Page:Lovers Legends - The Gay Greek Myths.pdf/90

LOVERS’ LEGENDS oak of Dodona, we would hear a voice defending the love of boys, in memory of young Phaedrus. Alas, that cannot be, "for between us lie shadowy mountain ranges, seas that surge and thunder."$1$

We have halted here, strangers in a foreign land, and Cnidus is the domain of Charicles. However, I will not succumb to fear. But come you to my aid, divine spirit, protector of friendship, revealer of its mysteries, Eros. Not the mischievous child drawn by the hands of painters, but He who was made perfect from birth by the first principle of the seed. You are the one, in fact, who formed the universe, until then shapeless, dark and confused. Pulling the world as if out of a grave, you pushed back all-enveloping Chaos and flung him into the deepest abyss of Tartarus, where truly "iron gates and brazen thresholds loom,"$2$ so that he may never return from the prison where he is chained. Then, beating back the night with your dazzling light, you became the creator of all things, animate and inanimate. You have inspired in men, by means of the lofty sentiment of harmony, the noble passions of friendship, so that a soul still innocent and tender, nurtured in the shade of goodwill, will ripen into maturity.

Marriage is a solution devised by the demands of procreation, but male love alone must rule the heart of a philosopher. Everything fashioned uniquely for luxury is valued far above what arises from need, and everywhere people prefer the beautiful to the merely useful. As long as men were ignorant and lacked the ease for seeking something beyond the fruit of their daily toil, they deemed themselves content with bare necessities — they had no time to discover a better way of life. But once urgent needs were satisfied, the men who followed were free from the shackles of necessity and able to improve things; the whole gradual development of the sciences and of the arts that we see today is one interesting result. The first men were hardly born, before they had to seek a remedy for daily hunger. Caught by these pressing needs, and deprived by poverty of the freedom to pursue refinements, they subsisted on roots and herbs, or, above all, on the fruit of the oak. But shortly thereafter these foods were relegated to the beasts, and the farmers toiled to sow wheat and oats, which they had noticed grew anew each year. No one is so mad as to claim the acorn is tastier than grain. 76