nces. Meanwhile, paiderastia as a
vice did not diminish. It only grew more wanton and voluptuous. Little,
therefore, can be gained by tracing its historical development further,
although it is not without interest to note the mode of feeling and the
opinion of some later poets and rhetoricians.

The Idyllists are the only poets, if we except a few epigrammatists of
the _Anthology_, who preserve a portion of the old heroic sentiment. No
true student of Greek literature will have felt that he could strictly
censure the paiderastic passages of the _Thalysia_, _Aites_, _Hylas_,
_Paidika_. They have the ring of genuine and respectable emotion. This
may also be said about the two fragments of Bion which begin, _Hespere
tas eratas_ and _Olbioi oi phileontes_. The _Duseros_, ascribed without
due warrant to Theocritus, is in many respects a beautiful composition,
but it lacks the fresh and manly touches of the master's style, and
bears the stamp of an unwholesome rhetoric. Why, indeed, should we pity
this suicide, and why should the statue of Love have fallen on the
object of his admiration? Maximus Tyrius showed more sense when he
contemptuously wrote about those men who killed themselves for love of a
beautiful lad in Locri:[167] "And in good sooth they deserved to die."

The dialogue, entitled _Erotes_, attributed to Lucian, deserves a
paragraph. More than any other composition of the rhetorical age of
Greek literature, it attempts a comprehensive treatment of erotic
passion, and sums up the teaching of the doctors and the predilections
of the vulgar in one treatise.[168] Like many of Lucian's compositions,
it has what may be termed a retrospective and resumptive value. That is
to say, it represents less the actual feeling of the author and his age
than the result of his reading and reflection brought into harmony with
his experience. The scene is laid at Cnidus, in the groves of Aphrodite.
The temple and the garden and the statue of Praxiteles are described
with a luxury of language which strikes the keynote of the dialogue. We
have exchanged the company of Plato, Xenophon, or AEschines for that of a
Juvenalian _Graeculus_, a delicate aesthetic voluptuary. Every epithet
smells of musk, and every phrase is a provocative. The interlocutors
are Callicratides, the Athenian, and Charicles, the Rhodian.
Callicratides kept an establishment of _exoleti_; when the down upon
their chins had grown beyond the proper point--"when the bea