But indeed the whole conception of Eros the boy, familiar as it sounds to us from the long continued convention of literature, is, if we think of its origin or meaning, quite alien from our own habit of life and thought. Even in the middle ages it cohered but ill with the literary view of the relations between men and women in poetry and romance; hardly, except where it is raised into a higher sphere by the associations of religion, as in the friezes of Donatello, is it quite natural, and now, apart from what remains of these same associations, the natural basis of the conception is wholly obsolete. Since the fashion of squires and pages, inherited from the feudal system, ceased with the decay of the Renaissance, there has been nothing in modern life which even remotely suggests it. We still--such is the strength of tradition in art--speak of Love under the old types, and represent him under the image of a winged boy; but the whole condition of society in which this type grew up has disappeared and left the symbolism all but meaningless to the ordinary mind. In Greece it was otherwise. Side by side with the unchanging passions and affections of all mankind there was then a feeling, half conventional, and yet none the less of vital importance to thought and conduct, which elevated the mere physical charm of human youth into an object of almost divine worship. Beauty was the special gift of the gods, perhaps their choicest one; and not only so, but it was a passport to their favour. Common life in the open air, and above all the importance of the gymnasia, developed great perfection of bodily form and kept it constantly before all men's eyes. Art lavished all it knew on the reproduction of the forms of youthful beauty. Apart from the real feeling, the worship of this beauty became an overpowering fashion. To all this there must be added a fact of no less importance in historical Greece, the seclusion of women. Not that this ever existed in the Oriental sense; but, with much freedom and simplicity of relations inside the family, the share which women had in the public and external life of the city, at a time when the city meant so much, was comparatively slight. The greater freedom of women in Homer makes the world of the Iliad and Odyssey really more modern, more akin to our own, than that of the later poets. The girl in Theocritus, "with spring in her eyes,"[1] comes upon us as we read the Idyls almost like a modernism. It is in the fair shepherd boy, Daphnis or Thyrsis, that Greek pastoral finds its most obvious, one might almost say its most natural inspiration.