A Problem in Greek Ethics Author:John Addington Symonds Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: by Diphilis and Antiphanes; Ganymedes of plays of Alkaeusr Antiphanes and Eubulus. What has been quoted from Eschylus and Sophocles sufficiently establishes t... more »he fact that paiderastia was publicly received with approbation on the tragic stage. This should make us- cautious in rejecting the stories which are told about the love adventures of Sophocles.1 Athena:us calls him a lover of lads, nor is it strange if, in the age of Pericles, and while he was producing the Achilles' Loves, he should have shared the tastes of which his race approved. At this point it may be as well to mention a few illustrious names which, to the student of Greek art and literature, are indissolubly connected with paiderastia. Parmenides, whose life, like that of Pythagoras, was accounted peculiarly holy, loved his pupil Zeno. 2 Pheidias loved Pantarkes, a youth of Elis, and carved his portrait in the figure of a victorious athlete at the foot of the Olympian Zeus. 3 Euripides is said to have loved the adult Agathon Lysias, Demosthenes, and Eschines, orators whose conduct was open to the most searching censure of malicious criticism, did not scruple to avow their love. Socrates described his philosophy as the science of erotics. Plato defined the highest form of human existence to be "philosophy together with paiderastia," and composed the celebrated epigrams on Aster and on Agathon. This list might be indefinitely lengthened. XIII. Before proceeding to collect some notes upon the state of paiderastia at Athens, I will recapitulate the points which I have already attempted to establish. In the first place, paiderastia was unknown to Homer. 4 Secondly, soon after the heroic age, two forms of paiderastia appeared in Greece —the one chivalrous and martial, which received a formal organisation in the...« less