IV.—The Milesian Tales
The chief characteristic of Ionian literature is a certain softness, a kind of laxity of morals corresponding to a looseness of political organisation. The Ionian man was a convinced believer in freedom—for himself; but he was by no means a believer in the discipline which alone makes freedom possible. Both in sexual matters and in politics, his desire for freedom and his desire for pleasure were constantly at cross-purposes. He wished to be independent of women; but he was not meant by nature to be a monk, and he purchased his apparent freedom by yielding to a sensuality far more degrading than that of women’s love. He wished to be independent of Persia; but he was not a born soldier, and he finally bought a pretence of autonomy by the payment of tribute to a Persian satrap, forfeiting his manhood for the sake of peace.
The Ionians were, indeed, a strange medley of qualities, and with them intellectual activity stood in sharp contrast with moral and physical sloth. They were essentially a race of city dwellers; for them the charm of the country and of nature had little attraction, and their civilisation found its most perfect expression during the seventh and sixth centuries in the splendid luxury of such towns as the Ionian Miletus, in Asia Minor, and the Achæan Sybaris, in South Italy. The two cities were closely connected by ties of trade and social intercourse, and in both places material prosperity led quickly to moral corruption, and voluptuousness became the rule of life. Like Buenos Ayres to-day, Miletus and Sybaris were trading ports founded in a new country, and the rapid growth of riches discouraged the manlier virtues. The mixture of races was a danger, the climate favoured voluptuous pleasures, and the bracing stimulus of war was, until too late, absent. The moral and sexual degradation that resulted from this unbridled pursuit of pleasure found its expression, as we have seen, in literature. The tale of Ganymede, the episode of the tricked husband in the Iliad, and the catalogue of women in Simonides, are fair samples of Ionian thought. No one of the three has any moral value; indeed, a strict Puritan would probably refuse to let them soil his lips; but they are at least decent enough to be written down in a literary form, and to pass muster, if they are not too closely examined.
There was, however, another and even less creditable class of story of which literary historians tell us little, but which, probably, was first invented in such towns as Miletus and Sybaris in the seventh and sixth centuries, during the time of their greatest prosperity—the so-called Milesian Tales. Usually circulating by word of mouth, they endured for centuries, and occasionally make a furtive appearance in history, but their significance in sexual morality has not always been appreciated. In dealing with them as literature we are confronted with a threefold difficulty: firstly, many of the most typical specimens of this style were never written down at all; secondly, most of the stories that found a footing in literature were blotted out by the righteous indignation of Christian moralists; thirdly, in the case of the few that do survive, it is neither possible nor desirable to introduce them to a modern audience. But, though they are the least estimable part of our inheritance from ancient literature, their influence on ancient morals was very great, and their tendency was so definitely to ruin any reasonable conception of sex relationships that they force themselves into notice.
Though sometimes written in prose, their natural medium was the iambic measure, invented by Archilochus, and they were meant both for a male and female audience. Iambus the jester, Pierrot, has his female counterpart in Iambë, Pierrette, who appears in the Homeric hymn to Demeter, and by her capers forces the sad goddess to smile once more. This is, perhaps, the one justification of the tales; in their more innocent form they were intended to purge away that feeling of melancholy of which, as the precursor of madness, the Greeks were so much afraid, by exciting the emotion of laughter; just as tragedy effects the same purpose by exciting the emotions of pity and fear. But this sort of humour in Athens and Ionia soon degenerated into coarseness, and Iambë, her name now changed to Baubo, as we see her in the ritual statuette, a woman sitting on a pig, played a prominent and a shameful part in the Eleusinian mysteries of Demeter. The worship of the sorrowing mother—Mater Dolorosa—was made the cloak for nameless obscenities, and the influence of religion was added to that of literature to degrade men’s conception of women. These were the sort of verses and images to which Aristotle alludes in the Seventh Book of the Politics; and this is one of the reasons for Plato’s objection to poetry; better no literature at all, he thinks, than literature degraded to these ends.
