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. Surely no one save Sappho has touched so closely the heart of love and poetry.
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[44] 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 Achan 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[45] 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 Iamb, Pierrette, who appears in the Homeric hymn to Demeter, and by her capers forces the sad goddess to smile once[46] 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 Iamb, 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'[47] and barbers' shops. But as soon as the decadence began, these 'Ionian poems,' as Athenus calls them, became a recognised branch of letters, and we hear of their chief practitioners, writers of 'faceti,' the 'Hilarodoi,' the 'Simodoi,' and the 'Lysiodoi.'
Among the more notorious authors were Simus the Magnesian, Alexander the tolian, 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 Carrh. Even the Parthians, as Plutarch tells us, were disgusted by Aristides, and Ovid tries to use him as a[48] 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.
