chastened members to the family circle.[1] Yet to complete the picture one other sin against morality must be mentioned, which travels beyond the belief and almost eludes the conception of any ordinary mind. The incredible perversion of sexual instinct named paederasty is still more than ever rife in the principal cities of the East. Idealized by the Greek philosophers,[2] tolerated by the later Republic,[2] and almost deified[3] under many of the pagan emperors,[4] it has with-**
- ↑ Chrysostom. Habentes autem eumdem, etc. Hom. ii, 9 (in Migne, iii, 284).
- ↑ See Plato's Phaedrus, Symposium, etc.; Plutarch, Pelopidas, 19. A modern Democritus might smile at the conclusion of Lucian that, whilst the commerce of the sexes is necessary for the propagation of the race, paederasty is the ideal sphere for the love of philosophers; Amores. According to Aristotle, Minos introduced the practice into Crete as an antidote against over-population; Politics, ii, 10; vii, 16. In this respect the Greeks, perhaps, corrupted on the one hand and on the other Romans and Persians alike; Herodotus, i, 135. It was indigenous, however, among the Etruscans; Athenaeus, xii, 14, etc.
- ↑ I have not, however, fallen in with any account of the dedication of a temple to Amor Virilis. Such a shrine would have been quite worthy of Nero or Elagabalus, indeed of Hadrian.
- ↑ Suetonius, Nero, 28; Hist. Aug. Hadrian, 14; Heliogabalus, 6, 15,
etc.; Statius, Silvae, iii, 4, etc. The adulation of this vice pervaded even
the golden age of Latin poetry:
But Virgil's songs are pure except that horrid one
Beginning with "Formosum pastor Corydon."
Byron, Don Juan, i, 42.For the estimation in which paederasty was held in Crete see Strabo, X, iv, 21; Athenaeus, xi, 20. Old men even wore a robe of "honour" to indicate that in youth they had been chosen to act the part of a pathic. The epigram on Julius Caesar is well known—"omnium mulierum vir, omnium virorum mulier"; Suetonius, in Vit. 52. Anastasius, who seems
