with most disgraceful acts and emotions
assumes the most honourable of titles?" Whereupon Daphnaeus, "Do you call
the marriage and union of man and woman most disgraceful, than which no
holier tie exists nor ever did?" Protogenes replied, "Why, as all this
is necessary for the human race to continue, our legislators do not act
amiss in crying up marriage and eulogizing it to the masses, but of
genuine love there is not a particle in the woman's side of a house;[64]
and I also say that you who are sweet on women and girls only love them
as flies love milk, and bees the honey-comb, and butchers and cooks
calves and birds, fattening them up in darkness.[65] But as nature leads
one to eat and drink moderately and sufficiently, and excess in this is
called gluttony and gormandizing, so the mutual desires between men and
women are natural; but that headlong, violent, and uncontrollable
passion for the sex is not rightly called love. For love, when it seizes
a noble and young soul, ends in virtue through friendship; but these
violent passions for women, at the best, aim only at carnal enjoyment
and reaping the harvest of a beauteous prime, as Aristippus showed in
his answer to one who told him Lais loved him not, 'No more,' he said,
'do meat and wine love me, but I gladly enjoy both.'[66] For the end of
passion is pleasure and fruition: but love, when it has once lost the
promise of friendship, will not remain and continue to cherish merely
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