in
the passage above referred to, did not allude to boy-love in general,
but to the peculiarly Hellenic form of it which I shall afterwards
attempt to characterise.

A prevalent opinion among the Greeks ascribed the origin of paiderastia
to Crete; and it was here that the legend of Zeus and Ganymede was
localised.[3] "The Cretans," says Plato,[4] "are always accused of
having invented the story of Ganymede and Zeus, which is designed to
justify themselves in the enjoyment of such pleasures by the practice of
the god whom they believe to have been their lawgiver."

In another passage,[5] Plato speaks of the custom that prevailed before
the time of Laius--in terms which show his detestation of a vice that
had gone far toward corrupting Greek society. This sentence indicates
the second theory of the later Greeks upon this topic. They thought that
Laius, the father of OEdipus, was the first to practise _Hybris_, or
lawless lust, in this form, by the rape committed on Chrysippus, the son
of Pelops.[6] To this crime of Laius, the Scholiast to the _Seven
against Thebes_ attributes all the evils which afterwards befell the
royal house of Thebes, and Euripides made it the subject of a tragedy.
In another but less prevalent Saga the introduction of paiderastia is
ascribed to Orpheus.

It is clear from these conflicting theories that the Greeks themselves
had no trustworthy tradition on the subject. Nothing, therefore, but
speculative conjecture is left for the modern investigator. If we need
in such a matter to seek further than the primal instincts of human
nature, we may suggest that, like the orgiastic rites of the later
Hellenic cultus, paiderastia in its crudest form was transmitted to the
Greeks from the East. Its prevalence in Crete, which, together with
Cyprus, formed one of the principal links between Phoenicia and Hellas
proper, favours this view. Paiderastia would, on this hypothesis, like
the worship of the Paphian and Corinthian Aphrodite, have to be regarded
as in part an Oriental importation.[7] Yet, if we adopt any such
solution of the problem, we must not forget that in this, as in all
similar cases, whatever the Greeks received from adjacent nations, they
distinguished with the qualities of their own personality. Paiderastia
in Hellas assumed Hellenic characteristics, and cannot be confounded
with any merely Asiatic form of luxury. In the tenth section of this
Essay I shall return to the problem, and advance