The Complete Essays (144 page)

Isocrates meant that, while the ends were different, they were in certain circumstances not incompatible. For its part marriage has usefulness, justice, honour and constancy: a level but more universal pleasure. A love-affair
is based on pleasure alone: and in truth its pleasure is more exciting, lively and keen: a pleasure set ablaze by difficulties. It must have stabs of pain and anguish. Without darts and flames of desire Cupid is Cupid no longer. In marriage the ladies are so lavish with their presents that they dull the edge of our passion and desire. [C] You merely need to see the trouble that Lycurgus and Plato give themselves in order to avoid this incongruity.

[B] Women are not entirely wrong when they reject the moral rules proclaimed in society, since it is we men alone who have made them. There is by nature always some quarrelling and brawling between women and men: the closest union between us remains turbulent and tempestuous. In the opinion of our poet we treat women without due consideration. That is seen by what follows.

We realize that women have an incomparably greater capacity for the act of love than we do and desire it more ardently – and we know that this fact was attested in Antiquity by that priest who had been first a man and then a woman:

Venus huic erat utraque nota
.
[He knew Venus from both angles.]
³⁸

Moreover we have learned from their own lips such proof as in former ages was provided by an Emperor and Empress of Rome, both infamous past masters on the job: he managed to deflower ten captive Sarmatian virgins in one night, but she in one night furnished the means of five-and-twenty engagements, changing her partners according to her needs and preferences:

        
adhuc ardens rigide tentigine vulve,
Et lassata viris, nondum satiata, recessit
.

[at last she retired, inflamed by a cunt stiffened by tense erections, exhausted by men but not yet satisfied.]

Then there was that plea lodged in Catalonia by a wife as plaintiff against her husband’s excessively assiduous love-making: not I think because she was actually troubled by it (except within the Faith I believe in
no miracles) but rather to have a pretext for pruning back and curbing the authority of husbands over their wives even in the very deed which forms the basic act of marriage, and also to show that the nagging and spitefulness of wives extend over the marriage-bed and trample under heel the sweet delights of Venus. Her husband, a really depraved brute of a fellow, made the rejoinder that even on days of abstinence he could not manage with less than ten times. Whereupon intervened that notable judgement of the Queen of Aragon: after mature deliberation in her counsel that good Queen (wishing to provide for all time an example of the moderation required in a proper marriage and a measuring-rod for temperance) ordained that it is necessary to limit and restrict intercourse to six times a day – sacrificing much of women’s needs and surrendering many of their desires in order to establish a scale which would be unexacting and therefore durable and unchanging.
³⁹
At which the doctors exclaim: ‘If that is the rate assessed by a reasoned moral reformation, what must be the lusts and the appetites of women?’ [C] Just think of the disparity of judgements on our appetites: Solon, the head of the school of lawgivers, with the aim of avoiding failure, sets the rate for such conjugal intimacy at three times a month.
⁴⁰

We believe all that and teach all that. And then we go and assign sexual restraint to women as something peculiarly theirs, under pain of punishments of the utmost severity. No passion is more urgent than this one, yet our will is that they alone should resist it – not simply as a vice with its true dimensions but as an abomination and a curse,
⁴¹
worse than impiety and parricide. Meanwhile we men can give way to it without blame or reproach.

Those men who have made an assay at overcoming it, employing purely material remedies to cool down the body, to weaken it and to subdue it, have adequately vouched for the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of achieving it. Yet we men on the other hand want our wives to be in good health, energetic, radiant, buxom… and chaste at the same time, both hot and cold at once.

As for marriage (which has the duty, we say, of stopping them from burning)
⁴²
it brings them but little respite given our manners: if they do
take a husband in whom the vigour of youth is still a-boil he will boast of scattering it elsewhere:

Sit tandem pudor, aut eamus in jus:
Multis mentula millibus redempta,
Non est hæc tua, Basse; vendidisti
.

[A little more propriety, please, or I’ll take you to law. I paid a few thousand for your cock. It is not yours now, Bassus: you sold it to me.]

[C] And Polemon the philosopher rightly received a legal summons from his wife because he scattered on a barren field the fruitful seed he owed to her fertile one.

[B] If they take one of those broken-down husbands, there they are, fully wed yet worse off than virgins and widows. (We assume that they are furnished with all they need because they have a man about the place, just as the Romans assumed that a Vestal Virgin called Clodia Laeta had been raped simply because Caligula had made an approach to her, even though it was proved that he had done no more than that.)
⁴³
Their needs are then not satisfied but increased, since their ardour, which would have remained calm in their single state, is awoken by contact with any male company whatsoever. That explains why those monarchs of Poland, Boleslaus and Kinge his consort, agreed together to take the vow of chastity on their very wedding-day as they lay side by side, maintaining it in the teeth of the pleasure which marriage offers: such considerations and circumstances made their chastity more meritorious.
⁴⁴

We train women from childhood for the practices of love: their graces, their clothes, their education, their way of speaking regard only that one end. Those in charge of them impress nothing on them but the face of love, if only to put them off it by continually portraying it to them. My daughter – I have no other children – is of an age when the more passionate girls are legally allowed to marry. She is slender and gentle; by complexion she is young for her age, having been quietly brought up on her own by her mother; she is only just learning to throw off her childish innocence. She was reading from a French book in my presence when she came across the name of that well-known tree
fouteau
[a beech].
⁴⁵
The
woman she has for governess pulled her up short rather rudely and made her jump over that awkward ditch. I let her be, so as not to interfere with women and their rules, for I play no part at all in that sort of education: feminine polity goes its own mysterious way: we must leave it entirely to them. But unless I am mistaken the company of twenty lackeys would not in half a year have imprinted on her mind an understanding of what those naughty syllables mean, how they are used and what they imply, as did that good old crone by her one reprimand and prohibition.

