may take about Homer's silence, and about the possibility of paiderastia
occurring in the lost poems of the cyclic type, or lastly, about its
probable survival in the people from an age of savagery, we are bound to
regard its systematical development among the Dorians as a fact of
paramount significance.

In that passage of the _Symposium_[47] where Plato notices the Spartan
law of love as _Poikilos_, he speaks with disapprobation of the
Boeotians, who were not restrained by custom and opinion within the same
strict limits. Yet it should here be noted that the military aspect of
Greek love in the historic period was nowhere more distinguished than at
Thebes. Epaminondas was a notable boy-lover; and the names of his
beloved Asopichus and Cephisodorus are mentioned by Plutarch.[48] They
died, and were buried with him at Mantinea. The paiderastic legend of
Herakles and Iolaus was localised in Boeotia; and the lovers, Diocles and
Philolaus, who gave laws to Thebes, directly encouraged those masculine
attachments, which had their origin in the Palaestra.[49] The practical
outcome of these national institutions in the chief town of Boeotia was
the formation of the so-called Sacred Band, or Band of Lovers, upon whom
Pelopidas relied in his most perilous operations. Plutarch relates that
they were enrolled, in the first instance, by Gorgidas, the rank and
file of the regiment being composed of young men bound together by
affection. Report goes that they were never beaten till the battle of
Chaeronea. At the end of that day, fatal to the liberties of Hellas,
Philip of Macedon went forth to view the slain; and when he "came to
that place where the three hundred that fought his phalanx lay dead
together, he wondered, and understanding that it was the band of lovers,
he shed tears, and said, 'Perish any man who suspects that these men
either did or suffered anything that was base.'"[50] As at all the other
turning points of Greek history, so at this, too, there is something
dramatic and eventful. Thebes was the last strong-hold of Greek freedom;
the Sacred Band contained the pith and flower of her army; these lovers
had fallen to a man, like the Spartans of Leonidas at Thermopylae,
pierced by the lances of the Macedonian phalanx; then, when the day was
over and the dead were silent, Philip, the victor in that fight, shed
tears when he beheld their serried ranks, pronouncing himself therewith
the fittest epitaph which could have bee