And yet so it is, that we only meet with our deserts, no one of us feeling the least anxiety to know what is necessary for his own welfare. We walk[2498] with the feet of other people, we see with the eyes of other people, trusting to the memory of others we salute one another, and it is by the aid of others that we live. The most precious objects of existence, and the chief supports[2499] of life, are entirely lost to us, and we have nothing left but our pleasures to call our own. I will not leave Cato exposed to the hatred of a profession so ambitious as this, nor yet that senate which judged as he did, but at the same time I will pursue my object without wresting to my purpose the cries practised by its adepts, as some might naturally expect. For what profession has there been more fruitful in poisonings, or from which there have emanated more frauds upon wills? And then, too, what adulteries have been committed, in the very houses of our princes even! the intrigue of Eudemus,[2500] for example, with Livia, the wife of Drusus Cæsar, and that of Valens with the royal lady previous mentioned.[2501] Let us not impute these evils, I say, to the art, but to the men who practise it; for Cato, I verily believe, as little apprehended such practices as these in the City, as he did the presence of royal ladies[2502] there. I will not accuse the medical art of the avarice even of its professors, the rapacious bargains made with their patients while their fate is trembling in the balance, the tariffs framed upon their agonies, the monies taken as earnest for the dispatching of patients, or the mysterious secrets of the craft. I will not mention how that cataract must be couched[2503] only, in the eye, in preference to extracting it at once—practices, all of them, which have resulted in one very great advantage, by alluring hither such a multitude of adventurers; it being no moderation on their part, but the rivalry existing between such numbers of practitioners, that keeps their charges within moderation. It is a well-known fact that Charmis, the physician[2504] already mentioned, made a bargain with a patient of his in the provinces, that he should have two hundred thousand sesterces for the cure; that the Emperor Claudius extorted from Alcon, the surgeon,[2505] ten millions of sesterces by way of fine; and that the same man, after being recalled from his exile in Gaul, acquired a sum equally large in the course of a few years.