Socrates, therefore, sought to direct and moralise a force already existing. In the _Phædrus_ he describes the passion of love between man and boy as a madness, not different in quality from that which inspires poets; and, after painting that fervid picture of the lover, he declares that the true object of a noble life can only be attained by passionate friends, bound together in the chains of close yet temperate comradeship, seeking always to advance in knowledge, self-restraint, and intellectual illumination. The doctrine of the _Symposium_ is not different, except that Socrates here takes a higher flight. The same love is treated as the method whereby the soul may begin her mystic journey to the region of essential beauty, truth, and goodness. It has frequently been remarked that Plato's dialogues have to be read as poems, even more than as philosophical treatises; and if this be true at all, it is particularly true of both the _Phædrus_ and the _Symposium_. The lesson which both essays seem intended to inculcate is this: love, like poetry and prophecy, is a divine gift, which diverts men from the common current of their lives; but in the right use of this gift lies the secret of all human excellence. The passion which grovels in the filth of sensual grossness may be transformed into a glorious enthusiasm, a winged splendour, capable of soaring to the contemplation of eternal verities. How strange will it be, when once those heights of intellectual intuition have been scaled, to look down again to earth and view the _Meirakidia_ in whom the soul first recognised the form of beauty![158] There is a deeply-rooted mysticism, an impenetrable soofyism, in the Socratic doctrine of Erôs.
In the _Phædrus_, the _Symposium_, the _Charmides_, the _Lysis_, and the _Republic_, Plato dramatised the real Socrates, while he gave liberal scope to his own personal sympathy for paiderastia.[159] In the _Laws_, if we accept this treatise as the work of his old age, he discarded the Socratic mask, and wrote a kind of palinode, which indicates more moral growth than pure disapprobation of the paiderastic passion. I have already tried to show that the point of view in the _Laws_ is still Greek: that their author has not passed beyond the sphere of Hellenic ethics. He has only become more ascetic in his rule of conduct as the years advanced, importing the _rumores senum severiorum_ into his discourse, and recognising the imperfection of that halting-point between the two logical extremes of Pagan license and monastic asceticism which in the fervour of his greener age he advocated. As a young man, Plato felt sympathy for love so long as it was paiderastic and not spent on women; he even condoned a lapse through warmth of feeling into self-indulgence. As an old man, he denounced carnal pleasure of all kinds, and sought to limit the amative instincts to the one sole end of procreation.