commit a double crime? What blind insensibility blankets your souls, to doubly stray from the good road, chasing what you should flee? If everyone did likewise there would be no one left!
Socrates’ disciples wield truly admirable arguments with which they fool young boys, not yet in full possession of their reason, but anyone favored with a grain of sense can hardly be swayed by them. They feign love of the soul and, as if ashamed to love the beauty of the body, style themselves “lovers of virtue.” Often I had a good laugh over that. How is it, O venerable philosophers, that you dismiss with such disdain those whose age has long since proven their worth, and whose gray hairs vouch for their virtue? How come your love, so full of wisdom, lunges hungrily for the young, whose judgement is not yet fully formed, and who know not which road to take? Is there some law that taints lack of beauty as perverse, and decrees the beautiful as always good and praiseworthy? Yet, to quote Homer, that great prophet of truth:
One man may fail to impress us with his looks
But a god can crown his words with beauty, charm,
And men look on with delight when he speaks out.
Never faltering, filled with winning self-control,
He shines forth at assembly grounds and people gaze
At him like a god when he walks through the streets.2
And elsewhere he also said:
No sense in your head to match your handsome looks.3 Indeed, prudent Ulysses is favored over beautiful Nireus.
How is it that your love does not pursue prudence, or justice, or the other virtues which upon occasion crown maturity? Why is the beauty of the young the only thing that inflames your ardent passions? Ought one to have loved Phaedrus, betrayer of Lysias, O Plato? Was it right to love the virtues of Alcibiades, who mutilated the statues of the gods and revealed the Eleusinian mysteries between cups of wine? Who would confess to being his lover when he fled Athens to make his stand in Decelea and openly aspired to tyranny? As long as he remained beardless, according to the divine Plato, he was loved by all, but as soon as he became a man and his intellect, previously unripe, reached its full dimension, he was hated by all. Why is that? It is because the men who call “virtue” the beauty of the body put an
