“‘But when dissoluteness and diseases abound in a city, are not law courts and surgeries opened in abundance, and do not Law and Physic begin to hold their heads high, when numbers even of well-born persons devote themselves with eagerness to these professions?’ “‘What else can we expect?’ * * * * * “‘And do you not hold it disgraceful to require medical aid, unless it be for a wound, or an attack of illness incidental to the time of the year--to require it, I mean, owing to our laziness and the life we lead, and to get ourselves so stuffed with humours and wind, like quagmires, as to compel the clever sons of Asklepios to call diseases by such names as _flatulence_ and _catarrh_?’ “‘To be sure, these are very strange and new-fangled names for disorders.’” (Book III.) Elsewhere, in a well-known passage (in _The Laws_), Plato pronounces that the springs of human conduct and moral worth depend principally on diet. “I observe,” says he, “that men’s thoughts and actions are intimately connected with the threefold need and desire (accordingly as they are properly used or abused, virtue or its opposite is the result) of eating, drinking, and sexual love.” He himself was remarkable for the extreme frugality of his living. Like most of his countrymen, he was a great eater of figs; and so much did he affect that frugal repast that he was called, _par excellence_, the “lover of figs” (φιλόσυκος). The Greeks, in general, were noted among the Europeans for their abstemiousness; and Antiphanes, the comic poet (in Athenæus), terms them “leaf-eaters” (φυλλοτρῶγες). Amongst the Greeks, the Athenians and Spartans were specially noted for frugal living. That of the latter is proverbial. The comic poets frequently refer, in terms of ridicule, to what seemed to them so unaccountable an indifferentism to the “good things” of life on the part of the witty and refined people of Attica. See the _Deipnosophists_ (dinner-philosophers) of Athenæus (the great repertory of the _bon-vivantism_ of the time), and Plutarch’s _Symposiacs_. It has been pointed out by Professor Mahaffy, in his recent work on old Greek life, that slaughter-houses and butchers are seldom, or never, mentioned in Greek literature. “The eating of [flesh] meat,” he observes, “must have been almost confined to sacrificial feasts; for, in ordinary language, butchers’ meat was called _victim_ (ἱερεῖον). The most esteemed, or popular, dishes were _madsa_, a sort of porridge of wheat or barley; various kinds of bread (see _Deipn._ iii.); honey, beans, lupines, lettuce and salad, onions and leeks. Olives, dates, and figs formed the usual fruit portion of their meals. In regard to non-vegetable food, fish was the most sought after and preferred to anything else; and the well-known term _opson_, which so frequently recurs in Greek literature, was specially appropriated to it.