nd love."

She was silent a moment, standing in a pensive attitude; then she
continued:

"I hate the barbarians, not because they have no treasures of art, but
for the odium they cast on love, which they enchain with all manner of
laws and restrictions. They are hypocritical and deformed; they make
reproduction a crime, and they hate the nude, hiding the body with all
kinds of rags, as if it were an abominable spectacle--when carnal love,
the meeting of two bodies, is the sublime love through which we are
born, and without which the fount of existence would dry
up--extinguishing the world."

"That is why we are great," said Actaeon with gravity. "On this account
our arts fill the earth, and all bow before the moral grandeur of
Greece. We are the people that has known how to honor life making a cult
of its origin; we satisfy the impulses of love without hypocrisy, and
because of this we understand better than others the needs of the
spirit. Intelligence wings more truly when it does not feel the weight
of the body tormented by pudicity. We love and study; our gods go naked,
with no other adornment than the ray of immortal light upon the
forehead. They do not demand blood, like those barbarian divinities
enwrapped in clothing which only leaves uncovered their frowning
assassin faces; they are as beautiful as human beings, they laugh like
them, and their peals of merriment wafted around Olympus gladden the
earth."

"Love is the most virtuous sentiment; from it emanates all greatness.
Only the barbarians calumniate it, hiding it as a dishonest thing."

"I know a people," said Actaeon, "among whom love, the divine fusion of
bodies, is looked upon as an impurity. Israel is an amalgamation of
miserable tribes, occupying an arid region surrounding a temple of
barbaric construction, copied from all peoples. They are hypocrites,
rapacious and cruel; on this account they abominate love. If such a
people were to attain universal influence like Greece, if it should
dominate the world, imposing its beliefs, the eternal light which shines
on the Parthenon would go out; humanity would grope in darkness, with
the heart dry and the thought dead; the world would be a necropolis, all
would be moving corpses, and centuries and more centuries would pass
before man would again find the road, coming back to our smiling gods,
to the cult of beauty that gladdens life."

Sonnica, listening to the Greek, approached the tall rose bushes and