Then I said to him: If we may be your judges, you
have not; yea, we must acquit you of having offered them
the least indignity; and therefore pray despatch the rest
of your discourse with assurance. How! said he, and
shall not Aristodemus then succeed me, if you are tired
out yourself? Aristodemus said: With all my heart,
when you are as much tired as he is; but since you are
yet in your vigor, pray make use of yourself, my noble
friend, and don't think to pretend weariness. Theon then
replied: What is yet behind, I must confess, is very easy;
it being but to go over the several pleasures contained in
that part of life that consists in action. Now themselves
somewhere say that there is far more satisfaction in doing
than in receiving good; and good may be done many times,
it is true, by words, but the most and greatest part of
good consists in action, as the very name of beneficence
tells us and they themselves also attest. For you may
remember, continued he, we heard this gentleman tell us
but now what words Epicurus uttered, and what letters
he sent to his friends, applauding and magnifying Metrodorus,—how bravely and like a spark he quitted the
city and went down to the port to relieve Mithrus the
Syrian,—and this, though Metrodorus did not then do
any thing at all. What and how great then may we presume the pleasures of Plato to have been, when Dion by
the measures he gave him deposed the tyrant Dionysius
and set Sicily at liberty? And what the pleasures of
Aristotle, when he rebuilt his native city Stagira, then
levelled with the ground, and brought back its exiled inhabitants?
[p. 181]
And what the pleasures of Theophrastus and
of Phidias, when they cut off the tyrants of their respective countries For what need a man recount to you,
who so well know it, how many particular persons they
relieved, not by sending them a little wheat or a measure
of meal (as Epicurus did to some of his friends), but by
procuring restoration to the banished, liberty to the imprisoned, and restitution of wives and children to those
that had been bereft of them? But a man could not, if
he would, pass by the sottish stupidity of the man who,
though he tramples under foot and vilifies the great and
generous actions of Themistocles and Miltiades, yet writes
these very words to his friends about himself: ‘You have
given a very gallant and noble testimony of your care of
me in the provision of corn you have made for me, and
have declared your affection to me by signs that mount
to the very skies.’ So that, should a man but take that
poor parcel of corn out of the great philosopher's epistle,
it might seem to be the recital of some letter of thanks
for the delivery or preservation of all Greece or of the
commons of Athens.
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