Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/68

 of childhood, damage to emotional tranquillity and innocence of youth. It becomes a baneful social influence, and a menace to national and individual well-being, whether in Greece or any other land, whether in past epochs, or about us to day.

Pederasty became a most influential sentiment in Greek life, during numerous periods of greater or lesser importance and interest. As its harmful relations to youth became clearer understood, it was directly legislated against, often most severely, by Greek lawgivers; sometimes was strongly repudiated socially. But this hostile attitude was a fluctuating matter. Through long epochs of all that was most Greek, boy-love was regarded as quite as legitimate and ideal a sentiment as the love of a man for a woman, or even more so. General was the passion of a man, not merely a young man, or a lad, for the loveliness of a boy just verging on manhood, and so uniting especially the first potency of the masculine physique with the grace of the feminine, and at the same time offering the spontaneous psychic charm of youthful, boyish natures. Pederastic admiration was outspoken and accepted by all classes, from philosophers and poets to statesmen or the humblest citizens. The Greek lyric and dramatic writers made it their theme. Theognis, Anacreon, Pindar, Meleager, Euripides, Plato, Lucian, Athenaeus, and so on in an endless succession, "married it to immortal verse," to noble prose or to learned study. Amusingly, we discover how Socratism juggled rhetorically with it. For, it is true that we find the Greek philosophers, eternal straw-splitters, often insisting on line distinctions in the quality of pederasty. They persisted in giving it as far as possible an intellectual and educational and other complexions. They draped elegantly its nudely physical quality, they made it what we might call pedophily, in place of pederasty. But it is not easy to believe in the sincerity of