_Græco-Roman Social Depravity, Born of Religion and Traceable to the Gods._--The modern mind identifies true religion with perfect purity of heart and with boundless love. "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" is the leading aphorism of both the Hebrew and Christian faiths. The Sermon on the Mount is the chart of the soul on the sea of life; and its beatitudes are the glorifications of the virtues of meekness, mercy, and peace. To the mind imbued with the divine precepts of the Savior, it seems incredible that religion should have ever been the direct source of crime and sin. It is, nevertheless, a well-established fact that the Roman and Greek mythologies were the potent causes of political corruption and social impurity in both Italy and Greece. Nothing better illustrates this truth than the abominable practice that found its inspiration and excuse in the myth of the rape of Ganymede. The guilty passion of Zeus for the beautiful boy whom he, himself, in the form of an eagle, had snatched up from earth and carried away to Olympus to devote to shameful and unnatural uses, was the foundation, in Greece, of the most loathsome habit that ever disgraced the conduct of men. Passionate fondness for beautiful boys, called paiderastia in Greek, termed sodomy in modern criminal law, was the curse and infamy of both Roman and Grecian life. This unnatural vice was not confined to the vulgar and degenerate. Men of letters, poets, statesmen and philosophers, debased themselves with this form of pollution. It was even legalized by the laws of Crete and Sparta. Polybius tells us that many Romans paid as much as a talent ($1,000) for a beautifully formed youth. This strange perversion of the sexual instincts was marked by all the tenderness and sweetness of a modern courtship or a honeymoon. The victim of this degrading and disgusting passion treated the beautiful boy with all the delicacy and feeling generally paid a newly wedded wife. Kisses and caresses were at times showered upon him. At other times, he became an object of insane jealousy. An obscene couplet in Suetonius attributes this filthy habit to Julius Cæsar in the matter of an abominable relationship with the King of Bithynia.[173] "So strong was the influence of the prevalent epidemic on Plato, that he had lost all sense of the love of women, and in his descriptions of Eros, divine as well as human, his thoughts were centered only in his boy passion. The result in Greece confessedly was that the inclination for a woman was looked upon as low and dishonorable, while that for a youth was the only one worthy of a man of education."[174]