=Masked Sadism.= Their stormy jealousy was more akin to hatred than to love. There was no tenderness in it but a good deal of sadism, of cruelty, and they used it in order to torture their mates on whom, in the course of their jealous scenes, they could heap up abuse, which they would not, under any other circumstances, dare to voice as freely. Many a husband would like to insult a wife he detests. Neurotic jealousy supplies him with an excuse which he might not find elsewhere. After which, if the vocabulary he used on that occasion is especially vile, he has a good scapegoat at his disposal. "I was crazed by jealousy and did not realise what I was saying." CHAPTER XVII HOMOSEXUALISM; ITS GENESIS Love's normal goal is the union of the male and the female in a way which may insure the reproduction of the species. At times, however, we behold love deviating from the path that leads to that goal: a man may love another man as passionately as he would love a woman, a woman may be consumed with desire for another woman. Certain parts of the ancient world looked with indifference upon such deviations from the normal. The poems of Sappho, the dialogues of Plato, to only mention the best known sources of information on the subject, prove that in classic Greece homosexual unions were countenanced by public opinion. In the "Banquet" young Alkibiades describes, with a frankness reminiscent of eighteenth century novels, his attempts at "seducing" Socrates. In the holy island of Thera an inscription commemorates the "wedding" of two young men, Erastos and Klainos, which was celebrated with all sorts of ceremonies. A distinction was even drawn in those days between homosexual love which was purely sexual and the kind of love which was both sexual and intellectual. =Groups of Male Lovers=, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, Kratinos and Aristodemos, etc., became famous and legendary owing to their unusual faithfulness and constancy. Pederasty was countenanced by the very behavior of the Greek gods, of Zeus in particular. The various philosophers granted women the right to indulge in homosexual love if they wished, but, nevertheless, Lesbian love, as it was called after Sappho of Lesbos, was rather considered as a freak of nature, if not a vice. The low social condition of Hellenic women accounts for that illogical difference in treatment. =Women Were Harem Slaves= with little opportunity for intellectual development and their homosexualism could not drape itself in the mantle of intellectual pretence which it wore in the gymnasiums and schools frequented by men. Greek mythology offers no example of love between goddesses. Sappho and the Lesbian poetesses gave female passion an eminent place in Greek literature but the Aeolian women did not found a tradition corresponding to that of the Dorian men.