Page:Symonds - A Problem in Greek Ethics.djvu/41

Rh the Greek notion that love was an effluence from the beloved person through the eyes into the lover's soul, while Stobæus quotes the beautiful simile by which love is compared to a piece of ice held in the hand by children. Another play of Sophocles, the Niobe, is alluded to by Plutarch and by Athenæus for the paiderastia which it contained. Plutarch's words are these: "When the children of Niobe, in Sophocles, are being pierced and dying, one of them cries out, appealing to no other rescuer or ally than his lover: Ho! comrade, up and aid me!" Finally, Athenæus quotes a single line from the Colchian Women of Sophocles, which alludes to Ganymede, and runs as follows: "Inflaming with his thighs the royalty of Zeus."

Whether Euripides treated paiderastia directly in any of his plays is not quite certain, though the title Chrysippus, and one fragment preserved from that tragedy—

justify us in believing that he made the crime of Laius his subject. It may be added that a passage in Cicero confirms this belief. The title of another tragedy, Peirithous, seems in like manner to point at friendship; while a beautiful quotation from the Dictys sufficiently indicates the high moral tone assumed by Euripides in treating of Greek love. It runs as follows:—"He was my friend; and never may love lead me to folly, nor to Kupris. There is, in truth, another kind of love—love for the soul, righteous, temperate, and good. Surely men ought to have made this law, that only the temperate and chaste should love and send Kupris, daughter of Zeus, a-begging." The philosophic ideal of comradeship is here vitalised by the dramatic vigour of the poet; nor has the Hellenic conception of pure affection for "a soul, just, upright, temperate and good," been elsewhere more pithily expressed. The Euripidean conception of friendship, it may further be observed, is nobly personified in Pylades, who plays a generous and self-devoted part in the three tragedies of Electra, Orestes, and Iphigenia in Tauris.

Having collected these notices of tragedies which dealt with boy-love, it may be well to add a word upon comedies in the same relation. We hear of a Paidika by Sophron, a Malthakoi by the older Cratinus, a Baptæ by Empolis, in which Alcibiades and his society were satirised. Paiderastes is the title of plays