The practices I allude to are those to which, while enjoying robust health, we submit: such, for instance, as rubbing the body with wax and oil,[2514] a preparation for a wrestling match, by rights, but which, these men pretend, was invented as a preservative of health; the use of hot baths, which are necessary, they have persuaded us, for the proper digestion of the food, baths which no one ever leaves without being all the weaker for it, and from which the more submissive of their patients are only carried to the tomb; potions taken fasting; vomits to clear the stomach, and then a series of fresh drenchings with drink; emasculation, self-inflicted by the use of pitch-plasters as depilatories; the public exposure, too, of even the most delicate parts of the female body for the prosecution of these practices. Most assuredly so it is, the contagion which has seized upon the public morals, has had no more fertile source than the medical art, and it continues, day by day even, to justify the claims of Cato to be considered a prophet and an oracle of wisdom, in that assertion of his, that it is quite sufficient to dip into the records of Greek genius, without becoming thoroughly acquainted with them. Such then is what may be said in justification of the senate and of the Roman people, during that period of six hundred years in which they manifested such repugnance to an art, by the most insidious terms of which, good men are made to lend their credit and authority to the very worst, and so strongly entered their protest against the silly persuasions entertained by those, who fancy that nothing can benefit them but what is coupled with high price. I entertain no doubt, too, that there will be found some to express their disgust at the particulars which I am about to give, in relation to animals: and yet Virgil himself has not disdained—when, too, there was no necessity for his doing so—to speak of ants and weevils, “And nests by beetles made that shun the light.”[2515] Homer,[2516] too, amid his description of the battles of the gods, has not disdained to remark upon the voracity of the common fly; nor has Nature, she who engendered man, thought it beneath her to engender these insects as well. Let each then make it his care, not so much to regard the thing itself, as to rightly appreciate in each case the cause and its effects. CHAP. 9.—THIRTY-FIVE REMEDIES DERIVED FROM WOOL.