The worst type of Milesian or Sybaritic tale was definitely meant to stimulate the animal passions, and owed little to any qualities of humour or imagination. The sense of artistic fitness which the Athenians always possessed kept this kind of stories out of written literature during the great period, and confined them to the gossip of the perfumers’ and barbers’ shops. But as soon as the decadence began, these ‘Ionian poems,’ as Athenæus calls them, became a recognised branch of letters, and we hear of their chief practitioners, writers of ‘facetiæ,’ the ‘Hilarodoi,’ the ‘Simodoi,’ and the ‘Lysiodoi.’
Among the more notorious authors were Simus the Magnesian, Alexander the Ætolian, Pyres the Milesian, and Sotades of Maronea, who gives his name to that whole class of licentious writings which is represented in modern times by the sotadic satire of Nicholas Chorier. Sotades, however, did not confine himself to the comparatively safe pastime of libelling women. He ventured to write lampoons upon Ptolemy Philadelphus and his sister Arsinoe, was caught on the island where he had taken refuge, put into a jar with a leaden top, and drowned.
But the most famous, or infamous, of all the class is Aristides, usually called, but on very little evidence, ‘of Miletus,’ who lived perhaps in the second century before Christ. Of the man and his book we have little direct knowledge, but he was translated into Latin by Sisenna, the companion of Sulla in his voluptuous debauchery, and copies of this version were found by the Parthians in the tents of the Roman officers after the battle of Carrhæ. Even the Parthians, as Plutarch tells us, were disgusted by Aristides, and Ovid tries to use him as a shelter for himself against the charge of immoral writing. The Roman poet who, though a libertine, was at least free from some of the grosser vices of his age, complains bitterly in his exile of the difference in treatment meted out to Aristides and himself. ‘Aristides was not banished,’ he cries, ‘and yet he fathered all the scandalous stories of Miletus: the authors amongst us who now put together Sybaritic stories go unpunished.’
Sybaritic and Milesian were the descriptive adjectives used even in Ovid’s time for this kind of writing, and we can trace its popularity and influence in Rome. Quotations are obviously impossible, and indeed the genre does not depend on literary grace. One author alone, Petronius, possesses sufficient skill to make it tolerable, and the viler portions of the ‘Satyricon’ are the most real examples of the literature that was inspired by Miletus, and by Milesian ideas of womankind. The natural coarseness of the Roman mind gave this sort of story a greater prominence than the Greeks ever allowed, but it will probably be correct to trace its first origin to the coast of Ionia in the seventh century and especially to the metropolis of the Ionian States.
From the beginning at Miletus the relations between men and women were notoriously bad, and, as Herodotus tells us, they had some historical justification. ‘The first settlers at Miletus,’ he says, ‘having no wives of their own, killed the men and seized the women of the country.’ On account of this massacre, the women established the law and imposed upon themselves an oath, which they handed down to their daughters, to this effect:
They should never eat at the same table with their husbands, nor should any woman ever call her husband by his name. For they had killed their fathers, their husbands, and their sons, and after so doing had forced them to become their wives.
This is the first incident in the history of Miletus, an episode not unlike the story of the Lemnian women, and it explains a great deal. In the chief city of Ionia, enmity, not love, was the law between husband and wife. Domestic life was poisoned, and literature caught the infection. By action and reaction the mischief spread, and it is impossible for us now fully to estimate its extent. But we cannot doubt the effect that Ionian literature had in lowering men’s estimate of women, and thereby degrading all their ideals of social life. The three great curses of Greek civilisation—sexual perversion, infanticide, and the harem system—all come into prominence during the sixth century, and there is good reason to believe that it was just at this time that the natural increase of population was checked, and the slow process of race suicide begun. If Ionia was the cradle of Greek culture, as we know it, from Ionia also came the germs of that moral disease which made a fatal counterpoise to the intellectual supremacy of Greece.
