lation of the sexes to each other was both more formal and more
simple than it is with us; the natural and the political purposes of
cohabitation were less veiled by those personal and emotional
considerations which play so large a part in modern life. There was less
scope for the emergence of passionate enthusiasm between men and women,
while the full conditions of a spiritual attachment, solely determined
by reciprocal inclination, were only to be found in comradeship. In the
wrestling-ground, at the common tables, in the ceremonies of religion,
at the Pan-hellenic games, in the camp, in the hunting-field, on the
benches of the council chamber, and beneath the porches of the Agora,
men were all in all unto each other. Women meanwhile kept the house at
home, gave birth to babies, and reared children till such time as the
State thought fit to undertake their training. It is, moreover, well
known that the age at which boys were separated from their mothers was
tender. Thenceforth they lived with persons of their own sex; their
expanding feelings were confined within the sphere of masculine
experience until the age arrived when marriage had to be considered in
the light of a duty to the commonwealth. How far this tended to
influence the growth of sentiment, and to determine its quality, may be
imagined.

In the foregoing paragraph I have restricted my attention almost wholly
to the Dorians: but what has just been said about the circumstance of
their social life suggests a further consideration regarding paiderastia
at large among the Greeks, which takes rank with the weightiest of all.
The peculiar status of Greek women is a subject surrounded with
difficulty; yet no man can help feeling that the idealisation of
masculine love, which formed so prominent a feature of Greek life in the
historic period, was intimately connected with the failure of the race
to give their proper sphere in society to women. The Greeks themselves
were not directly conscious of this fact; nor can I remember any passage
in which a Greek has suggested that boy-love flourished precisely upon
the special ground which had been wrestled from the right domain of file
other sex. Far in advance of the barbarian tribes around them, they
could not well discern the defects of their own civilisation; nor was it
to be expected that they should have anticipated that exaltation of the
love of women into a semi-religious cult which was the later product of
chival