rous Christianity. We, from the standpoint of a more fully
organised society, detect their errors, and pronounce that paiderastia
was a necessary consequence of their unequal social culture; nor do we
fail to notice that, just as paiderastia was a post-Homeric intrusion
into Greek life, so women, after the age of the Homeric poems, suffered
a corresponding depression in the social scale. In the _Iliad_ and the
_Odyssey_, and in the tragedies which deal with the heroic age, they
play a part of importance for which the actual conditions of historic
Hellas offered no opportunities.

It was at Athens that the social disadvantages of women told with
greatest force; and this perhaps may help to explain the philosophic
idealisation of boy-love among the Athenians. To talk familiarly with
free women on the deepest subjects, to treat them as intellectual
companions, or to choose them as associates in undertakings of political
moment, seems never to have entered the mind of an Athenian. Women were
conspicuous by their absence from all places of resort--from the
palaestra, the theatre, the Agora, Pnyx, the law-court, the symposium;
and it was here, and here alone, that the spiritual energies of the men
expanded. Therefore, as the military ardour of the Dorians naturally
associated itself with paiderastia, so the characteristic passion of the
Athenians for culture took the same direction. The result in each case
was a highly wrought psychical condition, which, however alien to our
instincts, must be regarded as an exaltation of the race above its
common human needs--as a manifestation of fervid, highly-pitched
emotional enthusiasm.

It does not follow from the facts which I have just discussed that,
either at Athens or at Sparta, women were excluded from an important
position in the home, or that the family in Greece was not the sphere of
female influence more active than the extant fragments of Greek
literature reveal to us. The women of Sophocles and Euripides, and the
noble ladies described by Plutarch, warn us to be cautious in our
conclusions on this topic. The fact, however, remains that in Greece, as
in mediaeval Europe, the home was not regarded as the proper sphere for
enthusiastic passion: both paiderastia and chivalry ignored the family,
while the latter even set the matrimonial tie at nought. It is therefore
precisely at this point of the family, regarded as a comparatively
undeveloped factor in the higher spiritual li