umed
by Socrates in the Platonic dialogue. He sympathises with Greek lovers,
and avows a fervent admiration for beauty in the persons of young men.
At the same time, he declares himself upon the side of temperate and
generous affection and strives to utilise the erotic enthusiasm as a
motive power in the direction of philosophy. This was really nothing
more or less than an attempt to educate the Athenians by appealing to
their own higher instincts. We have seen that paiderastia in the prime
of Hellenic culture, whatever sensual admixture it might have contained,
was a masculine passion. It was closely connected with the love of
political independence, with the contempt for Asiatic luxury, with the
gymnastic sports, and with the intellectual interests which
distinguished Hellenes from barbarians. Partly owing to the social
habits of their cities, and partly to the peculiar notions which they
entertained regarding the seclusion of free women in the home, all the
higher elements of spiritual and mental activity, and the conditions
under which a generous passion was conceivable, had become the exclusive
privileges of men. It was not that women occupied a semi-servile
station, as some students have imagined, or that within the sphere of
the household they were not the respected and trusted helpmates of men.
But circumstances rendered it impossible for them to excite romantic and
enthusiastic passion. The exaltation of the emotions was reserved for
the male sex.

Socrates, therefore, sought to direct and moralise a force already
existing. In the _Phaedrus_ he describes the passion of love between man
and boy as a madness, not different in quality from that which inspires
poets; and, after painting that fervid picture of the lover, he declares
that the true object of a noble life can only be attained by passionate
friends, bound together in the chains of close yet temperate
comradeship, seeking always to advance in knowledge, self-restraint, and
intellectual illumination. The doctrine of the _Symposium_ is not
different, except that Socrates here takes a higher flight. The same
love is treated as the method whereby the soul may begin her mystic
journey to the region of essential beauty, truth, and goodness. It has
frequently been remarked that Plato's dialogues have to be read as
poems, even more than as philosophical treatises; and if this be true at
all, it is particularly true of both the _Phaedrus_ and the _Symposium_.
Th