18 



Indiana University Studies 



virtue most useful for life whether in war or in peace, and that which 

 engenders in the sons of men the female disease and makes them 

 into men-women, whereas they should be closely welded together in 

 all the pursuits that make for manliness. 



So having outraged the youth of boys and having reduced them to 

 the class and condition of ^lights of love", it injures the lovers also 

 in most essential particulars — body, mind, and estate. For it is 

 necessarily true that the mind of the boy-lover must be kept on the 

 stretch toward his favorite, looking intently to this alone and blind 

 to all other interests, both private and public. It also follows that 

 his body must be wasted away by lust, especially if he fail to obtain 

 satisfaction. And his estate must be lessened in two ways, both from 

 his neglect and from what he squanders upon the object of his love. 



And a still greater evil is engendered that affects all the people, 

 causing depopulation of cities and scarcity of the better sort of man, 

 and barrenness and unfruitfulness, since they imitate those who are 

 (M. 481) inexperienced in the cultivation of the soil, who sow seed 

 not upon deep-soiled land of the plain but rather upon salty marshes, 

 or upon stony and hard-trodden places, which are not fitted by nature 

 to grow anything, and only destroy the seed cast upon them.^^ 



I pass over in silence such fabrications in myths as creatures with 

 two bodies, which orignally having grown together by causes that 

 made them unite, later become disunited like parts of creatures 

 that once had come together merely, when the attractive force is 

 dissolved that once made them unite. All these things are very 

 seductive, being able by their very strangeness of conception to 

 catch the attention, but which the followers of Moses by reason of 

 their great superiority may well despise, having learned from early 

 youth to love the truth, and so living on incapable of being 

 deceived. 



VIII 



But since the banquets most widely celebrated are filled with such 

 nonsense, having in themselves their own condemnation, if anyone 

 should be willing to examine them not from the reputation and the 



which Plato enters into about man, we also seek in his arguments for what 

 we do not find. But what we do find are banquets, and conversations about 

 love, and other very unseemly harangues, which he composed with great 

 contempt for those who were to read them, as the greater part of his pupils 

 were of a tyrannical and calumnious disposition" (C. D. Yonge's translation). 



^^If Plato offends in the Symposium it was because of catering to some of 

 his hearers. We may be sure that his real feeling on the subject is expressed in 

 the Laws 8, 838 B. where he condemns all such practices as iu?/(]a/uGjg bain, Oeofi- 

 tofj 6t ml al<7Xpo)v alaxiora. 



