his phrase
denoted an absorbing passion for young men. The Platonist, as appears
from numerous passages in the Platonic writings, would have despised the
Petrarchist as a vulgar woman-lover. The Petrarchist would have loathed
the Platonist as a moral Pariah. Yet Platonic love, in both its Attic
and its mediaeval manifestations, was one and the same thing.

The philosophical ideal of paiderastia in Greece, which bore the names
of Socrates and Plato, met with little but contempt. Cicero, in a
passage which has been echoed by Gibbon, remarked upon, "the thin device
of virtue and friendship which amused the philosophers of Athens."[161]
Epicurus criticised the Stoic doctrine of paiderastia by sententiously
observing that philosophers only differed from the common race of men in
so far as they could better cloak their vice with sophistries. This
severe remark seems justified by the opinions ascribed to Zeno by
Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, and Stobaeus.[162] But it may be doubted
whether the real drift of the Stoic theory of love, founded on
_Adiaphopha_, was understood. Lucian, in the _Amores_,[163] makes
Charicles, the advocate of love for women, deride the Socratic ideal as
vain nonsense, while Theomnestus, the man of pleasure, to whom the
dispute is finally referred, decides that the philosophers are either
fools or humbugs.[164] Daphnaeus, in the erotic dialogue of Plutarch,
arrives at a similar conclusion; and, in an essay on education, the same
author contends that no prudent father would allow the sages to enter
into intimacy with his sons.[165] The discredit incurred by philosophers
in the later age of Greek culture is confirmed by more than one passage
in Petronius and Juvenal, while Athenaeus especially inveighs against
philosophic lovers as acting against nature.[166] The attempt of the
Platonic Socrates to elevate, without altering, the morals of his race
may therefore be said fairly to have failed. Like his Republic, his love
existed only in heaven.

XVI.

Philip of Macedon, when he pronounced the panegyric of the Sacred Band
at Chaeronea, uttered the funeral oration of Greek love in its nobler
forms. With the decay of military spirit and the loss of freedom, there
was no sphere left for that type of comradeship which I attempted to
describe in Section IV. The philosophical ideal, to which some
cultivated Attic thinkers had aspired, remained unrealised, except, we
may perhaps suppose, in isolated insta