pt one, Cleostratus. To clothe this youth, his lover, Menestratus,
forged a brazen coat of mail, thick set with hooks turned upwards. The
dragon swallowed Cleostratus and killed him, but died by reason of the
hooks. Thus love was the salvation of the city and the source of
immortality to the two friends.

* * * * *

It would not be difficult to multiply romances of this kind; the
rhetoricians and moralists of later Greece abound in them.[31] But the
most famous of all remains to be recorded. This is the story of
Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who freed Athens from the tyrant Hipparchus.
There is not a speech, a poem, essay, a panegyrical oration in praise of
either Athenian liberty or Greek love which does not tell the tale of
this heroic friendship. Herodotus and Thucydides treat the event as
matter of serious history. Plato refers to it as the beginning of
freedom for the Athenians. "The drinking-song in honour of these lovers,
is one of the most precious fragments of popular Greek poetry which we
possess. As in the cases of Lucretia and Virginia, so here a tyrant's
intemperance was the occasion, if not the cause, of a great nation's
rising. Harmodius and Aristogeiton were reverenced as martyrs and
saviours of their country. Their names gave consecration to the love
which made them bold against the despot, and they became at Athens
eponyms of paiderastia."[32]

X.

A considerable majority of the legends which have been related in the
preceding section are Dorian, and the Dorians gave the earliest and most
marked encouragement to Greek love. Nowhere else, indeed, except among
the Dorians, who were an essentially military race, living like an army
of occupation in the countries they had seized, herding together in
barracks and at public messes, and submitting to martial drill and
discipline, do we meet with paiderastia developed as an institution. In
Crete and Lacedaemon it became a potent instrument of education. What I
have to say, in the first instance, on this matter is derived almost
entirely from C. O. Muellers's _Dorians_,[33] to which work I refer my
readers for the authorities cited in illustration of each detail. Plato
says that the law of Lycurgus in respect to love was _Poikiles_,[34] by
which he means that it allowed the custom under certain restrictions. It
would appear that the lover was called Inspirer, at Sparta, while the
youth he loved was named Hearer. These lo