Page:Lovers Legends - The Gay Greek Myths.pdf/138

 LOVERS’ LEGENDS  In Petronius' Satyricon, Quartilla, a temple prostitute, quotes this proverb (Posse taurum tollere, qui vitulum sustulerit) to illustrate how the age of her lovers has kept pace with her own. Its use there, of course, makes little sense, as grown women need no justification for making love to adult men. Furthermore, the proverb is shot through with masculine imagery. Thus, coming from Quartilla in that context, it reads as a hilarious malapropism—Petronius' ironical aside on the love of adult men for others of their own kind, and on their self-justification in the face of societal disapproval. This reading is all the more plausible as the Satyricon has the love of youths as its central theme. Petronius Arbiter, The Satyricon, III.67 The saying is believed to have originally sprung from the story of Milo of Croton, thought to have lived around 500 BCE. He was said to have trained for weight-lifting by carrying a young calf on his shoulders every day from its birth until it grew to full size four years later. Then he butchered it and ate it. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 1.9; Aelian, Varia Historia, xii.22.  "Greece" was not a homogeneous nation. Local culture, language, laws, and tradition varied enormously from city to city. The area encompassed by the Greek world stretched from what is now Albania to the major islands in the Aegean Sea, North Africa, and coastal Turkey, as well as Italy and its islands. Greek culture spanned more than 2000 years. The Greeks themselves considered each region a country in its own right, and each citizen identified with, and was loyal to, his state rather than to the whole Hellenic domain. So, necessarily, what we will say about the Greeks will often be true of some areas and periods and not of others.  Such as Admetus, Hymenaeus, Phorbas the Lapith, and Hippolytus. Sergent, Hom. 262–263. This is a controversial interpretation of the myth of Kaineus, a story in which Kainis, a nymph, is loved by Poseidon. When the god encourages her to name a love-gift, she asks to become an invincible man. Ostensibly this is not a story about male love, but it has many parallels with the story of Achilles, who also "was a woman" in his youth, and with the story of Pelops, also loved by Poseidon and given manly gifts. Thus the myth calls to mind the "standard model" of pederastic initiation. Sergent, Hom. 247–249. 124