"You all tell me," he argued, "that I am beautiful, and I cannot but believe you; but if I am, and if you feel what I feel when I look on Cleinias, I think that beauty is better worth having than all Persia. I would choose to be blind to everybody else if I could only see Cleinias, and I hate the night because it robs me of his sight. I would rather be the slave of Cleinias than live without him; I would rather toil and suffer danger for his sake than live alone at ease and in safety. I would go through fire with him, as you would with me. In my soul I carry an image of him better made than any sculptor could fashion."
What makes this speech the more singular is that Critobulus was a newly-married man.
But to return from this digression to the palæstra. The Greeks were conscious that gymnastic exercises tended to encourage and confirm the habit of paiderastia. "The cities which have most to do with gymnastics," is the phrase which Plato uses to describe the states where Greek love flourished.[1] Herodotus says the barbarians borrowed gymnastics together with paiderastia from the Hellenes; and we hear that Polycrates of Samos caused the gymnasia to be destroyed when he wished to discountenance the love which lent the warmth of personal enthusiasm to political associations.[2] It was common to erect statues of love in the wrestling-grounds; and there, says Plutarch,[3] the god's wings grew so wide that no man could restrain his flight. Readers of the idyllic poets will remember that it was a statue of Love which fell from its pedestal in the swimming-bath upon the cruel boy who had insulted the body of his self-slain friend.[4] Charmus, the lover of Hippias, erected an image of Erôs in the academy at Athens which bore this epigram:—
"Love, god of many evils and various devices, Charmus set up this altar to thee upon the shady boundaries of the gymnasium."[5]
Erôs, in fact, was as much at home in the gymnasia of Athens as Aphrodite in the temples of Corinth; he was the patron of paiderastia, as she of female love. Thus Meleager writes:—
"The Cyprian queen, a woman, hurls the fire that maddens men for females; but Erôs himself sways the love of males for males."[6]
Plutarch, again, in the Erotic dialogue, alludes to "Erôs, where Aphrodite is not; Erôs apart from Aphrodite." These facts
