aye, and entertain themselves with their friends, and perhaps with a
greater relish too, after their engagements and hard services,--as
did Alexander and Agesilaus, and (by Jove) Phocion and Epaminondas
too,--than these gentlemen who anoint themselves by the fireside, and
are gingerly rocked about the streets in sedans. Yea, those make but
small account of such pleasures as these, as being comprised in those
greater ones. For why should a man mention Epaminondas's denying to sup
with one, when he saw the preparations made were above the man's
estate, but frankly saying to his friend, "I thought you had intended a
sacrifice and not a debauch," when Alexander himself refused Queen Ada's
cooks, telling her he had better ones of his own, to wit, travelling
by night for his dinner, and a light dinner for his supper, and when
Philoxenus writing to him about some handsome boys, and desiring to know
of him whether he would have him buy them for him, was within a small
matter of being discharged his office for it? And yet who might better
have them than he? But as Hippocrates saith that of two pains the lesser
is forgot in the greater, so the pleasures that accrue from action and
the love of glory, while they cheer and refresh the mind, do by their
transcendency and grandeur obliterate and extinguish the inferior
satisfactions of the body.
If, then, the remembering of former good things (as they affirm) be that
which most contributes to a pleasurable living, not one of us will then
credit Epicurus when he, tells us that, while he was dying away in the
midst of the strongest agonies and distempers, he yet bore himself up
with the memory of the pleasures he formerly enjoyed. For a man may
better see the resemblance of his own face in a troubled deep or a
storm, than a smooth and smiling remembrance of past pleasure in a body
tortured with such lancing and rending pains. But now the memories of
past actions no man can put from him that would. For did Alexander,
think you, (or indeed could he possibly) forget the fight at Arbela?
Or Pelopidas the tyrant Leontiadas? Or Themistocles the engagement at
Salamis? For the Athenians to this very day keep an annual festival for
the battle at Marathon, and the Thebans for that at Leuctra; and so, by
Jove, do we ourselves (as you very well know) for that which Daiphantus
gained at Hyampolis, and all Phocis is filled with sacrifices and
public honors. Nor is there any of us that is better satisfied with
what himself hath either eaten or drunk than he is with what they
have achieved. It is very easy then to imagine what great content,
satisfaction, and joy accompanied the authors of these actions in their
lifetime, when the very memory of them hath not yet after five hundred
years and more lost its rejoicing power. The truth is, Epicurus himself
allows there are some pleasures derived from fame. And indeed why should
he not, when he himself had such a furious lechery and wriggling after
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