ON LOVE.

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,⁷¹ 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,⁷² 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.