Now when I set before my eyes the brave achievements of Thrasybulus and
Pelopidas, of Aristides engaged at Plataea and Miltiades at Marathon,
I am here constrained with Herodotus to declare it my opinion, that
in an active state of life the pleasure far exceeds the glory. And
Epaminondas herein bears me witness also, when he saith (as is
reported of him), that the greatest satisfaction he ever received in
his life was that his father and mother had lived to see the trophy
set up at Leuctra when himself was general. Let us then compare
with Epaminondas’s Epicurus’s mother, rejoicing that she had lived
to see her son cooping himself up in a little garden, and getting
children in common with Polyaenus upon the strumpet of Cyzicus. As
for Metrodorus’s mother and sister, how extravagantly rejoiced they
were at his nuptials appears by the letters he wrote to his brother
in answer to his; that is, out of his own books. Nay, they tell us
bellowing that they have not only lived a life of pleasure, but also
exult and sing hymns in the praise of their own living. Now, when our
servants celebrate the festivals of Saturn or go in procession at the
time of the rural bacchanals, you would scarcely brook the hollowing
and din they make, should the intemperateness of their joy and their
insensibleness of decorum make them act and speak such things as these:
Lean down, boy! why dost sit! let’s tope like mad!
Here’s belly-timber store; ne’er spare it, lad.
Straight these huzza like wild. One fills up drink;
Another plaits a wreath, and crowns the brink
O’ th’ teeming bowl. Then to the verdant bays
All chant rude carols in Apollo’s praise;
While one his door with drunken fury smites,
Till he from bed his pretty consort frights.
And are not Metrodorus’s words something like to these when he writes
to his brother thus: It is none of our business to preserve the Greeks,
or to get them to bestow garlands upon us for our wit, but to eat well
and drink good wine, Timocrates, so as not to offend but pleasure our
stomachs. And he saith again, in some other place in the same epistles:
How gay and how assured was I, when I had once learned of Epicurus
the true way of gratifying my stomach; for, believe me, philosopher
Timocrates, our prime good lies at the stomach.
17. In brief, these men draw out the dimensions of their pleasures
like a circle, about the stomach as a centre. And the truth is, it is
impossible for those men ever to participate of generous and princely
joy, such as enkindles a height of spirit in us and sends forth to all
mankind an unmade hilarity and calm serenity, that have taken up a sort
of life that is confined, unsocial, inhuman, and uninspired towards
the esteem of the world and the love of mankind. For the soul of man
is not an abject, little, and ungenerous thing, nor doth it extend its
desires (as polyps do their claws) unto eatables only,—yea, these are
in an instant of time taken off by the least plenitude,—but when its
efforts towards what is brave and generous and the honors and caresses
that accrue therefrom are now in their consummate vigor, this life’s
duration cannot limit them, but the desire of glory and the love of
mankind grasp at whole eternity, and wrestle with such actions and
charms as bring with them an ineffable pleasure, and such as good men,
though never so fain, cannot decline, they meeting and accosting them
on all sides and surrounding them about, while their being beneficial
to many occasions joy to themselves.
As he passes through the throngs in the city,
All gaze upon him as some Deity.[148]
For he that can so affect and move other men as to fill them with joy
and rapture, and to make them long to touch him and salute him, cannot
but appear even to a blind man to possess and enjoy very extraordinary
satisfactions in himself. And hence it comes that such men are both
indefatigable and undaunted in serving the public, and we still hear
some such words from them:
Thy father got thee for the common good;
and
Let’s not give off to benefit mankind.
But what need I instance in those that are consummately good? For if
to one of the middling rank of bad men, when he is just a dying, he
that hath the power over him (whether his God or prince) should but
allow one hour more, upon condition that, after he hath spent that
either in some generous action or in sensual enjoyment, he should then
presently die, who would in this time choose rather to accompany with
Lais or drink Ariusian wine, than to despatch Archias and restore the
Thebans to their liberties? For my part I believe none would. For I
see that even common sword-players, if they are not utter brutes and
savages, but Greek born, when they are to enter the list, though there
be many and very costly dishes set before them, yet take more content
in employing their time in commending their poor wives to some of
their friends, yea, and in conferring freedom on their slaves, than
in gratifying their stomachs. But should the pleasures of the body be
allowed to have some extraordinary matter in them, this would yet be
common to men of action and business.