ound in the faces of women, and shall there be no gleam of chastity and
modesty in their appearance? Nay, there are many such, and shall they
not move and provoke love? To doubt it would be neither sensible nor in
accordance with the facts, for generally speaking, as has been pointed
out, all these attractions are the same in both sexes.... But, Daphnaeus,
let us combat those views which Zeuxippus lately advanced, making Love
to be only irregular desire carrying the soul away to licentiousness,
not that this was so much his own view as what he had often heard from
morose men who knew nothing of love: some of whom marry unfortunate
women for their dowries, and force on them economy and illiberal saving,
and quarrel with them every day of their lives: while others, more
desirous of children than wives, when they have made those women they
come across mothers, bid farewell to marriage, or regard it not at all,
and neither care to love nor be loved. Now the fact that the word for
conjugal love differs only by one letter from the word for endurance,
the one being [Greek: stergein] the other [Greek: stegein], seems to
emphasize the conjugal kindness mixed by time and intimacy with
necessity. But that marriage which Love has inspired will in the first
place, as in Plato's Republic, know nothing of _Meum_ and _Tuum_, for
the proverb, 'whatever belongs to a friend is common property,'[137] is
especially true of married persons who, though disunited in body, are
perforce one in soul, neither wishing to be two, nor thinking themselves
so. In the second place there will be mutual respect, which is a vital
necessity in marriage. For as to that external respect which has in it
more of compulsion than choice, being forced by the law and shame and
fear,

"Those needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds,"[138]

that will always exist in wedlock. But in Love there is such
self-control and decorum and constancy, that if the god but once enter
the soul of a licentious man, he makes him give up all his amours,
abates his pride, and breaks down his haughtiness and dissoluteness,
putting in their place modesty and silence and tranquillity and decorum,
and makes him constant to one. You have heard of course of the famous
courtesan Lais,[139] how she set all Greece on fire with her charms, or
rather was contended for by two seas,[140] and how, when she fell in
love with Hippolochus the Thessalian, 'she left Acro-Corinthus washed by
the gree