XXIII. ‘What shall we say then about her older predecessors? Not one thing, I think, but several. In the first place, [Sidenote: E] as has been already said, they, too, for the most part, used to give the responses in prose. In the second place, those times produced temperaments and natural conditions which offered an easy and convenient channel for the stream of poetry, to which were at once superadded, in one and another, an eagerness, an impulse, a preparation of soul, all resulting in a readiness which needed but a slight initial movement from without to give the imagination a turn. So it was that not only were astronomers and philosophers drawn, as Philinus says, in their several directions, but also, when men were mellow with wine and sentiment, some undercurrent of pity or joy would come, and they would [Sidenote: F] glide into a song-like voice; drinking parties were filled with amorous strains and songs, books with poems in writing. When Euripides wrote:[116] _Love can teach, he makes A poet of a stranger to the Muse_, he did not mean that Love implants a faculty for poetry or music; the faculty is there already, but Love stirs and warms what was latent and idle. Or are we to say, Sir Stranger, that no one now loves, that Love has gone by the heels, because there is none who, to quote Pindar,[117] _Scatters with easy grace The vocal shafts of love and joy._ [Sidenote: 406] That is absurd. Loves there are and many of them, and they master men; but when they associate with souls which have no natural turn for music, they drop the flute and the lyre, yet are vocal still and fiery through and through, as much as of old. It is an unhallowed thing to say, and an unfair, that the Academy was loveless, or the choir of Socrates and Plato; yet, while we have their love dialogues to read, they have left no poems. Why not declare at once that Sappho was the only woman who [Sidenote: B] ever loved, if you are to say that Sibylla alone had the gift of prophecy, or Aristonica, and the others who delivered themselves in verse? Wine, as Chaeremon[118] used to say, _Is mingled with the moods of them that drink_, and the prophetic inspiration, like that of love, uses the faculty which is subjected to it, and stirs its recipients according to the nature of each.