Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/71

 The similisexual passion between women appears with distinctness in Greek social life, and enters into Hellenic literature with emphasis. It has, in fact, received a specific name, Lesbianism, from the relationship of the great woman-poet of Hellas to the passion. "Greek love" as a term has been long applied almost as particularly to female similisexualism, and to its grosser phases, as it has been to masculine passion. But no legislative notice was taken of feminine similisexualism by Greek statutory law. Society smiled at it, or ignored it; just as is the case today. It never acquired any dignified philosophic or other recognition in Greece, at any time; apparently being relegated to the indifference that was felt toward much that was feminine, by the Hellene.

Rooted in the primitive Etruscan and and Latin peoples, a covert passion in the earlier and less aesthetic Roman State, strengthened by Greek and Oriental influences in proportion to the progress of luxury and loss of idealism in later periods of Roman civilization, the sexual passion of the male for the male pervaded Rome with cumulative vigour. Throughout classic and pagan epochs, it was, successively, either tolerated; or merely spasmodically reprehended as a civil danger, rather than treated through any general moral question of it; or satirized, idealized, glorified; or simply taken for granted. We are often assured that primitive Latin society was a stranger to it, or regarded it as a moral disgrace. This is not the fact, any more than that it became first influential in Latin character through importation from Greece. It did however suffer shameful debasements from Greek ideals, when Roman corruption of social morals was at the fullest, along with the Roman grossness that distorted so much of what in Greek conditions was richly ideal and spiritual.