Or if, as a last alternative, people choose to talk of ‘ease and enjoyment’, when they mean luxurious self-indulgence; if they recommend the public man to adopt that process of idle senile decay, I hardly know which of two ugly comparisons will best hit off such a life. Shall I say it is a case of sailors taking ‘Aphrodite-holiday’ and keeping it up for ever, without waiting till their ship is berthed, but deserting it while still on the voyage? Or is it a case of ‘Heracles-chez-Omphale’—as some sorry humourists depict him—wearing a saffron gown and quietly allowing Lydian handmaids to fan him and braid his hair? Are we to treat our public man in that way? To strip off his [Sidenote: F] lion’s-skin, lay him on a couch, and feast him, with lute and flute lulling him all the while? Or should we not take warning by the retort of Pompey the Great to Lucullus? The latter, after his campaigns and public services, had given himself up to baths, dinners, social entertainments in the daytime, profound indolence, and new-fangled notions in the way of house-building. Meanwhile he accused Pompey of a fondness for place and power unsuited to his years. Pompey replied that for an old man effeminacy was more unseasonable than office. When he was [Sidenote: 786] ill and the doctor ordered him fieldfares—the bird being then out of season and difficult to procure—and when some one told him that Lucullus had a large number in his preserves, he refused to send for or receive one, exclaiming, ‘What? Pompey could not live but for the luxury of Lucullus?’ It may be true that nature ordinarily seeks pleasure and delight. But, with an old man, the body has become incapable of all pleasures except a few which are essential. Not only is it the case that _The Queen of Love turns weary from the old_, [Sidenote: B] as Euripides has it. Though they may retain the appetite for eating and drinking—generally in a dulled or toothless form—they find a difficulty in whetting the edge or sharpening the teeth even of that. It is in the mind that one must lay up a stock of pleasures, though not of the mean and ignoble kind indicated by Simonides, when he told those who reproached him with avarice that, though age had robbed him of other joys, he had still one left to support his declining years—the joy of money-making. In public activity there are pleasures of the greatest and noblest sort, such as we may believe to be the only, or the chief, enjoyment of the gods themselves—I mean those which result from a beneficent deed or a fine achievement.