“What statement, then, shall we make about
the priestesses of former days ? Not one statement,
but more than one, I think. For in the first place,
as has already been said,
1 they also gave almost all
their responses in prose. In the second place, that
era produced personal temperaments and natures
which had an easy fluency and a bent towards composing poetry, and to them were given also zest and
eagerness and readiness of mind abundantly, thus
creating an alertness which needed but a slight
initial stimulus from without and a prompting of the
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imagination, with the result that not only were
astronomers and philosophers, as Philinus says,
attracted at once to their special subjects, but when
men carne under the influence of abundant wine or
emotion, as some note of sadness crept in or some joy
befell, a poet would slip into ‘tuneful utterance’
2;
their convivial gatherings were filled with amatory
verses and their books with such writings. When
Euripides said
Love doth the poet teach,
Even though he know naught of the Muse before,3
his thought was that Love does not implant in one
the poetical or musical faculty, but when it is already
existent in one, Love stirs it to activity and makes it
fervent, while before it was unnoticed and idle. Or
shall we say, my friend, that nobody is in love nowadays, but that love has vanished from the earth
because nobody in verse or song
Launches swiftly the shafts
Of sweet-sounding lays
Aimed at the youth beloved,
as Pindar
4 has put it ? No, that is absurd. The fact
is that loves many in number still go to and fro among
men, but, being in association with souls that have no
natural talent nor ear for music, they forgo the flute
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and lyre, but they are no less loquacious and ardent
than those of olden time. Besides it is not righteous
nor honourable to say that the Academy and Socrates
and Plato's congregation were loveless, for we may
read their amatory discourses
5; but they have left
us no poems.
6 As compared with him who says that
the only poetess of love was Sappho, how much does
he fall short who asserts that the only prophetess
was the Sibyl and Aristonica and such others as
delivered their oracles in verse ? As Chaeremon
7
says,
Wine mixes with the manners of each guest,
and as he drinks, prophetic inspiration, like that of
love, makes use of the abilities that it finds ready at
hand, and moves each of them that receive it according to the nature of each.