In the worse type of Milesian Tale immorality takes its most revolting form; but there was another and more pleasing form of story, also invented in Ionia about this time, which occasionally is called by the same title, and is best known to us in the collection of Æsop’s Fables. Æsop himself, the lame slave who was made by tradition the fellow-servant of the fair courtesan, Rhodopis, and so a contemporary of Sappho, is hardly more a real person than Homer, and his name was used as a convenient shelter for two slightly different kinds of humorous story. There were the well-known animal fables which are common to the whole Mediterranean and Asiatic world, and in Æsop find a Greek dress, and beside them a sort of humorous anecdote, sometimes trivial, sometimes coarse, but always strongly realistic.
They were especially popular at Athens. ‘Tell them a funny tale of Æsop, or of Sybaris,’ says the old gentleman in Aristophanes’ ‘Wasps,’ ‘something you heard at the club’; and later on in the play, when Bdelycleon is intoxicated, we get two specimens of the style. Like our Limericks, they are in verse, with a catch refrain: ‘A woman at Sybaris once,’ and ‘Æsop one day,’ and although they are not particularly humorous, it must be remembered that they are the witticisms of a drunken man. The first runs thus:
Æsop one night was going back from dinner, when a bitch began to bark at him, a bold, drunken creature. Thereupon said he: ‘Dear, dear! my good bitch, if you were to sell that foul tongue of yours and buy some flour, you would be more sensible.’
The other is this:
A woman of Sybaris once broke a jug. The jug got a friend to act as witness, and laid a claim for damages. Thereupon the lady said: ‘By the virgin, if you would but let the lawyers alone and buy some sticking-plaster you would show more wisdom.’
The fables of Æsop are now a nursery classic, for, like the Arabian Nights and Gulliver’s Travels, they have been turned by the kindly irony of time to a use which their authors hardly contemplated. But in their Milesian shape there was always an underlying vein of satire, even in the animal stories. The male animals, the eagle and the lion, are brave and generous; the females, the fox and the weasel, are cunning and treacherous.
Moreover, as we see in the Greek version of Babrius and the Latin of Phædrus, separated though they be from the original by a gap of centuries, there was a great deal of matter in the Æsopian stories which was plainly misogynistic.
As examples, we may take from Babrius, Fable 10:
A man fell in love with an ugly, dirty slave-girl, his own property, and readily gave her all she asked. She had her fill of gold: fine purple robes trailing at her ankles, and soon she began to rival the mistress of the house. ‘The goddess of love,’ thought she, ‘is the cause of all this’ and she honoured her with votive tapers, going every day to sacrifice and prayer with supplications and requests. But at last the goddess came in a dream while they were asleep, and appearing to the slave-girl, she said, ‘Do not thank me, or suppose that I have made you beautiful: I am angry with that fellow there, and so he thinks you fair.’
Belief in women’s beauty, we see, is mere infatuation, and so is belief in their truth, as No. 16 shows:
A country nurse once threatened a whining child: ‘Stop, or I will throw you to the wolf.’ The wolf heard the words, and supposing that the old dame was speaking the truth, waited patiently for the meal which he thought would soon be ready. It was not till evening that the child fell asleep, and the wolf, who had been waiting on slow hope, went off home very hungry, his mouth really agape. ‘How is it you have come home empty-handed?’ said his wife, who had been keeping house. ‘It’s very unusual.’ But the wolf replied: ‘What would you have? I have trusted a woman.’
No. 32 is a curious reminiscence of Simonides:
Once upon a time a cat fell in love with a comely man, and glorious Cypris, the mother of Desire, allowed her to change her shape and take a woman’s body, one so fair that all men desired her. The young man saw her, fell captive in his turn and arranged to wed. The marriage feast was just prepared when a mouse ran by, and the bride, jumping down from the high couch, rushed after it. So the banquet came to an end, and Love, who had had a merry jest, departed too—for even he could not fight against nature.
