for beauty that which gives it pain, where it gives no return of
friendship and virtue. You remember the husband in the play saying to
his wife, 'Do you hate me? I can bear that hatred very easily, since of
my dishonour I make money.' Not a whit more really in love than this
husband is the one, who, not for gain but merely for the sexual
appetite, puts up with a peevish and unsympathetic wife, as Philippides,
the comic poet, ridiculed the orator, Stratocles, 'You scarce can kiss
her if she turns her back on you.' If, however, we ought to give the
name of love to this passion, then is it an effeminate and bastard love,
and like at Cynosarges,[67] taking us to the woman's side of the house:
or rather as they say there is a genuine mountain eagle, which Homer
called 'black, and a bird of prey,' and there are other kinds of
spurious eagles, which catch fish and lazy birds in marshes, and often
in want of food emit an hungry wail: so the genuine love is the love of
boys, a love not 'flashing with desire,' as Anacreon said the love of
maidens was, nor 'redolent of ointment and sprightly,' but you will see
it plain and without airs in the schools of the philosophers, or perhaps
in the gymnasiums and wrestling-schools, keenly and nobly pursuing
youths, and urging on to virtue those who are well worthy of attention:
but that soft and stay-at-home love, spending all its time in women's
bosoms and beds, always pursuing effeminate delights, and enervated by
unmanly, unfriendly, and unimpassioned pleasures, we ought to condemn as
Solon condemned it: for he forbade slaves to love boys or to anoint them
with oil, while he allowed them to associate with women. For friendship
is noble and refined, whereas pleasure is vulgar and illiberal.
Therefore, for a slave to love boys is neither liberal or refined: for
it is merely the love of copulation, as the love of women."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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