Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/305

 —and declaring that when cured of this passion the elegist will dedicate a golden ex voto to Venus, in her temple.

As for Propertius, whose muse is consderably in a higher and more varied strain (except where Propertius is recording his passion for Cynthia) we find a touch of sensibility to pederastic love, more or less personal, in the charming address to his friend Gallus, who was in torment by a certain beautiful youth named Hylas. Propertius reminds Gallus that the name "Hylas" is classically an ominous one that Gallus must not let the nymphs of Rome ravish the boy from his lover; the poet proceeding to tell the story of loss of Hylas, the beloved of Hercules. Propertius also reminds a jealous friend, Demophöon, in the Twenty-Second Elegy of, the Second Book, that although he, Propertius, is so susceptible to women, still he cannot resist the charms of some handsome and sweet-voiced male actor in the theater; declaring truly that Nature makes each man with some weakness:

—a confession, not to say a predicament, that many an Uranian will echo, joyfully or ruefully, a long life through.

Of the vita sexualis of the Latin comedy writers, Plautus, Terence, we have no data. Even in their pieces, allusions to homosexualism are relatively brief, vague or insignificant. But of what very plain things of such sort were said on the Roman stage, we can judge by references; such as the odd anecdote of the free behaviour of the audience toward no less a person than Augustus (who seems to have taken the episode in the best of good humour, with that curious democracy of attitude often met in the Imperial times) when upon an actor's reciting a line describing an obscene act by a male prostitute, all the theater "burst