it is unbecoming in him to
be fearful, so to be pleased is proper, but to be joyful improper. I
have, in order that I might be the better understood, distinguished
pleasure from joy. I have already said above, that a contraction of the
mind can never be right, but that an elation of it may; for the joy of
Hector in Naevius is one thing--

'Tis joy indeed to hear my praises sung
By you, who are the theme of honor's tongue--

but that of the character in Trabea another: "The kind procuress,
allured by my money, will observe my nod, will watch my desires, and
study my will. If I but move the door with my little finger, instantly
it flies open; and if Chrysis should unexpectedly discover me, she will
run with joy to meet me, and throw herself into my arms."

Now he will tell you how excellent he thinks this:

Not even fortune herself is so fortunate.

XXXII. Any one who attends the least to the subject will be convinced
how unbecoming this joy is. And as they are very shameful who are
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 Caecilius 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
carnal;