Tusculan Disputations 4 ¶51 — Cicero (on the Stoics)

Cicero (on the Stoics), Tusculan Disputations 4 ¶51

Anyone who attends the least to the subject will be convinced how unbecoming this joy is. And as they are very shameful who are immoderately delighted with the enjoyment of venereal pleasures, so are they very scandalous who lust vehemently after them. And all that which is commonly called love (and, believe me, I can find out no other name to call it by) is of such a trivial nature that nothing, I think, is to be compared to it, of which Caecilius says, I hold the man of every sense bereaved Who grants not Love to be of Gods the chief: Whose mighty power whate’er is good effects, Who gives to each his beauty and defects: Hence, health and sickness; wit and folly, hence, The God that love and hatred doth dispense! An excellent corrector of life this same poetry, which thinks that love, the promoter of debauchery and vanity, should have a place in the council of the Gods! I am speaking of comedy, which could not subsist at all without our approving of these debaucheries. But what said that chief of the Argonauts in tragedy? My life I owe to honor less than love. What, then, are we to say of this love of Medea? What a train of miseries did it occasion! And yet the same woman has the assurance to say to her father, in another poet, that she had a husband Dearer by love than ever fathers were.