This brief abstract of Lucian's dialogue on love indicates the cynicism with which its author viewed the subject, using the whole literature and all the experience of the Greeks to support a thesis of pure hedonism. The sybarites of Cairo or Constantinople at the present moment might employ the same arguments, except that they would omit the philosophic cant of Callicratides.
There is nothing in extant Greek literature, of a date anterior to the Christian era, which is foul in the same sense as that in which the works of Roman poets (Catullus and Martial), Italian poets (Beccatelli and Baffo), and French poets (Scarron and Voltaire) are foul. Only purblind students will be unable to perceive the difference between the obscenity of the Latin races and that of Aristophanes. The difference, indeed, is wide and radical, and strongly marked. It is the difference between a race naturally gifted with a delicate, æsthetic sense of beauty, and one in whom that sense was always subject to the perturbation, of gross instincts. But with the first century of the new age a change came over even the imagination of the Greeks. Though they never lost their distinction of style, that precious gift of lightness and good taste conferred upon them with their language, they borrowed something of their conquerors' vein. This makes itself felt in the _Anthology_. Straton and Rufinus suffered the contamination of the Roman genius, stronger in political organisation than that of Hellas, but coarser and less spiritually tempered in morals and in art. Straton was a native of Sardis, who flourished in the second century. He compiled a book of paiderastic poems, consisting in a great measure of his own and Meleager's compositions, which now forms the twelfth section of the _Palatine Anthology_. This book he dedicated, not to the Muse, but to Zeus; for Zeus was the boy-lover among deities;[169] he bade it carry forth his message of fair youths throughout the world;[170] and he claimed a special inspiration from heaven for singing of one sole subject, paiderastia.[171] It may be said with truth that Straton understood the bent of his own genius. We trace a blunt earnestness of intention in his epigrams, a certainty of feeling and directness of artistic treatment, which show that he had only one object in view. Meleager has far higher qualities as a poet, and his feeling, as well as his style, is more exquisite. But he wavered between the love of boys and women, seeking in both the satisfaction of emotional yearnings which in the modern world would have marked him as a sentimentalist. The so-called _Mousa Paidiké_, "Muse of Boyhood," is a collection of two hundred and fifty-eight short poems, some of them of great artistic merit, in praise of boys and boy-love. The common-places of these epigrams are Ganymede and Erôs;[172] we hear but little of Aphrodite--her domain is the other section of the _Anthology_, called Erotika. A very small percentage of these compositions can be described as obscene;[173] none are nasty, in the style of Martial or Ausonius; some are exceedingly picturesque;[174] a few are written in a strain of lofty or of lovely music;[175] one or two are delicate and subtle in their humour.[176] The whole collection supplies good means of judging how the Greeks of the decadence felt about this form of love. _Malakia_ is the real condemnation of this poetry, rather than brutality or coarseness. A favourite topic is the superiority of boys over girls. This sometimes takes a gross form;[177] but once or twice the treatment of the subject touches a real psychological distinction, as in the following epigram:[178]--