uns as follows:[87] "Inflaming with his thighs the
royalty of Zeus."

Whether Euripides treated paiderastia directly in any of his plays is
not quite certain, though the title _Chrysippus_, and one fragment
preserved from that tragedy--

"Nature constrains me though I have sound judgment"--

justify us in believing that he made the crime of Laius his subject. It
may be added that a passage in Cicero confirms this belief.[88] The
title of another tragedy, _Peirithous_, seems in like manner to point at
friendship; while a beautiful quotation from the _Dictys_ sufficiently
indicates the high moral tone assumed by Euripides in treating of Greek
love. It runs as follows:--"He was my friend; and never may love lead me
to folly, nor to Kupris. There is, in truth, another kind of love--love
for the soul, righteous, temperate, and good. Surely men ought to have
made this law, that only the temperate and chaste should love and send
Kupris, daughter of Zeus, a-begging." The philosophic ideal of
comradeship is here vitalised by the dramatic vigour of the poet; nor
has the Hellenic conception of pure affection for "a soul, just,
upright, temperate and good," been elsewhere more pithily expressed. The
Euripidean conception of friendship, it may further be observed, is
nobly personified in Pylades, who plays a generous and self-devoted part
in the three tragedies of _Electra_, _Orestes_, and _Iphigenia in
Tauris_.

Having collected these notices of tragedies which dealt with boy-love,
it may be well to add a word upon comedies in the same relation. We hear
of a _Paidika_ by Sophron, a _Malthakoi_ by the older Cratinus, a
_Baptoee_ by Empolis, in which Alcibiades and his society were satirised.
_Paiderastes_ is the title of plays by Diphilis and Antiphanes;
_Ganymedes_ of plays of Alkaeus, Antiphanes and Eubulus.

What has been quoted from AEschylus and Sophocles sufficiently
establishes the fact that paiderastia was publicly received with
approbation on the tragic stage. This should make us cautious in
rejecting the stories which are told about the love adventures of
Sophocles.[89] Athenaeus calls him a lover of lads, nor is it strange if,
in the age of Pericles, and while he was producing the _Achilles'
Loves_, he should have shared the tastes of which his race approved.

At this point it may be as well to mention a few illustrious names
which, to the student of Greek art and literature, are indissolubly
connected with pai