Page:Symonds - A Problem in Greek Ethics.djvu/24

12 him through the breast, that his lover might not blush to see him wounded in the back." In order to illustrate the haughty temper of Greek lovers, the same author, in his Erotic Dialogue, records the names of Antileon of Metapontum, who braved a tyrant in the cause of the boy he loved; of Crateas, who punished Archelaus with death for an insult offered to him; of Pytholaus, who treated Alexander of Pheræ in like manner; and of another youth who killed the Ambracian tyrant Periander for a similar affront. To these tales we might add another story by Plutarch in his Life of Demetrius Poliorketes. This man insulted a boy called Damocles, who, finding no other way to save his honour, jumped into a cauldron of boiling water and was killed upon the spot. A curious legend, belonging to semi-mythical romance related by Pausanias, deserves a place here, since it proves to what extent the popular imagination was impregnated by notions of Greek love. The city of Thespia was at one time infested by a dragon, and young men were offered to appease its fury every year. They all died unnamed and unremembered except one, Cleostratus. To clothe this youth, his lover, Menestratus, forged a brazen coat of mail, thick set with hooks turned upwards. The dragon swallowed Cleostratus and killed him, but died by reason of the hooks. Thus love was the salvation of the city and the source of immortality to the two friends.

It would be difficult to multiply romances of this kind; the rhetoricians and moralists of later Greece abound in them. But the most famous of all remains to be recorded. This is the story of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who freed Athens from the tyrant Hipparchus. There is not a speech, a poem, essay, a panegyrical oration in praise of either Athenian liberty or Greek love which does not tell the tale of this heroic friendship. Herodotus and Thucydides treat the event as matter of serious history. Plato refers to it as the beginning of freedom for the Athenians. "The drinking-song in honour of these lovers, is one of the most precious fragments of popular Greek poetry which we possess. As in the cases of Lucretia and Virginia, so here a tyrant's intemperance was the occasion, if not the