d "friendship with advantage for its object," Aristotle is
aiming at the vicious sort of paiderastia. As regards his silence in
the _Politics_, it is worth noticing that this treatise breaks off at
the very point where we should naturally look for a scientific handling
of the education of the passions; and, therefore, it is possible that we
may have lost the weightiest utterance of Greek philosophy upon the
matter of our enquiry.

Though Aristotle contains but little to the purpose, the case is
different with Plato; nor would it be possible to omit a detailed
examination of the Platonic doctrine on the topic, or to neglect the
attempt he made to analyse and purify a passion, capable, according to
his earlier philosophical speculations, of supplying the starting-point
for spiritual progress.

The first point to notice in the Platonic treatment of paiderastia is
the difference between the ethical opinions expressed in the _Phaedrus_,
_Symposium_, _Republic_, _Charmides_, and _Lysis_, on the one hand, and
those expounded in the _Laws_ upon the other. The _Laws_, which are
probably a genuine work of Plato's old age, condemn that passion which,
in the _Phaedrus_ and _Symposium_, he exalted as the greatest boon of
human life and as the groundwork of the philosophical temperament; the
ordinary social manifestations of which he described with sympathy in
the _Lysis_ and the _Charmides_; and which he viewed with more than
toleration in the _Republic_. It is not my business to offer a solution
of this contradiction; but I may observe that Socrates, who plays the
part of protagonist in nearly all the other dialogues of Plato, and who,
as we shall see, professed a special cult of love, is conspicuous by his
absence in the _Laws_. It is, therefore, not improbable that the
philosophical idealisation of paiderastia, to which the name of Platonic
love is usually given, should rather be described as Socratic. However
that may be, I think it will be well to deal first with the doctrine put
into the mouth of the Athenian stranger in the _Laws_, and then to pass
on to the consideration of what Socrates is made to say upon the subject
of Greek love in the earlier dialogues.

The position assumed by Plato in the _Laws_ (p. 636) is this: Syssitia
and gymnasia are excellent institutions in their way, but they have a
tendency to degrade natural love in man below the level of the beasts.
Pleasure is only natural when it arises out of the inter