Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/300

 Might I but become blind for everything else, keeping my eyes only for beholding Klinias! Night and sleep irritate me, because in them I cannot see Klinias; while beyond all measure do I give thanks for the sun, for the day, which show Klinias to me again!"

Greek writers were rarely gross, even when. personal. The Hellene, at home or in his colonial environment seldom approached vulgarity in æsthetics. One can linger over the examples of his pederastic loves; so refined the speech, and in such sympathy with Nature; ever sounding the psychic note, even when explicitly uttering the praise of physical loveliness in male youth. For the Roman, a descent to the literary obscene was easy. We have no Latin Pindar or Meleager. Even Hierocles and Philagre were not Martialesque.

Lucian of Samosata in many of the "Dialogues of the Dead" touches gaily and gracefully, ironically and slyly,, on the homosexual loves of the gods and heroes. It is to the last-named authour, so prolific, brilliant and charming, that we owe the- most important and interesting of all classic discussions of male-to-male love, when to be considered apart from philosophical theorizings. This is Lucian's long dialogue (which is also occasionally attributed to Aristhetenes) "Love": an-argument between Charicles a handsome heterosexual of Corinth, and Kallicratides the Athenian homosexual, as to which of "the two kinds" of sexual love is the most honourable and æsthetic. The discussion closes with the victory given by the umpire to the boy-lover. In this disquisition we find Lucian citing two lines by an unknown poet, suggesting that the tie between Achilles and Patroclus was sexual as well as less ardently psychical: