ls, a distinction however, which
bears no relation to love.

Monogamy had conquered, in principle at least and as an ideal.

The profoundly mystical core of the most powerful Greek tragedy which
has come down to our time, the _Orestes_ of Aeschylus, represents the
victory of the new gods of light over the old maternal powers. Orestes
has sinned against the old law, for in order to avenge his father's
death, he has slain his mother. The sun-god Apollo and the sinister
Erinnys, the upholders of the old maternal right, are waging war over
the justifiableness of the deed. To the Erinnys, matricide is the
foulest of all crimes, for man is more nearly related to the mother than
to the father. But Apollo had commanded the deed, so that the father's
murder should not remain unavenged.

Not to the mother is the child indebted
For life; she tends and guards the kindling spark
The father lighted; she but holds his pledge.----

he explains. And the answer is the lament of the Erinnys:

Thus thou destroy'st the gods of ancient times!

Athene, the virgin goddess, the motherless daughter of Zeus, appearing
as mediator between the opponents, decides in favour of the new
dispensation which places the father's claim above the mother's. Orestes
is free of guilt; his deed was justifiable according to the canons of
the new law. The tragedy is the symbolical commemoration of the victory
of the male principle in Greece. But Athene is the embodiment of the new
hermaphroditic ideal of the Greek which stood in close connexion to
their homosexuality, and with which I propose to deal later on.

There is a psychical law ordaining that nothing which has ever quickened
the soul of man shall be entirely lost. Were it not so, the storehouses
of the soul would stand empty. New values are created, but the old
verities endure; as a rule they are relegated to a lower sphere, to
inferior social layers, but they persist and frequently merge into the
new. This law applies without exception to the relationship between the
sexes; we shall come upon it again and again. During the second stage,
characterised by the spiritual love foreign to the ancients, the purely
sexual impulse continued as an unimpaired force, but it had lost its
prestige and was not only regarded as ignoble and base, but also
stigmatised as sinful and demoniacal. The hearts of men were stirred by
new ideals.

A similar attitude, perhaps not quite so uncompromising