At which the company falling into a loud laughter;
How! said Protogenes, can you believe that I at this time
wage war against love, and that I do not rather fight for
love against intemperate desire and lascivious wantonness,
which, under the shelter of the most honest and fairest
names that are, let themselves loose into the most shameful acts of inordinate lust and concupiscence? Then Daphnaeus: Do ye number wedlock and the conjunction of man
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and wife (than which there is no tie more sacred in this
life) among the vile and dishonest actions of the world?
Why truly, replied Protogenes, this same bond of wedlock,
as being necessary for generation, is not undeservedly perhaps extolled by our grave politicians and lawgivers, and
by them recommended to the multitude. But I must tell
ye, if you mean true love, there is not a farthing's worth of
it to be found among women. Nor do I believe that either
you yourselves, or any other that dote so much as you pretend to do upon women and virgins, love them any otherwise than as flies love milk, or bees love honey-combs; or
as cooks and butchers fat up calves and poultry in the dark,
not out of any extraordinary affection which they bear to
these creatures, but for the gain which they make of them.
But as Nature prompts all men to the use of bread and
meat with moderation and so far as may suffice the appetite, the excess of which becomes a vice, under the name
of gluttony or gormandizing; thus it is natural for men and
women to desire the pleasures of mutual enjoyment, but as
for that impetuous concupiscence that hurries the greatest
part of mankind with so much strength and violence, it is
not properly called love. For love that is bred in a young
and truly generous heart, by means of friendship, terminates
in virtue; whereas all our desires towards women, let them
be taken in the best sense he can, serve us only to reap the
fruit of pleasure, and to assist us in the fruition of youth
and beauty. As Aristippus testified to one that would have
put him out of conceit with Lais, for that, as he said, she
did not truly love him; no more, said he, am I beloved by
pure wine or good fish, and yet I willingly make use of
both. For the end of desire is pleasure and enjoyment.
But love, having once lost the hopes of friendship, will
neither tarry, nor cherish for beauty's sake that which is
irksome, though never so gaudy in the flower of youth, if
it bring not forth the fruit of a disposition propense to
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friendship and virtue. And therefore it is that you hear a
certain husband in a tragedy thus talking to his wife:
Thou hat'st me? True;—and I thy proud disdain
Will brook with patience, careless of the pain,
So long as my dishonor gives me gain.
Now I take him to be not at all a more amorous man than
this, that can endure, for the sake of his carnal pleasure, and
not for gain, the plague of a curst ill-natured shrew, that is
always scolding. The first of which love-martyrs Philippides the comedian thus derided in the person of Stratocles
the rhetorician:
She lowers and growls and turns her tail
With fury so unkind,
The wittol blest would think himself,
To kiss her coif behind.
Now if this be the passion you talk of which is to be called
Love, it is a spurious and effeminate love that sends us to
the women's chambers, as it were to the Cynosarges at
Athens. Or rather, as they say there is a sort of generous
and true bred mountain eagle, which Homer calls the black
eagle and eagle of prey, and then again there is another
sort of bastard eagle, that takes fish and birds that are lazy
and slow of flight, and wanting food makes a shrill and
mournful noise for hunger; thus the true genuine love is
that of boys, not flaming with concupiscence, as according
to Anacreon the love of maids and virgins does, neither
besmeared with odoriferous ointments, nor alluring with
smiles and rolling glances; but you shall find him plain
and simple and undebauched with pleasures in the schools
of the philosophers, or in the wrestling-lists and places of
public exercise, smart and generous in the chase of youth,
and exhorting to virtue all that he finds to be fit objects of
his diligence; whereas that other love, nice and effeminate,
and always nestling in the bosoms and beds of women, pursuing soft pleasures, and wasted with unmanly delights,
that have no gust of friendship or heavenly ravishment of
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mind, is to be despised and rejected of all mankind. This
indeed Solon did, when he forbade slaves and servants the
use of male familiarity and of dry ointment, but granted
them the liberty to accompany with women; as looking
upon friendship to be laudable and civil, but pleasure to
be a vulgar thing and unbecoming a man born free.
Whence it appears that to make love to a slave boy is
ignoble and unworthy of a freeman ; for this is mere mischievous love of copulation, like the affection toward
women.