ON LOVE.

ungovernable lust, which with most disgraceful acts and emotions assumes the most honourable of titles?" Whereupon Daphnæus, "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;³ 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.⁴ 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.'⁵ 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