Beasts are rational (7)

GRYLLUS. Let us, in fact, first describe these pleasures. Our pleasure in fragrant substances, those that by their nature stimulate our sense of smell, besides the fact that our enjoyment of this is simple and costs nothing, also contributes to utility by providing a way for us to tell good food from bad. For the tongue is said to be, and is, a judge of what is sweet or bitter or sour, when liquid flavours combine and fuse with the organ of taste; but our sense of smell, even before we taste, is a judge that can much more critically distinguish the quality of each article of food than any royal taster[*] in the world. It admits what is proper, rejects what is alien, and will not let it touch or give pain to the taste, but informs on and denounces what is bad before any harm is done. And in other respects smell is no nuisance to us, as it is to you, forcing you to collect and mix together incense of one kind or another and cinnamon[*] and nard[*] and malobathrum[*] and Arabian aromatic reeds,[*] with the aid of a formidable dyer’s or witch’s art, of the sort to which you give the name of unguentation, thus buying at a great price an effeminate, emasculating luxury which has absolutely no real use. Yet, though such is its nature, it has depraved not only every woman, but lately the greater part of men as well, so that they refuse to sleep even with their own wives unless they come to bed reeking with myrrh and scented powders.[*] But sows attract boars and nannies bucks and other female creatures their consorts by means of their own special odours; scented, as they are, with pure dew and grassy meadows, they are attracted to the nuptial union by mutual affection.[*] The females are not coy and do not cloak their desires with deceits or trickeries or denials; nor do the males, driven on by the sting of mad lust, purchase the act of procreation by money or toil or servitude. No! Both parties celebrate at the proper time a love without deceit or hire, a love which in the season of spring[*] awakens, like the burgeoning of plants and trees, the desire of animals, and then immediately extinguishes it. Neither does the female continue to receive the male after she has conceived, nor does the male attempt her.[*] So slight and feeble is the regard we have for pleasure: our whole concern is with Nature. Whence it comes about that to this very day the desires of beasts have encompassed no homosexual mating.[*] But you have a fair amount of such trafficking among your high and mighty nobility, to say nothing of the baser sort. Agamemnon[*] came to Boeotia hunting for Argynnus, who tried to elude him, and slandering the sea and winds[*]⋯ then he gave his noble self a noble bath in Lake Copaïs to drown his passion there and get rid of his desire. Just so Heracles,[*] pursuing a beardless lad, lagged behind the other heroes[*] and deserted the expedition. On the Rotunda of Ptoian Apollo[*] one of your men secretly inscribed FAIR IS ACHILLES[*] - when Achilles already had a son. And I hear that the inscription is still in place.[*] But a cock that mounts another for the lack of a female is burned alive because some prophet or seer declares that such an event is an important and terrible omen. On this basis even men themselves acknowledge that beasts have a better claim to temperance and the non-violation of nature in their pleasures. Not even Nature, with Law for her ally, can keep within bounds the unchastened vice of your hearts; but as though swept by the current of their lusts beyond the barrier at many points, men do such deeds as wantonly outrage Nature, upset her order, and confuse her distinctions. For men have, in fact, attempted to consort with goats[*] and sows and mares, and women have gone mad with lust for male beasts. From such unions your Minotaurs[*] and Aegipans,[*] and, I suppose, your Sphinxes[*] and Centaurs[*] have arisen. Yet it is through hunger that dogs have occasionally eaten a man; and birds have tasted of human flesh through necessity; but no beast has ever attempted a human body for lustful reasons.[*] But the beasts I have mentioned and many others have been victims of the violent and lawless lusts of man.