of reproductive organs was
male, the other female. Zeus, on account of the insolence and vigour of
these primitive human creatures, sliced them into halves. Since that
time, the halves of each sort have always striven to unite with their
corresponding halves, and have found some satisfaction in carnal
congress--males with males, females with females, and (in the case of
the lunar or hermaphroditic creatures) males and females with one
another. Philosophically, then, the homosexual passion of female for
female, and of male for male, was placed upon exactly the same footing
as the heterosexual passion of each sex for its opposite. Greek logic
admitted the homosexual female to equal rights with the homosexual male,
and both to the same natural freedom as heterosexual individuals of
either species.

Although this was the position assumed by philosophers, Lesbian passion,
as the Greeks called it, never obtained the same social sanction as
boy-love. It is significant that Greek mythology offers no legends of
the goddesses parallel to those which consecrated paiderastia among the
male deities. Again, we have no recorded example, so far as I can
remember, of noble friendships between women rising into political and
historical prominence. There are no female analogies to Harmodius and
Aristogeiton, Cratinus and Aristodemus. It is true that Sappho and the
Lesbian poetesses gave this female passion an eminent place in Greek
literature. But the AEolian women did not found a glorious tradition
corresponding to that of the Dorian men. If homosexual love between
females assumed the form of an institution at one moment in AEolia, this
failed to strike roots deep into the subsoil of the nation. Later
Greeks, while tolerating, regarded it rather as an eccentricity of
nature, or a vice, than as an honourable and socially useful emotion.
The condition of women in ancient Hellas sufficiently accounts for the
result. There was no opportunity in the harem or the zenana of raising
homosexual passion to the same moral and spiritual efficiency as it
obtained in the camp, the palaestra, and the schools of the philosophers.
Consequently, while the Greeks utilised and ennobled boy-love, they left
Lesbian love to follow the same course of degeneracy as it pursues in
modern times.

In order to see how similar the type of Lesbian love in ancient Greece
was to the form which it assumed in modern Europe, we have only to
compare Lucian's Dialogues wit