h Parisian tales by Catulle Mendes or Guy
de Maupassant. The woman who seduces the girl she loves, is, in the
girl's phrase, "over-masculine," "androgynous." The Megilla of Lucian
insists upon being called Megillos. The girl is a weaker vessel, pliant,
submissive to the virago's sexual energy, selected from the class of
meretricious _ingenues_.

There is an important passage in the _Amores_ of Lucian which proves
that the Greeks felt an abhorrence of sexual inversion among women
similar to that which moderns feel for its manifestation among men.
Charicles, who supports, the cause of normal heterosexual passion,
argues after this wise:

"If you concede homosexual love to males, you must in justice grant
the same to females; you will have to sanction carnal intercourse
between them; monstrous instruments of lust will have to be
permitted, in order that their sexual congress may be carried out;
that obscene vocable, tribad, which so rarely offends our ears--I
blush to utter it--will become rampant, and Philaenis will spread
androgynous orgies throughout our harems."

What these monstrous instruments of lust were may be gathered from the
sixth mime of Herodas, where one of them is described in detail.
Philaenis may, perhaps, be the poetess of an obscene book on sensual
refinements, to which Athanaeus alludes (_Deipnosophistae_, viii, 335). It
is also possible that Philaenis had become the common designation of a
Lesbian lover, a tribad. In the latter periods of Greek literature, as I
have elsewhere shown, certain fixed masks of Attic comedy (corresponding
to the masks of the Italian _Commedia dell' Arte_) created types of
character under conventional names--so that, for example, Cerdo became a
cobbler, Myrtale a common whore, and possibly Philaenis a Lesbian invert.

The upshot of this parenthetical investigation is to demonstrate that,
while the love of males for males in Greece obtained moralisation, and
reached the high position of a recognised social function, the love of
female for female remained undeveloped and unhonoured, on the same level
as both forms of homosexual passion in the modern European world are.

XX.

Greece merged into Rome; but, though the Romans aped the arts and
manners of the Greeks, they never truly caught the Hellenic spirit. Even
Virgil only trod the court of the Gentiles of Greek culture. It was not,
therefore, possible that any social custom so