enjoy the beauty of the youth, and the other forbidding him; for
the one is a lover of the body and hungers after beauty like ripe
fruit, and would fain satisfy himself without any regard to the
character of the beloved; the other holds the desire of the body to
be a secondary matter, and, looking rather than loving with his
soul, and desiring the soul of the other in a becoming manner,
regards the satisfaction of the bodily love as wantonness; he
reverences and respects temperance and courage and magnanimity and
wisdom, and wishes to live chastely with the chaste object of his
affection."

It is remarkable that Plato, in this analysis of the three sorts of
love, keeps strictly within the bounds of paiderastia. He rejects desire
and the mixed sort of love, reserving friendship (_Philia_) and
ordaining marriage for the satisfaction of the aphrodisiac instinct at a
fitting age, but more particularly for the procreation of children.
Wantonness of every description is to be made as much a sin as incest,
both by law and also by the world's opinion. If Olympian victors, with
an earthly crown in view, learn to live chastely for the preservation of
their strength while training, shall not men, whose contest is for
heavenly prizes, keep their bodies undefiled, their spirits holy?

Socrates, the mystagogue of amorous philosophy, is absent, as I have
observed, from this discussion of the laws. I turn now to those earlier
dialogues in which he expounds the doctrine of Platonic, or, as I should
prefer to call it, Socratic, love. We know from Xenophon, as well as
Plato, that Socrates named his philosophy the Science of Love. The one
thing on which I pride myself, he says, is knowledge of all matters that
pertain to love. It furthermore appears that Socrates thought himself in
a peculiar sense predestined to reform and to ennoble paiderastia.
"Finding this passion at its height throughout the whole of Hellas, but
most especially in Athens, and all places full of evil lovers and of
youths seduced, he felt a pity for both parties. Not being a lawgiver
like Solon, he could not stop the custom by statute, nor correct it by
force, nor again dissuade men from it by his eloquence. He did not,
however, on that account abandon the lovers or the boys to their fate,
but tried to suggest a remedy." This passage, which I have paraphrased
from Maximus Tyrius,[157] sufficiently expresses the attitude ass