ation supplied by Rosenbaum in
his _Geschichte der Lustseuche im Alterthume_, makes it clear to my mind
that the unisexual vices of barbarians follow, not the type of Greek
paiderastia, but that of the Scythian disease of effeminacy, described
by Herodotus and Hippocrates as something essentially foreign and
non-Hellenic. In all these cases, whether we regard the Scythian
impotent effeminates, the North American Bardashes, the Tsecats of
Madagascar, the Cordaches of the Canadian Indians and similar classes
among Californian Indians, natives of Venezuela, and so forth--the
characteristic point is that effeminate males renounce their sex, assume
female clothes, and live either in promiscuous concubinage with the men
of the tribe or else in marriage with chosen persons. This abandonment
of the masculine attributes and habits, this assumption of feminine
duties and costume, would have been abhorrent to the Doric custom.
Precisely similar effeminacies were recognised as pathological by
Herodotus, to whom Greek paiderastia was familiar. The distinctive
feature of Dorian comradeship was that it remained on both sides
masculine, tolerating no sort of softness. For similar reasons, what we
know about the prevalence of sodomy among the primitive peoples of
Mexico, Peru and Yucatan, and almost all half-savage nations,[45]
throws little light upon the subject of the present inquiry. Nor do we
gain anything of importance from the semi-religious practices of
Japanese Bonzes or Egyptian priests. Such facts, taken in connection
with abundant modern experience of what are called unnatural vices, only
prove the universality of unisexual indulgence in all parts of the world
and under all conditions of society. Considerable psychological interest
attaches to the study of these sexual aberrations. It is also true that
we detect in them the germ or raw material of a custom which the Dorians
moralised or developed after a specific fashion; but nowhere do we find
an analogue to their peculiar institutions. It was just that effort to
moralise and adapt to social use a practice which has elsewhere been
excluded in the course of civil growth, or has been allowed to linger
half-acknowledged as a remnant of more primitive conditions, or has
re-appeared in the corruption of society; it was just this effort to
elevate paiderastia according to the aesthetic standard of Greek ethics
which constituted its distinctive quality in Hellas. We are obliged, in