6
B Cheer up, good soul! you spur a willing horse, as Homer says,Iliad 8, 293. and if you hadn’t got ahead of me, I myself should have begged you to listen to my tale, for I want to have you bear witness before the world that my madness has reason in it. Then, too, I take pleasure in calling his words to mind frequently, and have already made it a regular exercise: even if nobody happens to be at hand, I repeat them to myself two or three times a day just the same.
7
I am in the same case with lovers. In the absence of the objects of their fancy they think over their actions and their words, and by dallying with these beguile their lovesickness into the belief that they have their sweethearts near; in fact, sometimes they even imagine they are chatting with them and are as pleased with what they formerly heard as if it were just being said, and by applying their minds to the memory of the past give themselves no time to be annoyed ‘by the present. So I, too, in the absence of my mistress Philosophy, get no little comfort out of gathering together the words that I then heard and turning them over to myself. In short, I fix my gaze on that man as if he were a lighthouse and I were adrift at sea in the dead of night, fancying him by me whenever I do anything and always hearing him repeat his former words. Sometimes, especially when I put pressure on my soul, his face appears to me and the sound of his voice abides in my ears. Truly, as the comedian says, Eupolis in the Demes, referring to Pericles Kock, 94 None better in the world to make a speech! He’d take the floor and give your orators A ten-foot start, as a good runner does, And then catch up. Yes, he was fleet, and more— Persuasion used to perch upon his lips, So great his magic; he alone would leave His sting implanted in his auditors. “he left a sting implanted in his hearers!”
