Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/144

 the Egyptian and Caananitish peoples, vices to be avoided by the Hebrew fugitives. In ancient Greece, where the impulse appears to have been widely distributed, though our data is relatively obscure when contrasted with that for Uranism, one brilliant woman of genius mysteriously connected with it has given two familiar terms to it—the poetess Sappho and her Lesbos. Sappho while she was of normal sexual emotions, even to a tragic passion for the youth Phaon, was also similisexual; and "sapphism" and "lesbianism" have passed into psychiatric language. Confused in use with male similisexualism, the expression "Greek love" also pertains to Uraniad-love. In Rome, under the Empire, it flourished. But of it less was spoken, less written, than masculine relationships. Juvenal speaks of the "infamous complaisances" for each other of "Taedia, Cluvia, Flora and Catulla". The Apostle Paul refers to it as a Roman vice. In classic days, as now, it was not taken so seriously as a moral or immoral problem. It was counted a feminine peccadillo, a faute de mieux that could easily be forgiven in a woman. We have already seen how largely it has been and is yet overlooked, by modern criminal law.

Under successive chapters of this study, we shall present the Uraniad's temperamental, social and professional relations to life and history. The following are general observation.

The Uraniad is met in almost all social situations that show superiour moral, intellectual and social traits. She can be highly receptive as to aesthetics. Under the latter type, let us remark her intense susceptibility to music,, which susceptibility can be blent into merely high nervosity, without any intellectual sense of the art. The Uraniad frequently enters with absorbing earnestness into severe professions of the masculine order. She exhibits more success in meeting their