Motus doceri gaudet Ionicos
Matura virgo, et frangitur artubus
    Jam nunc, et incestos amores
        De tenero meditatur ungui
.

[The marriageable maiden loves to learn the steps of the Ionic dance; she twists her limbs and from a tender age trains herself for unchaste loves.]
⁴⁶

Just let them dispense with a little ceremony and become free to develop their thoughts: in knowledge of such things we are babes compared with them. Just listen to them describing our pursuit of them and our rendezvous with them. They will soon show you that we contribute nothing but what they have known and already assimilated independently of us. [C] Could Plato be right when he said that in a former existence girls had been lascivious boys!
⁴⁷

[B] I happened to be one day in a place where my ear could unsuspectedly catch part of what they were saying to each other. I wish. I could tell you! ‘By our Lady,’ I said, ‘let us go, after this, and study the language of Amadis and tales in Boccaccio and Aretino so as to appear sophisticated.’ What a good use of our time! There is no word, no exemplary tale and no stratagem which women do not know better than our books do. The doctrines which nature, youth and good health (those excellent schoolmasters) ceaselessly inspire in their souls are born in their veins:

Et mentem Venus ipsa dedit
.
[Venus herself inspired their frenzy.]
⁴⁸

They do not need to learn them: they give birth to them.

Nec tantum niveo gavisa est ulla columbo
        
Compar, vel si quid dicitur improbius,
    Oscula mordenti semper decerpere rostro,
        Quantum præcipue multivola est mulier
.

[Never did white dove nor any more lascivious bird which you could name invite love’s kisses with its pecking beak as much as a woman yearning for a host of men.]
⁴⁹

If the ferocity of their desires were not somewhat reined in by that fear for their honour with which all women are endowed, we would all be laughing-stocks. The whole movement of the world tends and leads towards copulation. It is a substance infused through everything; it is the centre towards which all things turn. We can still read some of the ordinances made by that wise Rome of old to regulate love-affairs, as well as Socrates’ precepts for the education of courtesans.
⁵⁰

Nec non libelli Stoici inter sericos
Jacere pulvillos amant
.

[And there are little books which love to lie strewn about in silken cushions: some of them are Stoic ones.]

There are enactments among Zeno’s Laws covering penetration and opening up for deflowering.
⁵¹
[C] I wonder what was the drift of that book by Strato the philosopher entitled
On carnal knowledge
;
⁵²
what did Theophrastus treat of in those books of his which bore the titles
The Lover
and
On Love-affairs;
and what did Aristippus treat in his work
On Antique Delights?
What was Plato’s intention in his long and vivid descriptions of the most controversial love-affairs of the day? Then there are
The Book of the Love-maker
by Demetrius Phalereus;
Cliniasor, or the Lover Raped
, by Heraclides of Pontus;
On Marriage: or How to make Children
, and another,
On Master and Lover
, by Antisthenes;
On Amorous Exploits
by Ariston; two by Cleanthes,
The Art of Loving
and
On Love; Lovers’ Dialogues
by Sphaerus;
The Fable of Jupiter and Juno
, intolerably pornographic, by Chrysippus, with his
Fifty Lecherous Letters
. And I am not counting the writings of philosophers who followed the Epicurean School. [B] In bygone days fifty gods were tied to this job; and a nation was discovered who kept male and female prostitutes in their temples all ready to be enjoyed, so as to lull to sleep the lusts of those who came to worship there. [C]
‘Nimirum propter continentiam incontinentia necessaria est; incendium ignibus extinguitur.’
[Sexual excesses are doubtless needed for sexual restraint, as fire is doused by fire.]
⁵³

[B] In most parts of the world that member of our male bodies was turned into a god.
⁵⁴
In a single province some peeled off the skin and consecrated part of it as an oblation while others offered up their sperm and consecrated it. In another province the youths bored holes through it in public, prised gaps between the flesh and the skin and then threaded through them the longest thickest skewers which they could stand. They afterward made a bonfire of those skewers as an offering to their gods, and if they were stunned by the violence of the ferocious pain they were reckoned unchaste and lacking in vigour. Elsewhere the revered symbol of the most hallowed magistrate was the sexual organ; and in many processions an effigy of it was borne in pomp, in honour of a variety of gods. During the feast of Bacchus the ladies of Egypt wore such an effigy about their necks; it was of wood, exquisitely fashioned and as big and heavy as each could manage. In addition the statue of their god had a carved member which was bigger than the rest of his body. The married women near my place twist their headscarves into the shape of one to revel in the enjoyment they derive from it; then on becoming widows they push it back and bury it under their hair. The wisest of the Roman matrons were granted the honour of offering crowns of flowers to the god Priapus; when their maidens came to marry, they were required to squat over its less decent parts.
⁵⁵

I even wonder whether I have not seen in my own lifetime practices recalling similar devotions: what was the sense of that silly flap on our fathers’ flies which you can still see worn by our Swiss guards?
⁵⁶
Why do
we parade our genitals even now behind our loose-breeches, and, what is worse, cheat and deceive by exaggerating their natural size? [C] I would like to believe that such styles of clothing were invented in better and more moral times so that people should in fact not be deceived, each man gallantly rendering in public an account of his endowments; the more primitive peoples do still display it somewhere near its real size. In those days they supplied details of man’s working member just as we give the measurements of our arm or foot.