us' atoms in collision and recoil, forming no such
union as Love makes, when he presides over the conjugal state. For
nothing else produces so much pleasure, or such lasting advantages, or
such beautiful remarkable and desirable friendship,

'As when husband and wife live in one house,
Two souls beating as one.'[149]

And the law gives its countenance, and nature shows that even the gods
themselves require love for the production of everything. Thus the poets
tell us that 'the earth loves a shower, and heaven loves the earth,' and
the natural philosophers tell us that the sun is in love with the moon,
and that they are husband and wife, and that the earth is the mother of
man and beast and the producer of all plants. Would not the world itself
then of necessity come to an end, if the great god Love and the desires
implanted by the god should leave matter, and matter should cease to
yearn for and pursue its lead? But not to seem to wander too far away
and altogether to trifle, you know that many censure boy-loves for their
instability, and jeeringly say that that intimacy like an egg is
destroyed by a hair,[150] for that boy-lovers like Nomads, spending the
summer in a blooming and flowery country, at once decamp then as from an
enemy's territory. And still more vulgarly Bion the Sophist called the
sprouting beards of beautiful boys Harmodiuses and Aristogitons,[151]
inasmuch as lovers were delivered by them from a pleasant tyranny. But
this charge cannot justly be brought against genuine lovers, and it was
prettily said by Euripides, as he embraced and kissed handsome Agatho
whose beard was just sprouting, that the Autumn of beautiful youths was
lovely as well as the Spring. And I maintain that the love of beautiful
and chaste wives flourishes not only in old age amid grey hairs and
wrinkles, but even in the grave and monument. And while there are few
such long unions in the case of boy-loves, one might enumerate ten
thousand such instances of the love of women, who have kept their
fidelity to the end of their lives. One such case I will relate, which
happened in my time in the reign of the Emperor Vespasian.

Sec. XXV. Julius, who stirred up a revolt in Galatia, among several other
confederates had one Sabinus, a young man of good family, and for wealth
and renown the most conspicuous of all the men in those parts. But
having attempted what was too much for them they were foiled, and
expecting to pay the penalty