Kitap 13
84
Now I warn you, O philosophers, who indulge in unnatural passions, and who treat the great goddess Venus with impiety, to beware, lest you be destroyed in the same manner. For boys are only handsome, as Glycera the courtesan said, while they are like women: at least, this is the saying attributed to her by Clearchus. But my opinion is that the conduct of Cleonymus the Spartan was in strict conformity with nature, who was the first man to take such hostages as he took from the Metapontines—namely, two hundred of their most respectable and beautiful virgins; as is related by Duris the Samian, in the third book of his History of Agathocles. And I too, as is said by Epicrates in his Antilais, Have learnt by heart completely all the songs Breathing of love which sweetest Sappho sang, Or the Lamynthian Cleomenes. But you, my philosophical friends, even when you are in love with women . . . . . . . . . . . . . as Clearchus says. For a bull was excited by the sight of the brazen cow at Pirene: and in a picture that existed of a bitch, and a pigeon, and a goose; and a gander came up to the goose, and a dog to the bitch, and a male pigeon to the pigeon, and not one of them discovered the deception till they got close to them; but when they got near enough to touch them, they desisted; just as Clisophus the Salymbrian did. For he fell in love with a statue of Parian marble that then was at Samos, and shut himself up in the temple to gratify his affection; but when he found that he could make no impression on the coldness and unimpressibility of the stone, then he discarded his passion. And Alexis the poet mentions this circumstance in his drama entitled The Picture, where he says— And such another circumstance, they say, Took place in Samos: there a man did fall In love with a fair maiden wrought in marble, And shut himself up with her in the temple. And Philemon mentions the same fact, and says— But once a man, 'tis said, did fall, at Samos, In love with a marble woman; and he went And shut himself up with her in the temple. But the statue spoken of is the work of Ctesicles; as Adæus of Mitylene tells us in his treatise on Statuaries. And Polemo, or whoever the author of the book called Helladicus is, says—"At Delphi, in the museum of the pictures, there are two boys wrought in marble; one of which, the Delphians say, was so fallen in love with by some one who came to see it, that he made love to it, and shut himself up with it, and presented it with a crown; but when he was detected, the god ordered the Delphians, who consulted his oracle with reference to the subject, to dismiss him freely, for that he had given him a handsome reward.
