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True love for the Greeks was nearly always homosexual. The Ionian lyric poets of early Greece regarded woman as only an instrument of pleasure and the founder of the family. Theognis compares marriage to cattle-breeding; Alcman, when he wishes to be complimentary to the Spartan girls, speaks of them as his "female boy-friends."
What therefore else does he seem to do, but to set down himself those things and doctrines which, when others write them, he expunges; condemning, indeed, Plato for showing that not to live is better than to live viciously and ignorantly; and yet advising Theognis to let a man break his neck or throw himself into the sea, that he may avoid vice?
"I would you could endure your own troubles," retorted the other, "and let me care for mine!" "Perpol, friend," replied Antonius, "don't be vexed! I see it is a case of your wanting little said on a sore point. Well, keep silent, I won't tease you. Doesn't Theognis declare: "'Caress me not with words, while far away Thy heart is absent and thy feelings stray'? Elton, translator.
Eusebius of Nicomedia, afterward of Constantinople, Theognis of Nicæa, Maris of Chalcedon, and Menophantus of Ephesus, were among the most resolute defenders of Arius. It is curious to reflect that they represent the four sees of the four orthodox councils of the Church. The three last named soon vanish away from history.
Whence the verses of Empedocles and Parmenides, the Theriaca of Nicander, and the sentences of Theognis, are rather to be accounted speeches than poems, which, that they might not walk contemptibly on foot, have borrowed from poetry the chariot of verse, to convey them the more creditably through the world.
Of such a love we have a record in the elegies of Theognis, in which the poet has embodied, for the benefit of Kurnus his friend, the ripe experience of an eventful life.
And Piso, approaching me, told me to keep silence, and be of good cheer, as he would come there; and we found Theognis there, guarding the others; having given me up to him, they went back; and, under such circumstances, it seemed best to me to run any risk whatever, as if death were already at hand. 14.
As soon as writing came into fashion, wise men, or those who fancied themselves such, would naturally endeavour to increase the number of those established and respected maxims, and to express their own sense of what was either proper or improper conduct, sometimes in the more artificial form of apologues, like what are called the fables of Aesop; and sometimes in the more simple one of apophthegms or wise sayings, like the proverbs of Solomon, the verses of Theognis and Phocyllides, and some part of the works of Hesiod.
For often one who zealously pushes towards some excellence, though he be pursuing a gain, is really being led utterly astray by the will of some Power, which makes those things that are evil seem to him good, and those things seem to him evil that are for his advantage." Surely, both the Prince and the Baron might have learnt something from the frigid wisdom of Theognis.
Theognis recognizes this high ideal of the duty and the beauty of truthfulness, when he says: "At first there is a small attractiveness about a lie, but in the end the gain it brings is both shameful and harmful. That man has no fair glory, in whose heart dwells a lie, and from whose mouth it has once issued."
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