Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/436

 or merely effeminized Roman patricians; a dozen well-known princes in the Cæsarian lines; the debauched Greeks; the Italians and Frenchmen and Teutons of the Middle Ages; the long chain of Egyptian, Turkish, Persian voluptuaries; a Continental and Anglo-Saxon aristocracy to-day—furnish examples. We will not say that these types are morally or otherwise degenerates absolutely on account of their aesthetic or other cultivation. But the coincidence with it seems close. The passive sodomist in "high life" is notoriously degenerate, intellectually and morally, as has been noted above.

The complex degeneracy of Nero is extreme. How far Nero s moral abasement sprung out of his riddlesome dionid-uranian nature—was product of his original sexual instincts—is not clear. Nero's æstheticism had not enough higher intellectual counterbalances; a factor which has saved many an artist from decadence. Nero's increasing blood-lust, his indifference to murder, his use of the executioner and the assassin, of the royal command to suicide, all to get rid of inconvenient people; his slaughters of his nearest relatives and closest friends,—all these have no obvious, logical relation with Nero as a homosexual type. Enormously developed cruelty in Nero does not appear to have been essential to his sexual enjoyments. His tendency towards it seems merely a Roman liking for cruel sanguinary spectacles; a trait in many types of women, the Spanish, for instance—who adore millinery, lace, music and bull-fights. The beautiful madrilena or French méridionale, who cheers the agile "torero", who shudders with delight at bleeding men and disembowelled horses, is much the same type as the Roman lady criticizing with enthusiasm the gladiator in the arena hacking the arms and head from his adversary. Many men of the southern races which offer bisexual aspects, or are only indistinctly homosexual, are similarly feminine.