Page:Lovers Legends - The Gay Greek Myths.pdf/51



''In answer to Theomenstus' request, Lycinus recounts an argument he had recently refereed between two friends, whose tastes in love were opposed. The three of them were about to embark upon a journey, but first a debate comparing male and female love was held, to put an end to the annoying bickering between Lycinus' friends on the subject of love. Lycinus' recollections find him and his two friends holed up in a shady grove by Aphrodite's temple. Charicles is a young Corinthian bon-vivant, mad about women, and Callicratidas, an important Athenian politician, with a bottomless thirst for youths. The debate is about to start.''$1$

Part II


 * Charicles passed his hand over his brow and, after a moment of silence, began thus:


 * I call upon you, my Lady Aphrodite, uphold my plea for this, your cause! Every task, regardless how small, attains perfection if you but grant it the least measure of your mercy; but matters of love have special need of you, for you are, after all, their natural mother. Come as a woman to defend women, and grant that men remain men, as they were born to be. At the very start of this debate I call as witness of the truth of my words the primordial mother, original source of all creation, the sacred nature of the universe, she who united the elements of the world—earth, air, fire and water—and through their mingling wrought all living creatures.

She knew we were a meld of perishable stuffs, granted an all too short existence, and made it so that the death of one would be the birth of another, and that procreation would keep mortality in check, one life sending forth another in infinite succession. Because a thing cannot be born of a single source, to each species she granted the two genders: to the male she gave the seed principle, and she shaped the female into a vessel for that seed. She draws them together by means 37