The study of Plato, then, was entered upon freely, with the addition of anything that could throw light upon the doctrines which that great man had founded—the Bible, for instance, which in the Roman world men prided themselves on consulting directly; then Arabic and even Mussulman philosophy, with which it was fashionable to claim acquaintance. And it was well understood that a quest pursued with so subtle a magnificence, in scorn of realities and brutal sensualism, demanded a keen and eminently free intelligence, a soul at leisure, and a great loathing of the flesh; otherwise all hope of falling under the exquisite fascinations of love at once terrestrial and quasi-divine must be abandoned. That explains why from the outset this philosophy addressed itself to women and to the salons. Plato began to be talked about as we in our day have heard Schopenhauer and other eminent thinkers talked about by persons who have been at little pains to read them. It was known that Plato harped on the necessity of love, that his smile was less forbidding than that of S. Francis of Assisi, and that his method was dialogue, so naturally dialogues and conversations became the methods of the new platonists. From these tender colloquies the vulgar were excluded; they could make nothing of them; one could not expect common folk to apprehend the delicate devices by which love is etherealised and rendered impalpable; from these they would only have got a theme for gross perversions. Those who had the gift of knowledge and understanding ascended the Acropolis like M. Renan, to chant their canticles in a little temple of their own, whose dimensions seemed to them sufficient; the aristocratic mystery replaced the old priestly mystery; so Cataneo whispered, as it were under his breath, his book on love addressed only to the priests and temple choristers. Bembo took great care not to name the interlocutors male and female of the _Asolani_, “so as not to scandalise the populace”; all were agreed in religiously respecting the ignorance of the people, as to-day we respect the ignorance of young girls. And for the same reason, again, they made too prodigal a use of that strange mythological jargon which appears to us in these days so entirely pathetic. Mythology has its aesthetic advantages; it is an incarnation of the passions; but that would not suffice to explain its sickening vogue in a society full of taste, scepticism and levity, if it had not presented the one special advantage of furnishing a sort of technical slang by which the initiated recognised one another, and which sifted out the vulgar. The princes of wit felt so strongly the need of such distinctions that before adopting this garb for their works they began by muffling their own identity in an antique livery: a Greek or Latin name served them as a uniform,[144] as when San Severino called himself Pomponius Laetus, the old aristocratic pride yielding before this new-fangled vanity.