THE LESBIAN IN OLD GREECE

John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) was a pioneer in the field of gay rights, and the first historian of male homosexuality. When in 1858 he read the dialogues of Plato (and Fedro The Symposium) realized that there had been a noble homosexuality, but the manifestations of
homosexuality he had known in his teens, and then found that in his adult life, he seemed Unworthy. In 1873 he wrote his booklet "A Problem in the Ethics of the Greeks", and made ten copies printed privately in 1883. In 1897 it expanded and published as Appendix of the book
Investment Sexual Havelock Ellis, and included a section, the nineteenth about homosexuality in women of Ancient Greece. The text that follows is, consequently, one of the first modern
writings where lesbianism is not a medical issue or a perversion. Investment sex among Greek women offers more difficulties than those
found in the study of paedophilia. This is not to the absence of the phenomenon, but the fact that the passions Homosexual women were never
integrated into the social system, never became educational agents and the military. The Greeks accepted the fact that some women are congenital indifferent to the male sex, and feel their own appetite for sex. This is evident from the myth of Aristophanes in the Symposium Plato, who expressed in comic form his theory of sexual differentiation. There were originally humans three sexes: men, the offspring of the sun, women, the offspring of the earth; hermaphrodite, the progeny of the moon. They were round with two faces, four hands, four feet, and two sets of reproductive organs each. For the third sex (hermaphrodite or mole) a set of reproductive organs was Male, the other female. Zeus, because of the insolence and vigour of these primitive human creatures, cut into halves. Since that time half of each class have always struggled to unite with their corresponding halves, and have found some satisfaction in the congress carnal men With men, women with women, and (in the case of creatures moles or hermaphrodites) men and women to one another. Philosophically, then, the homosexual passion of a woman by woman, or man by man, was placed at exactly the same height as the passion heterosexual sex by its opposite. The logic of the Greeks admitted that the woman was homosexual equal rights with men homosexual, and that both have the same freedom naturally heterosexual individuals of any kind. Although this was the position taken by philosophers, passion lesbian, as the Greeks used to call it, was never the same penalty social love of boys. It is significant that the Greek mythology does not offer legends goddesses parallel to those who devoted paedophilia among male deities. Furthermore, we have no recorded examples, insofar as I can remember, noble friendships between women who up to political and historical prominence. There are no analogies in women for Harmodio and Aristogitón, and for Cratino Aristodemo.

It is true that poets Sappho and lesbian gave the passion of women a prominent place in Greek literature. But Women eolias not found a glorious tradition that meant the male doricos. If the homosexual love between women took the form of an institution at a time when Eolia, this fact failed to sink deep roots in the soil of the nation. The Greeks later, but tolerant, contemplated rather as an eccentricity of nature, or as a vice, rather than an honorable emotion and socially
useful. The status of women in the former Hélade sufficiently explains this result. There was no Opportunity in the harem or zenana to raise homosexual passion to the same moral and spiritual efficiency obtained in the camp, the arena, and schools of philosophers. Therefore, while Greeks used ennobled love of the boys left that love lesbian continue the same course of degeneration that follows in a similar moderns. For check what is the type of lesbian love the way he assumed in modern Europe, we have only dialogues that compare with the stories of Luciano Parisians of Catulle Mendès or Guy de Maupassant. The woman who seduces the girl to the loving is, in the words of the girl,"hipermale", "androgina." The Megila of Luciano insists that the call Megilo. The girl is a vehicle weaker complacent, submissive to sexual activity virago, and has been selected from the class of ingénues prostitutes. There is an important passage in loves Luciano evidence that the Greeks felt an abhorrence of the investment sex among women similar to that felt by its modern manifestation between boys. Caricles, which supports the cause of heterosexual passion normal argues this way: "If you grant homosexual love among men by justice you must give the same thing to women, you have to punish the carnal relationship between them; monstrous instruments lust be allowed to make their sexual congress can take place; that obscene word, tríbade, how rarely offends our ears will be present everywhere, and Filena spread orgies androginas our harems. " What were these monstrous lust instruments can be deduced from the
sixth Herodas of mime, where one of them is described in detail. Filena can, perhaps, be the poet of an obscene book on the refinements sensual, which alludes Ateneo (Deipnosofistas viii, 335). It is also possible that Filena has become the designation of a lesbian lover, a tríbade. During periods of the late Greek literature, as I have shown elsewhere, certain fixed masks of comedy Attic (corresponding to the masks of the Commedia dell 'Arte Italian) created types of character under conventional names: thus, example, pork became a cobbler remendón, Myrtala a prostitute ordinary, and possibly Filena became the name of an inverted lesbian. The intent of this research is to demonstrate parental that while love for the boys in Greece won its moralizing, and reached the high position of a social function recognized, love of women by women remained without development and without honor, the same level as they are both forms of passion in the modern European world.

Remarks to discuss
1 - Symonds The hypothesis is that the dignified and elevated homosexual love is an evolution from the ignoble way, and genital evil occurring spontaneously in societies (and that is for him the way that homosexuality is developed in the nineteenth century Europe). These developments occurred in Old Greece among men because culture gave educational functions and its military homosexuality, but was not among women because their homosexuality was not socially useful.

2 - The naive was a literary type created by the French literature of the nineteenth century: a woman soft, dreamer, weak character,faith
something stupid, helpless and easily dominable for some more character strong. The literary types referred to the girl Symonds are sensitive,
loving woman a formidable and virile male.

3 - The mime is a form of popular Greek theater; originated in the sixth century BC. The actors wore masks, sang, danced, did acrobatics and juggling, and placed on stage little works language, obscene gestures and clothes (large rear and falos exaggerated) with topics (the reasons are popular gluttony, beatings, robberies, deceit and sex, including adultery and adventures were short,improvised, and women could act. From Herodas, who lived in Alexandria in the first half of the third century before Christ, survived six little works, no longer a hundred lines.

From: ESPEJO Magazine