A Problem in Greek Ethics Part 10

[173] Perhaps ten are of this sort.

[174] 8, 125, for example.

[175] 132, 256, 221.

[176] 219.

[177] 7.

[178] 17. Compare 86.

[179] Ed. Kayser, pp. 343-366.

[180] It is worth comparing the letters of Philostratus with those of Alciphron, a contemporary of Lucian. In the latter there is no hint of paiderastia. The life of parasites, grisettes, lorettes, and young men about town at Athens is set forth in imitation probably of the later comedy. Athens is shown to have been a Paris _a la Murger_.

[181] See the introduction by Marcus Aurelius to his _Meditations_.

[182] See quotations in Rosenbaum, 119-140.

[183] See Athen., xii. 517, for an account of their grotesque sensuality.

[184] The following pa.s.sage may be extracted from a letter of Winckelmann (see Pater's _Studies in the History of the Renaissance_, p.

162): "As it is confessedly the beauty of man which is to be conceived under one general idea, so I have noticed that those who are observant of beauty only in women, and are moved little or not at all by the beauty of men, seldom have an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for beauty in art. To such persons the beauty of Greek art will ever seem wanting, because its supreme beauty is rather male than female." To this I think we ought to add that, while it is true that "the supreme beauty of Greek art is rather male than female," this is due not so much to any pa.s.sion of the Greeks for male beauty as to the fact that the male body exhibits a higher organisation of the human form than the female.