_Dion, with love thou hast distraught my soul._

11. Which of us is most to blame? I who am fool enough to speak
seriously of such things in a law-court? or you who are slanderous
enough to include such charges in your indictment? For sportive
effusions in verse are valueless as evidence of a poet's morals. Have
you not read Catullus, who replies thus to those who wish him ill:

_A virtuous poet must be chaste. Agreed.
But for his verses there is no such need._

The divine Hadrian, when he honoured the tomb of his friend the poet
Voconius with an inscription in verse from his own pen, wrote thus:

_Thy verse was wanton, but thy soul was chaste_,

words which he would never have written had he regarded verse of
somewhat too lively a wit as proving their author to be a man of
immoral life. I remember that I have read not a few poems by the
divine Hadrian himself which were of the same type. Come now,
Aemilianus, I dare you to say that that was ill done which was done by
an emperor and censor, the divine Hadrian, and once done was recorded
for subsequent generations. But, apart from that, do you imagine that
Maximus will censure anything that has Plato for its model, Plato
whose verses, which I have just read, are all the purer for being
frank, all the more modest for being outspoken? For in these matters
and the like, dissimulation and concealment is the mark of the sinner,
open acknowledgement and publication a sign that the writer is but
exercising his wit. For nature has bestowed on innocence a voice
wherewith to speak, but to guilt she has given silence to veil its
sin.

12. I say nothing of those lofty and divine Platonic doctrines, that
are familiar to but few of the elect and wholly unknown to all the
uninitiate, such for instance as that which teaches us that Venus is
not one goddess, but two, each being strong in her own type of love
and several types of lovers. The one is the goddess of the common
herd, who is fired by base and vulgar passion and commands not only
the hearts of men, but cattle and wild beasts also, to give themselves
over to the gratification of their desires: she strikes down these
creatures with fierce intolerable force and fetters their servile
bodies in the embraces of lust. The other is a celestial power endued
with lofty and generous passion: she cares for none save men, and of
them but few; she neither stings nor lures her followers to foul
deeds. Her love i