COURTESANS.
Smitten with love for fair Argea, who
Kept Archelaus' house, till the angry god
Found a fit death for cold Euripides,
Striving with hungry hounds in vain for life.
Then there's the man whom, mid Cythera's rocks,
The Muses rear'd, a faithful worshipper
Of Bacchus and the flute, Philoxenus:
Well all men know by what fierce passion moved
He to this city came; for all have heard
His praise of Galatea, which he sang
Amid the sheepfolds. And you likewise know
The bard to whom the citizens of Cos
A brazen statue raised to do him honour,
And who oft sang the praises of his Battis,
Sitting beneath a plane-tree's shade, Philetas;
In verses that no time shall e'er destroy.
Nor do those men whose lot in life is hard,
Seeking the secret paths of high philosophy,
Or those whom logic's mazes hold in chains,
Or that laborious eloquence of words,
Shun the sharp struggle and sweet strife of Love;
But willing, follow his triumphant car.
Long did the charms of fair Theano bind
The Samian Pythagoras, who laid bare
The tortuous mysteries of geometry;
Who all the mazes of the sphere unfolded,
And knew the laws which regulate the world,
The atmosphere which doth surround the world,
And motions of the sun, and moon, and stars.
Nor did the wisest of all mortal men,
Great Socrates, escape the fierce contagion,
But yielded to the fiery might of Venus,
And to the fascinations of the sex,
Laying his cares down at Aspasia's feet;
And though all doubts of nature he could solve,
He found no refuge from the pursuit of Love.
Love, too, did draw within the narrow Isthmus
The Cyrenean sage: and winning Lais,
With her resistless charms, subdued and bound
Wise Aristippus, who philosophy
Deserted, and preferr'd a trifling life.
72. But in this Hermesianax is mistaken when he represents Sappho and Anacreon as contemporaries. For the one lived in the time of Cyrus and Polycrates; but Sappho lived in the reign of Alyattes, the father of Crœsus. But Chameleon, in his treatise on Sappho, does assert that some people say that these verses were made upon her by Anacreon—
Love, the golden-haired god,
Struck me with his purple ball,
