[74]
But I must change my tone for Cato argues with me on rigid and stoic principles. He says
that it is not true that good-will is conciliated by food. He says that men's
judgments, in the important business of electing to magistracies, ought not to be corrupted by
pleasures. Therefore, if any one, to promote his canvass, invites another to supper, he must
be condemned. “Shall you,” says he, “seek to obtain supreme
power, supreme authority, and the helm of the republic, by encouraging men's sensual
appetites, by soothing their minds, by tendering luxuries to them? Are you asking employment
as a pimp from a band of luxurious youths, or the sovereignty of the world from the Roman
people?” An extraordinary sort of speech! but our usages, our way of living, our
manners, and the constitution itself rejects it. For the Lacedaemonians, the original authors
of that way of living and of that sort of language, men who lie at their daily meals on hard
oak benches, and the Cretans, of whom no one ever lies down to eat at all, have neither of
them preserved their political constitutions or their power better than the Romans, who set
apart times for pleasure as well as times for labour; for one of those nations was destroyed
by a single invasion of our army, the other only preserves its discipline and its laws by
means of the protection afforded to it by our supremacy.
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.