: The Deipnosophists; or Banquet of the Learned of Athenæus Vol. 3 (of 3) by Athenaeus Of Naucratis Yonge Charles Duke Translator - Greece Social life and customs; Civilization Greco-Roman; Dinners and dining Greece; Homosexuality Greece

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his treatise on Amatory Matters. For Melanippus and Chariton, being informed against as plotting against Phalaris, and being put to the torture in order to compel them to reveal their accomplices, not only did not betray them, but even made Phalaris himself pity them, on account of the tortures which they had undergone, so that he dismissed them with great praise. On which account Apollo, being pleased at this conduct, gave Phalaris a respite from death; declaring this to the men who consulted the Pythian priestess as to how they might best attack him. He also gave them an oracle respecting Chariton, putting the Pentameter before the Hexameter, in the same way as afterwards Dionysius the Athenian did, who was nicknamed the Brazen, in his Elegies; and the oracle runs as follows--

Happy were Chariton and Melanippus, Authors of heavenly love to many men.

The circumstances, too, that happened to Cratinus the Athenian, are very notorious. For he, being a very beautiful boy, at the time when Epimenides was purifying Attica by human sacrifices, on account of some old pollution, as Neanthes of Cyzicus relates in the second book of his treatise on Sacrifices, willingly gave himself up to secure the safety of the woman who had brought him up. And after his death, Apollodorus, his friend, also devoted himself to death, and so the calamities of the country were terminated. And owing to favouritism of this kind, the tyrants altogether forbad the fashion of making favourites of boys, and wholly abolished it. And some of them even burnt down and rased to the ground the palaestrae, considering them as fortresses hostile to their own citadels; as, for instance, Polycrates the tyrant of Samos did.

Admiring pretty legs and rosy lips;--

as AEschylus and Sophocles have openly made similar statements; the one saying, in the Myrmidons--

You paid not due respect to modesty, Led by your passion for too frequent kisses;--

and the other, in his Colchian Women, speaking of Ganymede, says--

Inflaming with his beauty mighty Jove.

But I am not ignorant that the stories which are told about Cratinus and Aristodemus are stated by Polemo Periegetes, in his Replies to Neanthes, to be all mere inventions. But you, O Cynulcus, believe that all these stories are true, let them be ever so false. And you take the greatest pleasure in all such poems as turn on boys and favourites of that kind; while the fashion of making favourites of boys was first introduced among the Grecians from Crete, as Timaeus informs us. But others say that Laius was the originator of this custom, when he was received in hospitality by Pelops; and that he took a great fancy to his son, Chrysippus, whom he put into his chariot and carried off, and fled with to Thebes. But Praxilla the Sicyonian says that Chrysippus was carried off by Jupiter. And the Celtae, too, although they have the most beautiful women of all the barbarians, still make great favourites of boys.... And the Persians, according to the statement of Herodotus, learnt from the Greeks to adopt this fashion.

But Ibycus states that Talus was a great favourite of Rhadamanthus the Just. And Diotimus, in his Heraclea, says that Eurystheus was a great favourite of Hercules, on which account he willingly endured all his labours for his sake. And it is said that Argynnus was a favourite of Agamemnon; and that they first became acquainted from Agamemnon seeing Argynnus bathing in the Cephisus. And afterwards, when he was drowned in this river, Agamemnon buried him, and raised a temple on the spot to Venus Argynnis. But Licymnius of Chios, in his Dithyrambics, says that it was Hymenaeus of whom Argynnus was a favourite. And Aristocles the harp-player was a favourite of King Antigonus: and Antigonus the Carystian, in his Life of Zeno, writes of him in the following terms:--"Antigonus the king used often to go to sup with Zeno; and once, as he was returning by daylight from some entertainment, he went to Zeno's house, and persuaded him to go with him to sup with Aristocles the harp-player, who was an excessive favourite of the king's."

The light of love doth shine in purple cheeks.

And a man from Eretria, or from Erythrae, who was a schoolmaster, answered him,--'You are a great man in poetry, O Sophocles; but still Phrynichus did not say well when he called purple cheeks a mark of beauty. For if a painter were to cover the cheeks of this boy with purple paint he would not be beautiful at all. And so it is not well to compare what is beautiful with what is not so.' And on this Sophocles, laughing at the Eretrian, said,--'Then, my friend, I suppose you are not pleased with the line in Simonides which is generally considered among the Greeks to be a beautiful one--

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