On 04-15-98 Frank Masingill wrote to Day Brown... 
 FM>    That is the saddest aspect of the reality of the closed-minded 
 FM> literalist 
 FM> in the realm of ANY "sacred" scripture or "word."  You may have 
 FM> noticed the 
 FM> similarity in basics of Paul's "Hymn to Love" (13th Chap. of I Cor.) 
 FM> and 
 FM> Plato's Symposium as a hymn to love.  Although Paul is emphasizing 
 FM> agape love 
 FM> and Plato was speaking of erotic love the central identity as far as 
 FM> noesis is concerned is rather plain.  
I dunno Frank; so far as I can tell, Plato and most Greeks took a 
Dionysian view of love, in which the term includes *both* erotic 
and agape.  Bear in mind, that they didn't, in his time, have any 
venereal diseases, so all of the taboos which we are used to were 
not a part of that culture.  So, Plato was not extolling the love 
of sex; he did not know there was a difference. 
 
IIRC, Claudius' wife, Lydia was infamous for screwing all comers, 
pardon the pun, ;) in a 24 hour brothel stint, apparantly setting 
a new record of some 300 or so studs.  I know of no evidence that 
she received exposure to an STD as a result. 
 
Yet, there was mention of VD on grafitti in Pompei, and by 200 AD 
would have been a significant problem which the Judaic taboos and 
the Christian dogma would've proved to be wise political policy. 
 
While I would not call this pandering by Paul, it was fortuitous. 
It was perhaps also a failure of Stoicism not to raise the issue. 
 
However: now that we have the diagnostic techniques, if love were 
as free now, as it was then, there would be no perjorative notion 
about identifying sexual partners, and these STDs would be easily 
tracked, carriers identified, and wiped out in one generation, as 
has been done with typhoid.   
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