All that is contrary to those professions
Which you so pompously parade abroad,
Hunting for beauty;—
went on to say,—And in this point alone you are imitators of the master of your school, Zeno the Phœnician, who was always a slave to the most infamous passions (as Antigonus the Carystian relates, in his History of his Life); for you are always saying that "the proper object of love is not the body, but the mind;" you who say at the same time, that you ought to remain faithful to the objects of your love, till they are eight-and-twenty years of age. And Ariston of Ceos, the Peripatetic, appears to me to have said very well (in the second book of his treatise on Likenesses connected with Love), to some Athenian who was very tall for his age, and at the same time was boasting of his beauty, (and his name was Dorus,) "It seems to me that one may very well apply to you the line which Ulysses uttered when he met Dolon—
Great was thy aim, and mighty is the prize.[19]
16. But Hegesander, in his Commentaries, says that all men love seasoned dishes, but not plain meats, or plainly dressed fish. And accordingly, when seasoned dishes are wanting, no one willingly eats either meat or fish; nor does any one desire meat which is raw and unseasoned. For anciently men used to love boys (as Aristophon relates); on which account it came to pass that the objects of their love were called παιδικά. And it was with truth (as Clearchus says in the first book of his treatise on Love and the Affairs of Love) that Lycophronides said—
No boy, no maid with golden ornaments,
No woman with a deep and ample robe,
Is so much beautiful as modest; for
'Tis modesty that gives the bloom to beauty.