Nothing is more surprising to the modern than to find Plato speaking, page after page, of Love, as the safeguard of states and the tutoress of philosophy, and then to discover that what we call love, _i.e._, the love between man and woman, is not meant at all—scarcely comes within his consideration—but only the love between men—what we should call romantic friendship. His ideal of this latter love is ascetic; it is an absorbing passion, but it is held in strong control. The other love—the love of women—is for him a mere sensuality. In this, to some extent, lies the explanation of his philosophical position. But it is evident that in this fact—in the fact that among the Greeks the love of women was considered for the most part sensual, while the _romance_ of love went to the account of friendship, we have the strength and the weakness of the Greek civilisation. Strength, because by the recognition everywhere of romantic comradeship, public and private life was filled by a kind of divine fire; weakness, because by the non-recognition of woman’s equal part in such comradeship, her saving, healing, and redeeming influence was lost, and the Greek culture doomed to be to that extent one-sided. It will, we may hope, be the great triumph of the modern love (when it becomes more of a true comradeship between man and woman than it yet is) to give both to society and to the individual the grandest inspirations, and perhaps in conjunction with the other attachment, to lift the modern nations to a higher level of political and artistic advancement than even the Greeks attained. I quote one or two modern writers on the subject, and then some passages from Plato and others indicating the philosophy of friendship as entertained among the Greeks. [Sidenote: _Bishop Thirlwall on Greek Friendship_] Bishop Thirlwall, that excellent thinker and scholar, in his _History of Greece_ (vol. 1, p. 176) says:—