the mariners who, leaving their ship for the future not in the harbor but under sail, spend all their time in celebrating the feasts of Venus; or to Hercules, whom some painters merrily but yet ridiculously represent wearing in Omphale’s palace a yellow petticoat, and giving himself up to be boxed and combed by the Lydian damsels. So shall we, stripping a statesman of his lion’s-skin, and seating him at a luxurious table, there be always cloying his palate with delicacies, and filling his ears with effeminate songs and music; being not a whit put to the blush by the saying of Pompey the Great to Lucullus, who after his public services both in camp and council, addicted himself to bathing, feasting, conversing with women in the day, and much other dissoluteness, even to the raising and extravagantly furnishing of sumptuous buildings, and who, once upbraiding Pompey with an ambition and desire of rule unsuitable to his age, was by him answered, that it was more misbecoming an old man to live voluptuously than to govern? The same Pompey, when in his sickness his physician had prescribed him the eating of a thrush, which was then hard to be got, as being out of season, being told that Lucullus bred great store of such birds, would not send to him for one, but said: What! Cannot Pompey live, unless Lucullus be luxurious? 5. For though Nature seeks by all means to delight and rejoice herself, yet the bodies of old men are incapacitated for all pleasures, except a few that are absolutely necessary. For not only Venus to old men is averse,[33] as Euripides has it; but their appetite also to their meat and drink is for the most part dull, and as one would say, toothless; so that they have but little gust and relish in them.