|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: prided himself, he now despises, and is ready to sleep like a servant,
wherever he is allowed, as near as he can to his desired one, who is the
object of his worship, and the physician who can alone assuage the
greatness of his pain. And this state, my dear imaginary youth to whom I
am talking, is by men called love, and among the gods has a name at which
you, in your simplicity, may be inclined to mock; there are two lines in
the apocryphal writings of Homer in which the name occurs. One of them is
rather outrageous, and not altogether metrical. They are as follows:
'Mortals call him fluttering love,
But the immortals call him winged one,
Because the growing of wings (Or, reading pterothoiton, 'the movement of
|