I have in hand my seventh book of Antiquities; I am collecting all the materials of our early history; of all the famous causes which I have defended; I am now completing the pleadings;[9] I am employed on a law of augurs, of pontiffs, of citizens. I am much engaged also in Greek literature, and, after the manner of the Pythagoreans, for the purpose of exercising my memory, I call to mind in the evening what I have said, heard, and done on each day. These are the exercises of the understanding; these are the race-courses of the mind; while I am perspiring and toiling over these, I do not greatly miss my strength of body. I attend my friends, I come into the senate very often, and spontaneously bring forward things much and long thought of, and I maintain them by strength of mind, not of body; and if I were unable to perform these duties, yet my couch would afford me amusement, when reflecting on those matters which I was no longer able to do, but that I am able is owing to my past life; for, by a person who always lives in these pursuits and labors, it is not perceived when old age steals on. Thus gradually and unconsciously life declines into old age; nor is its thread suddenly broken, but the vital principle is consumed by length of time. Then follows the third topic of blame against old age, that they say it has no pleasures. Oh, noble privilege of age! if indeed it takes from us that which is in youth the greatest defect. For listen, most excellent young men, to the ancient speech of Archytas[10] of Tarentum, a man eminently great and illustrious, which was reported to me when I, a young man, was at Tarentum with Quintus Maximus. He said that no more deadly plague than the pleasure of the body was inflicted on men by nature; for the passions, greedy of that pleasure, were in a rash and unbridled manner incited to possess it; that hence arose treasons against one's country, hence the ruining of states, hence clandestine conferences with enemies--in short, that there was no crime, no wicked act, to the undertaking of which the lust of pleasure did not impel; but that fornications and adulteries and every such crime were provoked by no other allurements than those of pleasure. And whereas either nature or some god had given to man nothing more excellent than his mind, that to this divine function and gift, nothing was so hostile as pleasure; since where lust bore sway, there was no room for self-restraint; and in the realm of pleasure, virtue could by no possibility exist. And that this might be the better understood, he begged you to imagine in your mind any one actuated by the greatest pleasure of the body that could be enjoyed; he believed no one would doubt but that so long as the person was in that state of delight, he would be able to consider nothing in his mind, to attain nothing by reason, nothing by reflection; wherefore that there was nothing so detestable and so destructive as pleasure,