hat he had only once met with a refusal (in which
case the man later on offered himself spontaneously) and only
once with an attempt to extort money. Permanent relations of
friendship sprang up in most instances. He admitted that he
looked after these persons and helped them with his social
influence and a certain amount of pecuniary support--setting one
up in business, giving another something to marry on, and finding
places for others.

Among the peasantry in Switzerland, I am informed, homosexual
relationships are not uncommon before marriage, and such relationships are
lightly spoken of as "Dummheiten". No doubt, similar traits might be found
in the peasantry of other parts of Europe.

What may be regarded as true sexual inversion can be traced in Europe from
the beginning of the Christian era (though we can scarcely demonstrate the
congenital element) especially among two classes--men of exceptional
ability and criminals; and also, it may be added, among those neurotic and
degenerate individuals who may be said to lie between these two classes,
and on or over the borders of both. Homosexuality, mingled with various
other sexual abnormalities and excesses, seems to have flourished in Rome
during the empire, and is well exemplified in the persons of many of the
emperors.[43] Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero,
Galba, Titus, Domitian, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Commodus, and
Heliogabalus--many of them men of great ability and, from a Roman
standpoint, great moral worth--are all charged, on more or less solid
evidence, with homosexual practices. In Julius Caesar--"the husband of all
women and the wife of all men" as he was satirically termed--excess of
sexual activity seems to have accompanied, as is sometimes seen, an excess
of intellectual activity. He was first accused of homosexual practices
after a long stay in Bithynia with King Nikomedes, and the charge was
very often renewed. Caesar was proud of his physical beauty, and, like
some modern inverts, he was accustomed carefully to shave and epilate his
body to preserve the smoothness of the skin. Hadrian's love for his
beautiful slave Antinoues is well known; the love seems to have been deep
and mutual, and Antinoues has become immortalized, partly by the romance of
his obscure death and partly by the new and strangely beautiful type which
he has given to sculpture.[44] Heliogabalus, "the most homosexual of all
the