EROTES, an ancient dialogue by Lucian of Samosata, in Pashto translation (original) (raw)

EROTES by Lucian of Samosata English rendition by Andrew Calimach Pashto translation by an anonymous Afghan intellectual Preface The origins of male love are lost in the mists of prehistory. In fact, they go back to the dawn of man, if observations of animals in the wild are any guide. Though same-sex sexual activity is widespread throughout the animal kingdom, it is predominantly a characteristic of higher species: the more evolved the animal, the more frequent its occurrence. We have no way of knowing what animals think of this topic. Humans, however, are possessed of speech, so that wherever a history of male love has survived, so have records of the conversations inspired by it. These debates have been going on, in various forms, for over two thousand years, so they are unlikely to be concluded any time soon. We might, however, steal a page from the arguments of our forefathers, and inject a little humor and poetry into our modern day disputes. Perhaps then the chase for some absolute truth will not be so all-consuming. This dialogue was written in Greek in the early years of our era by Lucian of Samosata (a town on the Euphrates, present-day Samsat, in modern Turkey). It reveals to our twenty-first-century eyes idealism and prejudice; humor and misogyny; a sense of play, sometimes fair and sometimes not; and a seriousness leavened by lightness of heart. Before us are arrayed the trappings of philosophical inquiry, along with specious arguments delivered with great vehemence. We would be justified to conclude that many things have not changed in the past two thousand years, while we smile, or frown, at how much has indeed changed. One thing that has not changed is the confusion often present in discussions of what is now dubbed “homosexuality,” which purports to conflate attraction with specific acts. Charicles, the fictional character in this dialogue who presents the argument against lying with males, argues against one thing and one thing only—anal sex with another male. His opponent, Callicratidas, defends the construction of male love prevalent among educated Athenians (as well as Spartans, Thebans, and Cretans) of his time. This was a chaste pederasty that consisted of the attraction, love, and mentorship between a grown man and an adolescent boy, but explicitly rejected acts of penetration in the relations between lover and beloved. This is not to say that somehow this “pure” or “noble” pederasty was in any way not sexual, or frigid. We can be certain that it was fully sexual in that the lovers surely enjoyed the peak of pleasure. Their lovemaking, however, consisted of acts that were seen as not debasing to either partner. Thus the two opponents in this debate talk past each other, neither acknowledging the veracity of his opponent’s arguments. Callicratidas makes no answer to Charicles’ accusations, characteristic of his time and historically accurate, that many men do indeed abuse, dishonor, and harm their boy beloveds by penetrating them, in flagrant contravention of mainstream Greek morals. Perhaps that is because of his own complicity in such behavior, hinted at by the nature of his interest in the statue of Aphrodite. Charicles has nothing to say about an affectionate and constructive chaste pederasty that does not imply the degradation of both lover and beloved by acts of hubris, which in this context was not used in its modern sense of “arrogance” but as a technical term for acts of sexual penetration, regardless of whether they were forced or voluntary. Could that be because of his fixation on women and his inability, or refusal, to react erotically and sentimentally to the beauty of a youth, as did the great majority of the men of his time? The significance of the dialogue is best expressed in the words of the great classicist and male love pioneer, John Addington Symonds: “More than any other composition of the rhetorical age of Greek literature, it sums up the teaching of the doctors and the predilections of the vulgar in one treatise. Like many of Lucian’s compositions it has what may be termed a retrospective and resumptive value. That is to say, it represents less the actual feeling of the author and his age than the result of his reading and reflection brought into harmony with his experience”.