These then so great and so many pleasures, that
run like perpetual springs and rills, these men decline and
avoid; nor will they permit those that put in among them
so much as to take a taste of them, but bid them hoist up
the little sails of their paltry cock-boats and fly from them.
Nay, they all, both he and she philosophers, beg and entreat Pythocles, for dear Epicurus's sake, not to affect or
make such account of the sciences called liberal. And
when they cry up and defend one Apelles, they write of
him that he kept himself clean by refraining himself all
along from the mathematics. But as to history—to pass
over their aversedness to other kinds of compositions—I
shall only present you with the words of Metrodorus, who
in his treatise of the Poets writes thus: Wherefore let it
never disturb you, if you know not either what side Hector
was of, or the first verses in Homer's Poem, or again what
is in its middle. But that the pleasures of the body
spend themselves like the winds called Etesian or Anniversary, and utterly determine when once age is past its
vigor, Epicurus himself was not insensible; and there
fore he makes it a problematic question, whether a sage
philosopher, when he is an old man and disabled for enjoyment, may not still be recreated with having handsome
girls to feel and grope him, being not, it seems, of the
mind of old Sophocles, who thanked God he had at length
escaped from this kind of pleasure, as from an untame and
furious master. But, in my opinion, it would be more advisable for these sensual lechers, when they see that age
will dry up so many of their pleasures, and that, as Euripides saith,
Dame Venus is to ancient men a foe,1
[p. 176]
in the first place to collect and lay up in store, as against a
siege, these other pleasures, as a sort of provision that will
not impair and decay; that then, after they have celebrated
the venereal festivals of life, they may spend a cleanly after
feast in reading over the historians and poets, or else in
problems of music and geometry. For it would never have
come into their minds so much as to think of these purblind and toothless gropings and spurtings of lechery, had
they but learned, if nothing more, to write comments upon
Homer or Euripides, as Aristotle, Heraclides, and Dicaearchus did. But I verily persuade myself that their neglecting to take care for such provisions as these, and finding
all the other things they employed themselves in (as they
use to say of virtue) but insipid and dry, and being wholly
set upon pleasure, and the body no longer supplying them
with it, give them occasion to stoop to do things both mean
and shameful in themselves and unbecoming their age; as
well when they refresh their memories with their former
pleasures and serve themselves of old ones (as it were)
long since dead and laid up in pickle for the purpose,
when they cannot have fresh ones, as when again they
offer violence to nature by suscitating and kindling in their
decayed bodies, as in cold embers, other new ones equally
senseless, they having not, it seems, their minds stored
with any congenial pleasure that is worth the rejoicing at.
