immoderately delighted with the enjoyment of venereal pleasures, so are
they very scandalous who lust vehemently after them. And all that which
is commonly called love (and, believe me, I can find out no other name
to call it by) is of such a trivial nature that nothing, I think, is to
be compared to it: of which Cæcilius says,

I hold the man of every sense bereaved
Who grants not Love to be of Gods the chief:
Whose mighty power whate'er is good effects,
Who gives to each his beauty and defects:
Hence, health and sickness; wit and folly, hence,
The God that love and hatred doth dispense!

An excellent corrector of life this same poetry, which thinks that
love, the promoter of debauchery and vanity, should have a place in the
council of the Gods! I am speaking of comedy, which could not subsist
at all without our approving of these debaucheries. But what said that
chief of the Argonauts in tragedy?

My life I owe to honor less than love.

What, then, are we to say of this love of Medea?--what a train of
miseries did it occasion! And yet the same woman has the assurance to
say to her father, in another poet, that she had a husband

Dearer by love than ever fathers were.

XXXIII. However, we may allow the poets to trifle, in whose fables we
see Jupiter himself engaged in these debaucheries: but let us apply to
the masters of virtue--the philosophers who deny love to be anything