The Complete Essays (145 page)

[B] That fine fellow who when I was young castrated so many beautiful ancient statues in his City so as not to corrupt our gaze,
⁵⁷
[C] following the counsel of that other fellow in Antiquity:

–
Flagitii principium est nudare inter cives corpora
[Baring the body among our citizens is the beginning of shameful deeds] –

[B] ought to have recalled that (as in the mysteries of the
Bona Dea
in which all signs of the male were banned) nothing is achieved unless you also geld horses, donkeys and finally everything in nature:

Omne adeo genus in terris hominumque ferarumque,
Et genus æquoreum, pecudes, pictæque volucres,
In furias ignemque ruunt
.

[All species on earth, both man and brute, and dwellers in the sea, and flocks and painted birds, all dash madly into the flames of desire.]
⁵⁸

[C] The gods, says Plato, have furnished men with a rebellious and tyrannical member which tries to force everything to submit to its appetite like an animal on the rampage. So too the women have an animal, avid and greedy: if you deny it in due season, it becomes frenzied and can brook no delay; its own raging madness is inhaled into their bodies; it stops all respiration by blocking up the tubes, so causing hundreds of kinds of illness which last until after it has drawn inwards with its breath the product of our common desire and scattered it broadcast, planting it in the ground of the womb.
⁵⁹

[B] Now that that lawgiver of mine
⁶⁰
ought also to have recalled that it is perhaps a more chaste and fruitful practice to bring women to learn early what the living reality is rather than to allow them to make conjectures according to the licence of a heated imagination: instead of our organs as they are their hopes and desires lead them to substitute extravagant ones three times as big. [C] And one man I know lost out by exposing his somewhere while they were still unready to perform their most serious task.

[B] What great harm is done by those graffiti of enormous genitals which boys scatter over the corridors and staircases of our royal palaces! From them arise a cruel misunderstanding of our natural capacities. [C] Who knows whether that explains why Plato decreed (following the practice of other states with sound institutions) that both men and women, old and young, should appear naked before each other during exercises in the gymnasia?
⁶¹
[B] Those Indian women who see their men in the nude have at least cooled off their visual senses.

[C] The women of that great Kingdom of Pegu wear below the belt nothing but a kirtle slit in the front and so tight that, no matter what formal decency they may seek to preserve, they reveal everything they have got with every step they take. They maintain that this fashion was created in order to attract the men to them and to distract them from that taste for males to which that nation has entirely surrendered. Yet it could be said that they lose more than they gain and that a complete hunger is more cruel than one where at least the eyes are satisfied.
⁶²
[B] Livia said, moreover, that to a moral woman a naked man means no more than a statue. [C] And the women of Sparta, who as wives were more virginal than our daughters, saw every day the young men of their city take everything off for their exercises; they themselves were not very particular
about keeping their thighs covered as they went about, believing, says Plato, that they were sufficiently veiled with virtue without needing a ‘virtue-guard’.
⁶³
Yet Saint Augustine is our witness for there once having been men who attributed such wonderful powers of temptation to nudity that they doubted whether, at the General Resurrection, women would rise again as women rather than in our sex so as not to go on tempting us in that blessed state!
⁶⁴

[B] In short we bait and lure women by every means. We are constantly stimulating and overheating their imagination. And then we gripe about it.

Let us admit it: there is hardly one of us who is not more afraid of the disgrace which comes to him from his wife’s immorality than from his own; hardly one who is not so amazingly charitable that he worries more about his dear wife’s conscience than he does about his; hardly one who would not rather commit theft and sacrilege – or that his wife were a murderer or a heretic – than to have her be no chaster than he is.

And our women would much rather volunteer to go and earn their fees in the law-courts or their reputations on the battlefield than to have to mount so difficult a guard in the midst of idle pleasures. Our women can see, can they not, that there is no merchant, no barrister, no soldier who does not drop what he is doing so as to hurry and get on with ‘the job’ – no porter or cobbler either, however weary with toil or faint with hunger.

Num tu, que tenuit dives Achæmenes,
Aut pinguis Phrygiæ Mygdonias opes,
Permutare velis crine Licinniæ,
    Plenas aut Arabum domos,
Dum fragrantia detorquet ad oscula
Cervicem, aut facili sævitia negat,
Quæ poscente magis gaudeat eripi,
    Interdum rapere occupet?

[Would you really exchange – even for all the wealth of Achaemenes or all the riches of Mygdon, King of fertile Phrygia, or the treasure-boxes of Araby – a
single one of Licinnia’s tresses when she bends her neck towards you for a fragrant kiss or when, with sweet severity, she denies what she in fact desires far more than you do, and will soon be snatching from you?]
⁶⁵

[C] We do not weigh the vices fairly in our estimation. Both men and women are capable of hundreds of kinds of corrupt activities more damaging than lasciviousness and more disnatured. But we make things into vices and weigh them not according to their nature but our self-interest: that is why they take on so many unfair forms. The ferocity of men’s decrees about lasciviousness makes the devotion of women to it more vicious and ferocious than its characteristics warrant, and engages it in consequences which are worse than their cause.

