rd is just
sprouting, when youth is in the prime of charm," they were drafted off
to farms and country villages. Charicles maintained a harem of
dancing-girls and flute-players. The one was "madly passionate for
lads;" the other no less "mad for women." Charicles undertook the cause
of women, Callicratides that of boys. Charicles began. The love of women
is sanctioned by antiquity; it is natural; it endures through life; it
alone provides pleasure for both sexes. Boys grow bearded, rough, and
past their prime. Women always excite passion. Then Callicratides takes
up his parable. Masculine love combines virtue with pleasure. While the
love of women is a physical necessity, the love of boys is a product of
high culture and an adjunct of philosophy. Paiderastia may be either
vulgar or celestial; the second will be sought by men of liberal
education and good manners. Then follow contrasted pictures of the lazy
woman and the manly youth. The one provokes to sensuality, the other
excites noble emulation in the ways of virile living. Lucian, summing up
the arguments of the two pleaders, decides that Corinth must give way to
Athens, adding: "Marriage is open to all men, but the love of boys to
philosophers only." This verdict is referred to Theomnestus, a Don Juan
of both sexes. He replies that both boys and women are good for
pleasure; the philosophical arguments of Callicratides are cant.

* * * * *

This brief abstract of Lucian's dialogue on love indicates the cynicism
with which its author viewed the subject, using the whole literature and
all the experience of the Greeks to support a thesis of pure hedonism.
The sybarites of Cairo or Constantinople at the present moment might
employ the same arguments, except that they would omit the philosophic
cant of Callicratides.

* * * * *

There is nothing in extant Greek literature, of a date anterior to the
Christian era, which is foul in the same sense as that in which the
works of Roman poets (Catullus and Martial), Italian poets (Beccatelli
and Baffo), and French poets (Scarron and Voltaire) are foul. Only
purblind students will be unable to perceive the difference between the
obscenity of the Latin races and that of Aristophanes. The difference,
indeed, is wide and radical, and strongly marked. It is the difference
between a race naturally gifted with a delicate, aesthetic sense of
beauty, and one in whom that