians. The phrases of Tacitus in speaking of the Germanic tribes are familiar. The fierce regiments of the Turanian hordes that invaded the Danubian basin were homosexual; as notably the Magyar is to-day, especially as a passivist. Slavonian regiments sometimes carried about with them groups of male prostitutes, as did the ancient Scythians. The Arab, the Ottoman, the Moor and the Persian soldiery have always been male-loving. The Janissary and Mameluke regiments were distinctively pederastic. To-day the Turkish soldier rapes a handsome boy even more instinctively than he does a terrified girl, when raiding some helpless village of Macedonia or Bulgaria.