In the _Phædrus_, the _Symposium_, the _Charmides_, the _Lysis_, and the _Republic_, Plato dramatised the real Socrates, while he gave liberal scope to his own personal sympathy for paiderastia.[159] In the _Laws_, if we accept this treatise as the work of his old age, he discarded the Socratic mask, and wrote a kind of palinode, which indicates more moral growth than pure disapprobation of the paiderastic passion. I have already tried to show that the point of view in the _Laws_ is still Greek: that their author has not passed beyond the sphere of Hellenic ethics. He has only become more ascetic in his rule of conduct as the years advanced, importing the _rumores senum severiorum_ into his discourse, and recognising the imperfection of that halting-point between the two logical extremes of Pagan license and monastic asceticism which in the fervour of his greener age he advocated. As a young man, Plato felt sympathy for love so long as it was paiderastic and not spent on women; he even condoned a lapse through warmth of feeling into self-indulgence. As an old man, he denounced carnal pleasure of all kinds, and sought to limit the amative instincts to the one sole end of procreation. It has so happened that Plato's name is still connected with the ideal of passion purged from sensuality. Much might be written about the parallel between the _mania_ of the _Phædrus_ and the _joy_ of mediæval amorists. Nor would it be unprofitable to trace the points of contact between the love described by Dante in the _Vita Nuova_ and the paiderastia exalted to the heavens by Plato.[160] The spiritual passion for Beatrice, which raised the Florentine poet above vile things, and led him by the philosophic paths of the _Convito_ to the beatific vision of the _Paradiso_, bears no slight resemblance to the _Erôs_ of the _Symposium_. Yet we know that Dante could not have studied Plato's works; and the specific love which Plato praised he sternly stigmatised. The harmony between Greek and mediæval mysticism in this matter of the emotions rests on something permanent in human nature, common alike to paiderastia and to chivalrous enthusiasm for woman.