Page:Symonds - A Problem in Greek Ethics.djvu/19

Rh quotation from one of the most eloquent of the later rhetoricians will sufficiently set forth the contrast, which the Greek race never wholly forgot: —

And again, in the same dissertation, Maximus Tyrius speaks to like purpose, clothing his precepts in imagery:—

With the baser form of paiderastia I shall have little to do in this essay. Vice of this kind does not vary to any great extent, whether we observe it in Athens or in Rome, in Florence of the sixteenth or in Paris of the nineteenth century; nor in Hellas was it more noticeable than elsewhere, except for its comparative publicity. The nobler type of masculine love developed by the Greeks is, on the contrary, almost unique in the history of the human race. It is that which more than anything else distinguishes the Greeks from the barbarians of their own time, from the Romans and from modern men in all that appertains to the emotions. The immediate subject of the ensuing inquiry