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 philosophical 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.) 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 Peloponnesian 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
representation of ordinary French life. And the greater part of Greek
literature, 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. (1) That good and evil are linked together in human nature,
and have often existed side by side in the world and in man to an extent
hardly credible. We cannot distinguish them, and are therefore unable to
part them; as in the parable 'they grow together unto the harvest:' it is