Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/299

 lad Theoxenos immortal among the group of beautiful boys loved by classic verse-makers. The Greek Anthologies are almost wholly pederastic. A large literature now lost to us, except by fragments, and a proportion tolerably extant, have offered examples of greater or lesser interest and elegance as to hellenic similisexual writers.

The Greek stage, too, became uranistic as hellenic drama took its most human phases. Lost plays of Eupolis, Eubolus, Antiphanes, Diphilos, Lycidas, Aelian, Lucian, Kratinos, either made it a special theme, or touched on it in episodes. It was a motive in dramas by Aeschylos (such as his lost "Achilles' Lovers." and "Niobe") and by Euripides. Euripides' "Hippolytus" is a subtly homosexual drama. We have no direct information as to the sexual inclinations of Aeschylos, as a man. Euripides was characterized by a special gout for women. Aristophanes makes, passim, characteristically sly allusions to a sort of morals inevitably under the eye of the great Athenian satirist. As to Sophocles, in Athenæus's "The Banqueters" Book XIII, occur anecdotes of plain sort as to his pederastic nature. Considerable information as to Greek literary homosexuals is found in "The Banqueters", the erotic memorabilia and gossip of which made Mr. W. H. Lecky term it "a book of painful interest" for those studying the theme. Lights and shadows on personalities, myths, incidents, in various periods of Grecian literary development, all tinged with uranianism are also met in Plutarch, in Xenophon, in many historians and biographists, as we have seen. Xenophon in his double, dignity of a great military leader and an authour, we know conclusively to have been personally pederastic. His vehement passion for. the beautiful boy, KliniaS is eloquently recorded by the authour of the "Anabasis" and "The Symposion," in such a self-confession as "—Now is the mere sight' of Klinias more to me than all the other beautiful things in the world of men!