31. And yet they are never wearied with their brawling and dunning of all persons to take the escape of evil for a good, and yet not to repute privation of good for an evil. But they still confess what we have asserted, that death hath in it nothing of either good hope or solace, but that all that is complacent and good is then wholly extinguished; at which time those men look for many amiable, great, and divine things, that conceive the minds of men to be unperishable and immortal, or at least to go about in certain long revolutions of times, being one while upon earth and another while in heaven, until they are at last dissolved with the universe and then, together with the sun and moon, sublimed into an intellective fire. So large a field and one of so great pleasures Epicurus wholly cuts off, when he destroys (as hath been said) the hopes and graces we should derive from the Gods, and by that extinguishes both in our speculative capacity the desire of knowledge, and in our active the love of glory, and confines and abases our nature to a poor narrow thing, and that not cleanly neither, to wit, the content the mind receives by the body, as if it were capable of no higher good than the escape of evil. ROMAN QUESTIONS. _Question 1._ Wherefore do the Romans require a new-married woman to touch fire and water? _Solution._ Is it not for one of these reasons; amongst elements and principles, one is masculine and the other feminine;—one (fire) hath in it the principles of motion, the other (water) hath the faculty of a subject and matter? Or is it because fire refines and water cleanseth, and a married wife ought to continue pure and chaste? Or is it because fire without moisture doth not nourish, but is adust, and water destitute of heat is barren and sluggish; so both the male and female apart are of no force, but a conjunction of both in marriage completes society? Or is the meaning that they must never forsake each other, but must communicate in every fortune, and although there be no goods, yet they may participate with each other in fire and water? _Question 2._ Why do they light at nuptials five torches, neither more nor less, which they call waxen tapers? _Solution._ Whether it be (as Varro saith) that the Praetors use three, but more are permitted to the Aediles, and married persons do light the fire at the Aediles’ torches? Or is it that, having use of many numbers, the odd number was reckoned better and perfecter upon other accounts, and therefore more adapted to matrimony? For the even number admits of division, and the equal parts of opposition and repugnancy, whenas the odd cannot be divided, but being divided into parts leaves always an inequality. The number five is most matrimonial of odd numbers, for three is the first odd and two is the first even, of which five is compounded, as of male and female.