[B] I am not even sure that the campaigns of Caesar and Alexander surpass the stern resolve of a beautiful young woman, brought up our way, in the light of society’s social norms and battered by numerous examples to the contrary, who, in the midst of hundreds of unending and forceful suitors yet remains pure. No attaining so bristles with difficulties as her abstaining; nor is any more active. I think it easier to keep on a suit of armour all your life than to keep a maidenhead. And so the vow of virginity is the noblest of all the vows and also the harshest. [C] As Saint Jerome says,
‘Diaboli virtus in lumbis est.’
[The Devil’s power is in the loins.]
⁶⁶

[B] We have certainly assigned to the ladies the most exacting and arduous of human duties and we let them have all the glory. It ought to serve them as a singular goad to help them stubborn it out that this is a subject in which they can challenge that vain pre-eminence in virtue and valour which men claim over them and can trample it underfoot. If they take care over it, they will find that not only are they most highly thought of but also better loved. No gentleman abandons his suit because he is refused, provided that the refusal is based on chastity not on preference for another. In vain do we swear oaths and make menaces and lamentations. We lie. We love them all the better for it. There is no lure like wise conduct when not brusque and glowering. There is cowardice and a lack of feeling in stubbornly continuing despite loathing and contempt: but when up against a constant and virtuous resolve mingled with an appreciative good-will it is an exercise fit for a noble and magnanimous soul.

They can, Up to a point, show their appreciation of our courtship and make us realize that in all honour they do not disdain us. [C] For that rule which ordains that they must detest us because we worship them and hate us because we love them is indeed cruel, if only for the hardship it causes. Why should ladies not lend an ear to our requests and offers of service provided we do not go beyond the bounds of propriety, and why do we go on assuming that their doing so suggests some inner licentiousness of thought? A Queen in our own days wittily said that to exclude such advances was a sign of frailty and an indication of one’s own levity, adding that no lady who had not been tempted could boast of her chastity.

[B] The boundaries of honour are by no means so narrowly drawn. There are means of being relaxed and showing some initiative without infringing them. Along its frontiers there is a stretch of neutral territory where a woman is free to show some discretion. If a man has been able to pursue her honour and to bring it to bay in its own corner of its fortress, then he is a silly fellow if he is not satisfied with his fortune. The prize of victory is valued for its difficulty. Do you want to know what impact your courtship and your merits have had on her heart? Measure it by her morals. Some women grant much who grant little: it is entirely in relation to the will of the one who grants it that we judge her gratitude for a kindness. The other attributes which apply to love’s favours are fortuitous and are deaf and dumb. That little which one lady grants you costs her more than it costs her companions to grant you her all. If rarity is worth esteeming in anything it must be so in this case: do not consider the smallness of the favour but the small number of those who receive it. Money is valued according to its stamp and hallmark. Whatever some men may be brought to say by frustration and bad judgement at the height of their distress, truth and virtue always regain the advantage.

I have known ladies whose reputation was unjustly compromised over a long period but who, without careful planning, were later restored to the unanimous esteem of mankind by their constancy alone. Everybody is sorry and denies what he once believed. After being young women who were just a little suspect they now hold the foremost rank among good and honoured noblewomen. When someone said to Plato, ‘They are all gossiping about you,’ he said, ‘Let them. I will so live that I will compel them to change their style.’
⁶⁷
But apart from the fear of God and the winning of
the prize of so rare a glory (which must incite women to protect themselves) the corrupt state of our century drives them to do so; and if I were in their place there is nothing I would not do rather than commit my reputation to such dangerous hands. In my day the pleasure of telling of an affair (a pleasure scarcely less delightful than having one) was conceded only to such as had one single faithful friend; nowadays the most usual talk at table and when men get together turns to boasting about favours received and the secret bounties of the ladies, who really do show abject baseness of mind to allow such tender gifts to be thus cruelly hunted, grabbed and plundered by men so ungrateful, so indiscreet and so inconstant.

It is our exaggerated and improper harshness towards this vice which gives birth to jealousy, the most vain and turbulent distemper which afflicts our human souls:

Quis vetat apposito lumen de lumine sumi?
[Whatever stops us lighting one torch from another’s light?]
⁶⁸
Dent licet, assidue, nil tarmen inde perit
.
[They can go on giving, on and on: they lose nothing in the process.]

Jealousy and Envy her sister seem to me to be the most absurd of the bunch. About envy I can say virtually nothing: that passion which is portrayed as so powerful and violent has no hold on me (and I thank her for it). As for Jealousy, I know her – by sight at least. Beasts can feel it too. When the shepherd Crastis fell in love with a nanny-goat her billy charged him while he lay asleep, butting his head and smashing it.
⁶⁹

We have raised the temperature of jealousy’s fevered climax, following in that some of the Barbarian nations. The better educated nations have been touched by jealousy – that is reasonable – but not caught away by it:

Ense maritali nemo confossus adulter
     Purpureo stygias sanguine tinxit aquas
.

[There, never did adulterer stain with his blood the waters of Styx while he lay pierced by a husband’s sword.]
⁷⁰

Lucullus, Caesar, Pompey, Antony, Cato and other fine men were all cuckolds and knew it: they never made a commotion about it. In those
days there was only one man who died of distress over it: Lepidus; and he was a fool:
⁷¹

Ah! tum te miserum malique fati,
Quem attractis pedibus, patente porta,
Percurrent mugilesque raphanique
.

[Ah! You wretched man caught out on the job! They will bind your legs together and stuff mullet and Greek radishes up your back passage.]

But when that god in our poet
⁷²
surprised one of his comrades lying with his wife he was satisfied with exposing them both to shame;

    
atque aliquis de Diis non tristibus optat
Sic fieri turpis!

[but one of the other gods, not the most severe, wished he was shamed as well!]