justify us in believing that he made the crime of Laius his subject. It may be added that a passage in Cicero confirms this belief.[88] The title of another tragedy, _Peirithous_, seems in like manner to point at friendship; while a beautiful quotation from the _Dictys_ sufficiently indicates the high moral tone assumed by Euripides in treating of Greek love. It runs as follows:--"He was my friend; and never may love lead me to folly, nor to Kupris. There is, in truth, another kind of love--love for the soul, righteous, temperate, and good. Surely men ought to have made this law, that only the temperate and chaste should love and send Kupris, daughter of Zeus, a-begging." The philosophic ideal of comradeship is here vitalised by the dramatic vigour of the poet; nor has the Hellenic conception of pure affection for "a soul, just, upright, temperate and good," been elsewhere more pithily expressed. The Euripidean conception of friendship, it may further be observed, is nobly personified in Pylades, who plays a generous and self-devoted part in the three tragedies of _Electra_, _Orestes_, and _Iphigenia in Tauris_. Having collected these notices of tragedies which dealt with boy-love, it may be well to add a word upon comedies in the same relation. We hear of a _Paidika_ by Sophron, a _Malthakoi_ by the older Cratinus, a _Baptœe_ by Empolis, in which Alcibiades and his society were satirised. _Paiderastes_ is the title of plays by Diphilis and Antiphanes; _Ganymedes_ of plays of Alkaeus, Antiphanes and Eubulus. What has been quoted from Æschylus and Sophocles sufficiently establishes the fact that paiderastia was publicly received with approbation on the tragic stage. This should make us cautious in rejecting the stories which are told about the love adventures of Sophocles.[89] Athenæus calls him a lover of lads, nor is it strange if, in the age of Pericles, and while he was producing the _Achilles' Loves_, he should have shared the tastes of which his race approved. At this point it may be as well to mention a few illustrious names which, to the student of Greek art and literature, are indissolubly connected with paiderastia. Parmenides, whose life, like that of Pythagoras, was accounted peculiarly holy, loved his pupil Zeno.[90] Pheidias loved Pantarkes, a youth of Elis, and carved his portrait in the figure of a victorious athlete at the foot of the Olympian Zeus.[91] Euripides is said to have loved the adult Agathon Lysias, Demosthenes, and Æschines, orators whose conduct was open to the most searching censure of malicious criticism, did not scruple to avow their love. Socrates described his philosophy as the science of erotics. Plato defined the highest form of human existence to be "philosophy together with paiderastia," and composed the celebrated epigrams on Aster and on Agathon. This list might be indefinitely lengthened. XIII.