with strange women, but I have not delayed over long in taverns to watch the young Syrians dance to the sound of the crotalum.* But if I have restrained my desires it was for my own satisfaction and for the sake of good discipline.  To fear pleasure and to fly from joy appears to me the worst insult that one can offer to nature.  I am assured that during their lives certain of the elect of thy god abstained from food and avoided women through love of asceticism, and voluntarily exposed themselves to useless sufferings.  I should be afraid of meeting those, criminals whose frenzy horrifies me.  A poet must not be asked to attach himself too strictly to any scientific or moral doctrine.  Moreover, I am a Roman, and the Romans, unlike the Greeks, are unable to pursue profound speculations in a subtle manner.  If they adopt a philosophy it is above all in order to derive some practical advantages from it.  Siro, who enjoyed great renown among us, taught me the system of Epicurus and thus freed me from vain terrors and turned me aside from the cruelties to which religion persuades ignorant men.  I have embraced the views of Pythagoras concerning the souls of men and animals, both of which are of divine essence; this invites us to look upon ourselves without pride and without shame.  I have learnt from the Alexandrines how the earth, at first soft and without form, hardened in proportion as Nereus withdrew himself from it to dig his humid dwellings; I have learned how things were formed insensibly; in what manner the rains, falling from the burdened clouds, nourished the silent forests, and by what progress a few animals at last began to wander over the nameless mountains.  I could not accustom myself to your cosmogony either, for it seems to me fitter for a camel-driver on the Syrian sands than for a disciple of Aristarchus of Samos.  And what would become of me in the abode of your beatitude if I did not find there my friends, my ancestors, my masters, and my gods, and if it is not given to me to see Rhea’s noble son, or Venus, mother of Aeneas, with her winning smile, or Pan, or the young Dryads, or the Sylvans, or old Silenus, with his face stained by Aegle’s purple mulberries.’  These are the reasons which I begged that simple man to plead before the successor of Jupiter.”

     * This phrase seems to indicate that, if one is to believe
     Macrobius, the “Copa” is by Virgil.

“And since then, O great shade, thou hast received no other messages?”

“I have received none.”

“To console themselves for thy absence, O Virgil, they have three poets, Commodianus, Prudentius, and Fortunatus, who were all three born in those dark plays when neither prosody nor grammar were known.  But tell me, O Mantuan, hast thou never received other intelligence of the God whose company thou didst so deliberately refuse?”

“Never that I remember.”

“Hast thou not told me that I am not the first who descended alive into these abodes and presented himself before thee?”