Sym- posium. Intkoduc- TION. would be better cared for than was possible in a great household of slaves. It is difficult to adduce the authority of Plato either for or against such practices or customs, because it is not always easy to determine whether he is speaking of ' the heavenly and philo- sophical love, or of the coarse Polyhymnia :' and he often refers to this (e.g. in the Symposium) half in jest, yet 'with a certain degree of seriousness.' We observe that they entered into one part of Greek literature, but not into another, and that the larger part is free from such associations. Indecency was an element of the ludicrous in the old Greek Comedy, as it has been in other ages and countries. But effeminate love was always condemned as well as ridiculed by the Comic poets ; and in the New Comedy the allusions to such topics have disappeared. They seem to have been no longer tolerated by the greater refinement of the age. False sentiment is found in the Lyric and Elegiac poets ; and in mythology ' the greatest of the Gods ' (Rep. iii. 388 B) is not exempt from evil imputations. But the morals of a nation are not to be judged of wholly by its literature. Hellas was not necessarily more corrupted in the days of the Persian and Pelo- ponnesian wars, or of Plato and the Orators, than England in the time of Fielding and Smollett, or France in the nineteenth century. No one supposes certain French novels to be a repre- sentation of ordinary French life. And the greater part of Greek hterature, beginning with Homer and including the tragedians, philosophers, and, with the exception of the Comic poets (whose business was to raise a laugh by whatever means), all the greater writers of Hellas who have been preserved to us, are free from the taint of indecency. Some general considerations occur to our mind when we begin to reflect on this subject, (i) That good and evil are linked toge- ther in human nature, and have often existed side by side in the world and in man to an extent hardly credible. We can- not distinguish them, and are therefore unable to part them ; as in the parable ' they grow together unto the harvest : ' it is only a rule of external decency by which society can divide them. Nor should we be right in inferring from the prevalence of any one vice or corruption that a state or individual was de- moralized in their whole character. Not only has the corruption
