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him and admonish him, and no enemy will charge him with meanness or

flattery; the actions of a lover have a grace which ennobles them; and

custom has decided that they are highly commendable and that there

no loss of character in them; and, what is strangest of all, he only

may swear and forswear himself (so men say), and the gods will forgive

his transgression, for there is no such thing as a lover's oath.

Such is the entire liberty which gods and men have allowed the

lover, according to the custom which prevails in our part of the

world. From this point of view a man fairly argues in Athens to love

and to be loved is held to be a very honourable thing. But when

parents forbid their sons to talk with their lovers, and place them

under a tutor's care, who is appointed to see to these things, and

their companions and equals cast in their teeth anything of the sort

which they may observe, and their elders refuse to silence the

reprovers and do not rebuke them-any one who reflects on all this

will, on the contrary, think that we hold these practices to be most

disgraceful. But, as I was saying at first, the truth as I imagine is,

that whether such practices are honourable or whether they are

dishonourable is not a simple question; they are honourable to him who

follows them honourably, dishonourable to him who follows them

dishonourably. There is dishonour in yielding to the evil, or in an

evil manner; but there is honour in yielding to the good, or in an

honourable manner.

Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul,

inasmuch as he is not even stable, because he loves a thing which is

in itself unstable, and therefore when the bloom of youth which he was

desiring is over, he takes wing and flies away, in spite of all his

words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is

life-long, for it becomes one with the everlasting. The custom of

our country would have both of them proven well and truly, and would

have us yield to the one sort of lover and avoid the other, and

therefore encourages some to pursue, and others to fly; testing both