Page:Lovers Legends - The Gay Greek Myths.pdf/92

LOVERS’ LEGENDS gifts afforded by intellect. Is it any wonder that they should be deprived, among other things, of male love? Lions do not love each other, but they are not philosophers; bears do not love each other, but they have no understanding of the beauty of friendship. Among men however, wisdom joined with knowledge, choosing, after numerous trials, what it found most beautiful, has decreed that male loves are the most sound.

So, Charicles, spare me these lectures more befitting the wanton lives of courtesans. Don’t insult our dignity and modesty in such crude terms, and do not make out Divine Eros to be a little fool. Consider, though it is late to educate oneself at your age, consider now, since you have not done so before, that Eros is a double god. He does not always arrive by the same path, nor does he always excite the same desires in our souls. One, I would say, is a ceaseless prankster. No reason governs him — he inhabits the souls of the foolish, and from him come the yearnings for women. He is the one who inspires rapes, for he pushes with irresistible force towards that which we crave. But the other Eros, father of the Ogygian age,3 that honest and profoundly sacred vision, is the propagator of healthy desires, and fills the souls with sweetness. Under the protection of this god, we taste pleasure mixed with virtue. As the tragic poet once said, love has two breaths, and two completely different passions bear the same name. Shame also is a twofold goddess, simultaneously good and evil: Shame can good and evil weave alike And men in warring camps divide. For the first she can’t be praised too highly From the bottom of our hearts we blame her for the other.$4$

So it is not at all surprising if, passion having taken the name of virtue, we should call Eros both unbridled lust as well as temperate affection.

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 * Is marriage nothing then, and shall we banish the race of women? How will men ever perpetuate themselves?