Adaios

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Adaios, (lived ca. 450 BCE) also known as Adaeus, was a Macedonian poet of which little is known, save that he made two notable contributions to literature and history. When his good friend Euripides died in exile and was refused burial in his native Athens, Adaios composed the epitaph that graced the playwright's grave in Macedonia. Adaios' other noted achievement was his sage advice for those men who would know the pleasures of another male:

If you see someone beautiful

hammer it out right then.

Say what you think;

grab his balls: be a man.

But if 'I admire you' is what you say

and 'I'll be a brother to you' -

shame will bar the only way

to all you want to do.

(This is one of several modern translations.)

The fact that Adaios does not speak specifically of loving a boy, a custom known to the Greeks as paiderastia, but instead seems to speak of sexual love between males in general, gives a clue to the Macedonians' ideas on the subject. While their neighbors to the south, especially in Athens, believed that such relations should be restricted to those between adult men and teenage boys, and that exclusive homosexuality should be shunned while bisexuality was accepted as the norm, the Macedonians apparently held no such prejudices, and relations between men of similar age was apparently more commonly accepted, as evidenced by the relationships between Alexander the Great and Hephaestion.^[1]

ADAEUS or ADDAEUS, called the Macedonian in the title of one of his epigrams, was a contemporary of Alexander the Great. Among his epigrams are epitaphs on Alexander and on Philip; his date is further fixed by the mention of Potidaea in another epigram, as Cassander, who died B.C. 296, changed the name of the city into Cassandreia. Eleven epigrams are extant under his name, but one is headed "Adaeus of Mytilene" and may be by a different hand, as Adaeus was a common Macedonian name. They are chiefly poems of country life, prayers to Demeter and Artemis, and hunting scenes, full of fresh air and simplicity out of doors, with a serious sense of religion and something of Macedonian gravity. The picture they give of the simple and refined life of the Greek country gentleman, like Xenophon in his old age at Scillus, is one of the most charming and intimate glimpses we have of the ancient world, carried on quietly among the drums and tramplings of Alexander's conquests, of which we are faintly reminded by another epigram on an engraved Indian beryl.^[2]

ADAEUS, or ADDAEUS (Αδαίος or Αδδαίος), a Greek epigrammatic poet, a native most probably of Macedonia. The epithet Μακεδόνος is appended to his name before the third epigram in the Vat. MS. (Anili. Gr. vi. 228); and the subjects of the second, eighth, ninth, and tenth epigrams agree with this account of his origin. He lived in the time of Alexander the Great, to whose death he alludes. (Anth. Gr. vii. 240.) The fifth epigram (Anth. Gr. vii. 305) is inscribed Αδδαίου Μυτιληναίου, and there was a Mytilenaean of this name, who wrote two prose works Περί αγαλματοποιών(On statue-makers and Περί Διαθέσεως(On disposition) (Athen. xiii. p. 606. A, xi. p. 471, F.) The time when he lived cannot be fixed with certainty. Reiske, though on insufficient grounds, believes these two to be the same person. (Anth. Grace, vi. 228, 2589 vii. 51, 238, 240, 305, x. 20 ; Brunck, Anal. ii. p. 224 ; Jacobs, xiii. p. 831.) [C. P. M.]^[3]