fact, to separate this, the true Hellenic manifestation of the
paiderastic passion, from the effeminacies, brutalities, and gross
sensualities which can be noticed alike in imperfectly civilised and in
luxuriously corrupt communities.

* * * * *

Before leaving this part of the subject, I must repeat that what I have
suggested regarding the intervention of the Dorians in creating the type
of Greek love is a pure speculation. If it has any value, that is due to
the fixed and regulated forms which paiderastic institutions displayed
at a very early date in Crete and Sparta, and also to the remnants of
savage customs embedded in them. It depends to a certain extent also
upon the absence of paiderastia in Homer. But on this point something
still remains to be said. Our Attic authorities certainly regarded the
Homeric poems as canonical books, decisive for the culture of the first
stage of Hellenic history. Yet it is clear that Homer refined Greek
mythology, while many of the cruder elements of that mythology survived
from pre-Homeric times in local cults and popular religious observances.
We know, moreover, that a body of non-Homeric writings, commonly called
the cyclic poems, existed by the side of Homer, some of the material of
which is preserved to us by dramatists, lyrists, historians, antiquaries
and anecdotists. It is not impossible that this so-called cyclical
literature contained paiderastic elements, which were eliminated, like
the grosser forms of myth, in the Homeric poems.[46] If this be
conceded, we might be led to conjecture that paiderastia was a remnant
of ancient savage habits, ignored by Homer, but preserved by tradition
in the race. Given the habit, the Greeks were certainly capable of
carrying it on without shame. We ought to resist the temptation to seek
a high and noble origin for all Greek institutions. But there remains
the fact that, however they acquired the habit, whether from North
Dorian customs antecedent to Homer, or from conditions of experience
subsequent to the Homeric age, the Greeks gave it a dignity and an
emotional superiority which is absent in the annals of barbarian
institutions. Instead of abandoning it as part of the obsolete lumber of
their prehistoric origins, they chose to elaborate it into the region of
romance and ideality. And this they did in spite of Homer's ignorance of
the passion or of his deliberate reticence. Whatever view, therefore, we