No. 22 is more outspoken:
Once upon a time a middle-aged man—not young, but not yet old, his hair a mixture of black and white—feeling that he still had leisure for love and merriment, took two mistresses, one young, one old. Now the young woman wanted to see in her lover a young man, the old dame desired some one as old as herself. So, every time, the girl plucked out any hairs that she could find turning white, while the old lady did the same to the black hairs, until young and old together at last pulled out all the hair he had and left him bald. Moral: Pitiable is the man who falls into the hands of women: they bite and bite until they strip him to the bone.
So in the fable of the lion who falls in love with a maiden, the noble animal strips himself of claws and teeth, and everything that makes him formidable, to please the girl, and for his reward is beaten to death.
In all these stories there is a note of satirical depreciation, but the best example of the cynical humour which inspires the whole class is to be found in the tale of the Ephesian Widow. Phædrus gives a brief version; in Petronius the story is put into the mouth of the satyr-poet Eumolpus, and in a condensed form it will perhaps bear quotation. ‘There was once a matron of Ephesus so notoriously virtuous that all the women of the neighbouring towns used to come and gaze upon her as at a wonderful spectacle.’ So it begins, and the first sentence, which might come from Voltaire’s Candide, gives the spirit in which it is written. The lady’s husband died, and not satisfied with the ordinary signs of grief, the bereaved wife insisted on following the corpse to the underground chamber where it was laid. There the lady ‘with singular and exemplary constancy,’ remained with it for five days, deaf to the entreaties of relatives and magistrates, refusing all food, and attended only by one servant-girl whose business it was to share her mistress’ grief and renew the taper which alone lit up the sepulchral chamber.
‘The whole country was full of the story,’ so the tale runs, ‘and men of every class agreed that this was a real and brilliant example of virtue and affection in a woman—the only one they had ever known.’
In the meantime, however, some robbers had been crucified near the place, and a soldier on guard over the crosses noticed the light of the taper gleaming in the darkness. Yielding to the weakness of human nature, he made his way down to the vault, and was surprised to find a pretty woman, where he had expected to see a ghost. But he soon realised the situation—that the lady could not get over the loss of her man—and so he brought his traps down to the cellar and began to address some words of comfort to her. ‘Do not persist in useless grief,’ said he, ‘do not rend your breast with unavailing sobs; all of us will come to this; we all have but one final resting-place.’ His attempt at consolation—which, though well-meant, is certainly somewhat commonplace—only irritated the lady, and he turned his attention to the servant (for in this sort of stories there is always a soubrette) and induced her to partake of his rations.
The girl was then able to persuade her mistress to follow her example, and soon all three were eating and drinking together.
‘You know,’ so says Eumolpus, ‘the result of a good meal: the soldier was soon as successful in overcoming the matron’s resolute virtue as he had been in overcoming her resolute desire for death.’
The doors of the vault were closed, so that it might appear that the good lady had breathed her last over her husband’s body; the soldier brought down all sorts of comestibles, and two or three days and nights were spent in dalliance.
Meanwhile the crucified robbers were quite forgotten, and on the third morning the soldier found that one of the crosses was empty, for the body had been removed for burial by the relatives in the night. He explained his plight to the lady, and announced his intention of committing suicide, the proper penalty, as he said, for his neglect of duty.
But the matron was as compassionate as she was virtuous, and ‘Heaven forfend!’ she cried. ‘I cannot bear to see two such dear men both depart from life. I would rather pay over the dead than lose the living.’ So she told the soldier to take the husband’s body out of its receptacle and fix it on the vacant cross. ‘The soldier gladly followed the clever lady’s ingenious idea, and the next day people were wondering how it was that a dead man had found his way to the cross.’
The Ephesian Widow represents the Milesian Tales at their best; at their worst they are only to be read by those who can touch pitch and not be defiled. In themselves they are beneath contempt, but they have a very considerable importance in the history of the world, and especially in the history of the relations of the sexes. The perverse ideas that underlie them were transplanted from Ionia to Athens, and, recommended by the literary genius of Athenian writers, they have had an influence on later thought which the Ionian pornographers would never have secured.
