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ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE

formosum senem?[1] For the very picture that the Academy draws of it[2] will not, I think, disprove me, if I say this as coming from it:[3] that this first frenzy, inspired by the son of Venus in the lover’s heart, for the possession of the flower of delicate youthfulness to which[4] they permit all the presumptuous and passionate efforts that an immoderate ardour can suggest, was based simply on external beauty, the deceitful design of corporeal generation; for it could not be based on the mind, which had not yet shown itself, which was but newly born and not yet blossoming. That, if this frenzy seized upon a mean heart, the instruments of its pursuit were riches, gifts, favour in promotion to places of dignity, and other such base trafficking which they[5] condemn. If it fell upon one of nobler temper, the means of pleasing adopted were noble likewise: philosophic instructions, teachings to reverence religion, to obey the laws, to die for the good of one’s country — examples of valour, wisdom, justice; the lover studying how to make himself acceptable by the charm and beauty of his mind (that of his body being long since faded), and hoping, by this mental companionship, to make a stronger and more lasting contract. When this pursuit came to a result in due season (for while they did not require of the lover that he should take time and use discretion in his pursuit, they most strictly required this of the loved one, since he had to judge of an inward beauty difficult to recognise and hard to discover), then there was born in the loved one a desire for a spiritual beauty: With him this was the principal thing, the bodily was fortuitous and secondary; with the lover it was just the opposite. For this reason they prefer the loved one, and aver that the gods too prefer him; and they find great fault with the poet Æschylus for having, in describing the love of Achilles and Patroclus,[6] given the lover’s part to Achilles, who was in the first and beardless bloom of his youth, and the most beauti-

  1. ↑ What, after all, is this friendship-love? Why is it that an ugly youth or a handsome old man is never beloved? — Cicero, Tusc. Disp., IV, 33.
  2. ↑ See Plato, Symposium (discourse of Pausanias).
  3. ↑ That is, from the Academy.
  4. ↑ That is, to the frenzy.
  5. ↑ That is, the Academy.
  6. ↑ See Plato, Symposium (discourse of Pausanias).
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