two pupils, Xenophon and Plato, elucidated this science in several of their works.  In Xenophon’s Symposium Critobulus declares that he would rather be blind to everything else in the world than not to see his beloved; that he would rather give all he had to the beloved than receive twice the amount from another; rather be the beloved’s slave than free alone; rather work and dare for the beloved than live alone in ease and security.  For, he continues, the enthusiasm which beauty inspires in lovers

“makes them more generous, more eager to exert themselves, and more ambitious to overcome dangers, nay, it makes them purer and more continent, causing them to avoid even that to which the strongest appetite urges them.”

Several of Plato’s dialogues, especially the Symposium and Phaedrus, also bear witness to the fact that the Socratic conception of love resembled modern romantic love in its ideal of purity and its altruistic impulses.  Especially notable in this respect are the speeches of Phaedrus and Pausanius in the Symposium (175-78), in which love is declared to be the source of the greatest benefits to us.  There can be no greater blessing to a young person, we read, than a virtuous lover.  Such a lover would rather die a thousand deaths than do a cowardly or dishonorable deed; and love would make an inspired hero out of the veriest coward.  “Love will make men dare to die for the beloved—­love alone.”  “The actions of a lover have a grace which ennobles them.”  “From this point of view a man fairly argues that in Athens to love and be loved is a very honorable thing.”  “There is a dishonor in being overcome by the love of money, or of wealth, or of political power.”  “For when the lover and beloved come together ... the lover thinks that he is right in doing any service which he can to his gracious loving one.”  And in the Republic (VI., 485):  “He whose nature is amorous of anything cannot help loving all that belongs or is akin to the object of his affections."[305]

All this, as I have said, suggests romantic love, except for one circumstance—­a fatal one, however.  Modern romantic love is an ecstatic adoration of a woman by a man or of a man by a woman, whereas the romantic love described by Xenophon and Plato—­so-called “Platonic love”—­has nothing whatever to do with women.  It is a passionate, romantic friendship between men and boys, which (whether it really existed or not) the pupils of Socrates dilate upon as the only noble, exalted form of the passion that is presided over by Eros.  On this point they are absolutely explicit.  Of course it would not do for a Greek philosopher to deny that a woman may perform the noble act of sacrificing her life for her husband—­that is her ideal function, as we have seen—­so Alcestis is praised and rewarded for giving up her life; yet Plato tells us distinctly (Symp., 180) that this phase of feminine love is, after all, inferior to that which