eas be unsettled, it becomes
undermined and is suspected by everybody. You have heard, of course,
what hot water Euripides got into, when he wrote at the beginning of his
'Melanippe,'

'Zeus, whosoe'er he is, I do not know
Except by hearsay,'[85]

but if he changed the opening line, he had confidence, it seems, that
his play would go down with the public uncommonly well,[86] so he
altered it into

'Zeus the divine, as he is truly called.'[87]

And what difference is there between calling in question the received
opinion about Zeus or Athene, and that about Love? For it is not now for
the first time that Love asks for an altar and sacrifices, nor is he a
strange god introduced by foreign superstition, as some Attis or Adonis,
furtively smuggled in by hermaphrodites and women, and secretly
receiving honours not his own, to avoid an indictment among the gods for
coming among them under false pretences. And when, my friend, you hear
the words of Empedocles,

'Friendship is there too, of same length and breadth,
But with the mind's eye only can you see it,
Till with the sight your very soul is thralled,'

you must suppose that they refer to Love. For this god is invisible, but
to be extolled by us as one of the very oldest gods. And if you demand
proofs about every one of the gods, laying a profane hand on every
temple, and bringing a learned doubt to every altar, you will scrutinize
and pry into everything. But we need not go far to find Love's pedigree.

'See you how great a goddess Aphrodite is?
She 'tis that gave us and engendered Love,
Whereof come all that on the earth do live.'[88]

And so Empedocles calls Aphrodite _Life-giving_,[89] and Sophocles calls
her _Fruitful_, both very appropriate epithets. And though the wonderful
act of generation belongs to Aphrodite only, and Love is only present in
it as a subordinate, yet if he be absent the whole affair becomes
undesirable, and low, and tame. For a loveless coition brings only
satiety, as the satisfaction of hunger and thirst, and has nothing noble
resulting from it, whereas by Love Aphrodite removes the cloying element
in pleasure, and produces harmonious friendship. And so Parmenides
declares Love to be the oldest of the creations of Aphrodite, writing in
his Cosmogony,

'Of all the gods first Love she did contrive.'

But Hesiod, more naturally in my opinion, makes Love the most ancient of
all, so that all things derive their