Satyricon, vol 7, Marchena Notes | Page 6

it is common in the most
polished nations and it is common among savage tribes. Profound
philosophers have argued in favor of it; poets have sung the objects of
this sort of love in their tender and passionate compositions, and these
compositions have always been the delight of posterity. What stupid or
unfeeling reader can read without emotion that beautiful eclogue of
Virgil where Corydon sighs his hopeless love for the beautiful Alexis?
The most passionate ode of Horace is that one in which he complains
of the harshness of Ligurinus. The tender Tibullus, deceived by his
Marathus, brings tears to all who have hearts. The delicate Anacreon,
praising his Bathylle, and the valiant Alceus giving himself up after his
labors in war to sing of the dark eyes and black hair of Lycus . . . "with
dark eyes and black hair beautiful." It is not to over-civilized
refinements of society which, according to certain misanthropists,
degrade nature and corrupt it, that this taste is due; it is found among
the south sea islanders, and the evidence of the first Spaniards attests
that it was common among the hordes of American Indians before the
discovery of the new world. Paw had attempted to explain this as

resulting from defects in the formation of the organs of pleasure among
the natives; but a peculiar cause is not sufficient explanation for a
universal effect.
At the time of the Patriarchs, Greek love was so general that in the four
cities, Sodom, Gomorrah, Adama, and Seboim, it was impossible to
find ten men exempt from the contagion; that number would have
sufficed, said the Lord, to withhold the punishment which he inflicted
upon those cities.
It should be noted here that most of the assertions about the morals of
the Israelites which are to be found in the Erotica Biblon of Mirabeau
are either false or pure guesswork. It is a bizarre method of judging the
morals of a people, that of taking their legal code and inferring that the
people were accustomed to break all the laws which are forbidden by
that code. Nevertheless, that is the method which the author of the
Erotica Biblon adopts for portraying the morals of the Jewish people.
Again, he has not even understood this code; he has believed that the
law against giving one's seed to the idol Moloch meant giving the
human semen; and he is ignorant of the fact that this seed, as spoken of
in the Bible, means the children and descendants. Thus it is that the
land of Canaan is promised to the seed of Abraham, and the perpetuity
of the reign on Sion to that of David. Moloch was a Phoenician deity,
the same one to which, in Carthage, they sacrificed children; the
Romans believed him to be a reincarnation of their Saturn, but Saturn
was an Etruscan divinity who could never have had any connection
with the Gods of Phoenicia. He (Mirabeau) has translated "those who
polluted the temple" as meaning those who were guilty of some
obscenity in the temple; and he does not know that the temple was
"polluted" by a thousand acts, declared impure by law, and which were
not obscene. The entrance of a woman into a sacred place, less than
forty days after her accouchement, or the entrance of a man who had
touched an impure animal, constituted a pollution of the House of the
Lord. When one wishes to make a parade of erudition he should make
some attempt to understand the things which he pretends to make clear
to others. Or is it that this Mirabeau was merely careless?
The love of boys was so thoroughly the fashion in Greece that we have
today given it the name "Greek Love." Orestes was regarded as the
"good friend" of Pylades and Patroclus as the lover of Achilles. In this

taste, the Gods set the example for mortals, and the abduction of
Ganymede for the service of the master of thunder, was not the least
cause for annoyance given the chaste but over-prudish Juno. Lastly,
Hercules was not content with the loves of Omphale and Dejanira, he
also loved the beautiful Hylas, who was brought up by the nymphs.
The Greeks boasted, without blushing, of this love, which they
considered the only passion worthy of men, and they did blush at
loving a woman, intimacy with whom, they said, only rendered her
adorers soft and effeminate. In the Dialogue of Plato, entitled "The
Banquet," which is concerned entirely with discussions of the various
forms of love, they dismiss love for women as unworthy of occupying
the attention of sensible men. One of the speakers, I believe it was
Aristophanes, explaining the cause of this fire which we kindle in the
bosoms of our loved ones,