Mexican law was equally severe, but all without much effect, if we may believe the accounts of Garcilaso himself, Gomara, Bernal Diaz, etc. I have elsewhere related how the ancient legislations of the great Asiatic states repressed these base aberrations of the procreative sense, and nevertheless, at the present day, the Arabs frequently give way to them, even in the holy Mosque at Mecca;[1] and other Eastern peoples, Hindoos, Persians, and Chinese, are also very imperfectly reformed on this point.
When we remember that morality is essentially relative, and that ancestral impressions are extremely tenacious in the human brain, we shall not be much surprised to see these low tendencies persist as survivals in the midst of civilisations already far advanced. Nevertheless, the theoretic morality of all the great nations of the East has for centuries condemned these repugnant excesses, which our European ancestors, both Celts and Teutons, have early reproved and repressed. It is all the more singular to find the most intelligent race of antiquity, the ancient Greeks, practising the greatest tolerance on this subject, so much so that the names of Socrates and Plato, those fathers of ethereal spiritualism, are attached to amours the mere thought of which now excites disgust in a civilised European.
A very slight acquaintance with Greco-Roman literature furnishes abundant information on this matter. I have no need, therefore, to dwell on it, but I must quote a curious passage of Strabo, from which we learn that the ancient Cretans associated with so-called Socratic amours the ceremonial of marriage by capture, of which I shall soon have to speak. This strange passage is as follows:—"It is not by persuasion, but by capture, that they obtain possession of the beloved object. Three days or more in advance the erastes apprises the friends of the young boy of his project of abduction. It would be considered the greatest disgrace for them to conceal the child, or prevent him from passing by the road indicated. By so doing they would appear to confess that he did not merit the favours of such a distinguished erastes. What do they do therefore? They meet together, and if the ravisher is equal or superior in
- ↑ Burckhardt, Hist. Univ. des Voy., t. xxxii. p. 155.
