em. Finding it within their hearts,
they chose to regulate it, rather than to root it out. It was only after
the inconveniences and scandals to which paiderastia gave rise had been
forced upon their notice, that they felt the visitings of conscience and
wavered in their fearless attitude.

In like manner, the religion of the Greeks was aesthetic. They analysed
the world of objects and the soul of man, unconsciously perhaps, but
effectively, and called their generalisations by the names of gods and
goddesses. That these were beautiful and filled with human energy was
enough to arouse in them the sentiments of worship. The notion of a
single Deity who ruled the human race by punishment and favour, hating
certain acts while he tolerated others--in other words, a God who
idealised one part of man's nature to the exclusion of the rest--had
never passed into the sphere of Greek conceptions. When, therefore,
paiderastia became a fact of their consciousness, they reasoned thus: If
man loves boys, God loves boys also. Homer and Hesiod forgot to tell us
about Ganymede and Hyacinth and Hylas. Let these lads be added to the
list of Danae and Semele and Io. Homer told us that, because Ganymede
was beautiful, Zeus made him the serving-boy of the immortals. We
understand the meaning of that tale. Zeus loved him. The reason why he
did not leave him here on earth like Danae was that he could not beget
sons upon his body and people the earth with heroes. Do not our wives
stay at home and breed our children? "Our favourite youths" are always
at our side.

XIX.

Sexual inversion among Greek women offers more difficulties than we met
with in the study of paiderastia. This is due, not to the absence of the
phenomenon, but to the fact that feminine homosexual passions were never
worked into the social system, never became educational and military
agents. The Greeks accepted the fact that certain females are
congenitally indifferent to the male sex, and appetitive of their own
sex. This appears from the myth of Aristophanes in Plato's _Symposium_,
which expresses in comic form their theory of sexual differentiation.
There were originally human beings of three sexes: men, the offspring of
the sun; women, the offspring of the earth; hermaphrodites, the
offspring of the moon. They were round with two faces, four hands, four
feet, and two sets of reproductive organs apiece. In the case of the
third (hermaphroditic or lunar) sex, one set