desire,' as Anacreon said the love of
maidens was, nor 'redolent of ointment and sprightly,' but you will see
it plain and without airs in the schools of the philosophers, or perhaps
in the gymnasiums and wrestling-schools, keenly and nobly pursuing
youths, and urging on to virtue those who are well worthy of attention:
but that soft and stay-at-home love, spending all its time in women's
bosoms and beds, always pursuing effeminate delights, and enervated by
unmanly, unfriendly, and unimpassioned pleasures, we ought to condemn as
Solon condemned it: for he forbade slaves to love boys or to anoint them
with oil, while he allowed them to associate with women. For friendship
is noble and refined, whereas pleasure is vulgar and illiberal.
Therefore, for a slave to love boys is neither liberal or refined: for
it is merely the love of copulation, as the love of women."

Sec. V. Protogenes was intending to go on at greater length, when Daphnaeus
stopped him and said, "You do well, by Zeus, to mention Solon, and we
too may use him as the test of an amorous man. Does he not define such a
one in the lines, 'As long as you love boys in the glorious flower of
their youth for their kisses and embraces.' And add to Solon the lines
of AEschylus, 'You did not disdain the honour of the thighs, O thankless
one after all my frequent kisses.'[68] For some laugh at them if they
bid lovers, like sacrificing priests and seers, to inspect thighs and
loins; but I think this a mighty argument in behalf of the love of
women. For if the unnatural commerce with males does not take away or
mar the amorous propensity, much more likely is it that the natural love
of women will end in friendship after the favour. For, Protogenes, the
yielding of the female to the male was called by the ancients the
favour. Thus Pindar says Hephaestus was the son of Hera 'without any
favours':[69] and Sappho, addressing a girl not yet ripe for marriage,
says to her, 'You seemed to me a little girl, too young for the favour.'
And someone asks Hercules, 'Did you obtain the girl's favour by force or
by persuasion?' But the love of males for males, whether rape or
voluntary--pathicks effeminately submitting, to use Plato's words, 'to
be treated bestially'--is altogether a foul and unlovely favour. And so
I think Solon wrote the lines quoted above 'in his hot youth,' as Plato
puts it; but when he became older wrote these other lines, 'Now I
delight in Cyprus-born Aphrodite, a