De tuenda sanitate praecepta

ZEUXIPPUS. At some other time, then, it may be that we shall have to speak against pleasures, and show what an intrinsic beauty and dignity belongs to continence; but the present discourse is on the side of many pleasures and great. For diseases do not take from us and spoil for us so many of our enterprises or hopes or travels or pastimes as they do of our pleasures. Hence contempt for health is least profitable for those who make pleasure their chief aim. For infirmities allow many persons to be philosophers, or actually even generals or kings, but the pleasures and enjoyments of the body in some cases do not come to life at all in time of disease, and those that come to life yield but a brief part of what they properly should, and even that is not pure, but contaminated with much that is foreign, and marked, as it were, by the beatings of surge and storm. For it is not true that In well-gorged bodies Love resides,[*](The sentiment is probably taken from Euripides; cf. Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag., Euripides, No. 895, and Plutarch, Moralia, 917 B.) but rather in serenity and calmness of the flesh does

love find its end in pleasure, as also do eating and drinking; and health affords to pleasures, as calm weather to the halcyons,[*](Cf. Aristotle, Historia animalium, v. 8; Plutarch, Moralia, 982 F.) a safe and lovely nesting and hatching of their young. Prodicus seems to have put the matter very neatly in saying that fire is the best of sauces [*](Attributed to Evenus in Moralia, 50 A 697 D, and 1010 C.); but one might more truly speak of health as being the most divine and agreeable sauce. For boiled, baked, or fried foods afford no proper pleasure or even gratification to those who are suffering from disease, debauch, or nausea, while a clean and unspoiled appetite makes everything, to a sound body, pleasant and eagerly craved, as Homer has said,[*](Od. viii. 164. Cf. also 101 C supra. ) — that is, agreeable.

ZEUXIPPUS. As Demades used to say that the Athenians, who were for making war in season and out of season, never voted for peace save when wearing black, so we never give a thought to a plain and restrained way of living except when using enemas and poultices. But when we find ourselves in this plight we try hard to stifle the thought of our wrongdoings, setting ourselves against their remembrance, and, as is the way of most people who object to this or that air or this or that locality as insalubrious when they say that they dread travelling, we exclude our intemperance and self-indulgence from the cause of our illness. Nay, we should recall how Lysimachus [*](202 B.C.; cf. also Moralia, 183 E and 555 D. Lysimachus was one of the successors of Alexander the Great.) among the Getae was constrained by thirst to surrender himself and the army with him as prisoners of war, and afterwards as he drank cold water exclaimed, My God, for what a brief pleasure have I thrown

away great prosperity! And in the same way we ought in our attacks of illness to remember that for a cold drink, an ill-timed bath, or a social party, we have spoiled many of our pleasures and have ruined many an honourable enterprise and delightful recreation. For the sting caused by such reflections keeps the memory raw, so that, like a scar that remains when the body is in health, it makes us more circumspect about our way of living. For the healthy body will not, to any immoderate extent, breed desires that are vehement, intractable, unwonted, and hard to dispossess; nay, we can boldly and confidently oppose the appetites which would fain go beyond all bounds and assault our enjoyments, knowing that their whining and whimpering is a trivial and childish manifestation, and that later, when the table is removed, they will cease repining and make no complaint nor feel themselves aggrieved, but, on the contrary, untainted and cheerful rather than dulled and nauseated by over-indulgence, await the morrow. The remark which Timotheus [*](That this story had acquired almost a fixed phraseology in the source from which Plutarch took it may be seen by comparing this passage and Plutarch, Moralia, 686 A, Aelian, Varia Historia, ii. 18, Athenaeus, p. 419 d, and Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, v. 35 (100).) made, the day after he had dined with Plato at the Academy on the simple fare of the scholar, is in point here: Those who dine with Plato, he said, get on pleasantly the next day also. And it is reported that Alexander said [*](Cf. Plutarch, Moralia, 180 A, 1099 C, and Life of Alexander, chap. xxii. (p. 677 B).) when he discharged the chefs of Ada that he had better ones always to take with him — his night marches for breakfast, and for dinner his frugal breakfast.

ZEUXIPPUS. I am not unaware that men contract fevers

because of fatigue and extremes of heat and cold; but just as the scents of flowers are weak by themselves, whereas, when they are mixed with oil, they acquire strength and intensity, so a great mass of food to start with provides substance and body, as it were, for the causes and sources of disease that come from the outside. Without such material none of these things would cause any trouble, but they would readily fade away and be dissipated, if clear blood and an unpolluted spirit are at hand to meet the disturbance; but in a mass of superfluous food a sort of turbulent sediment, as it were, is stirred up, which makes everything foul and hard to manage and hard to get rid of. Therefore we must not act like those much admired (!) ship-masters who for greed take on a big cargo, and thenceforth are continually engaged in baling out the sea-water. So we must not stuff and overload our body, and afterwards employ purgatives and injections, but rather keep it all the time trim, so that, if ever it suffer depression, it shall, owing to its buoyancy, bob up again like a cork.

ZEUXIPPUS. We ought to take special precautions in the case of premonitory symptoms and sensations. For what Hesiod has said [*](Works and Days, 104, quoted more fully supra, 105 E.) of the illnesses that go hither and thither assailing mankind is not true of all, that

Silent they go, since the wisdom of Zeus has deprived them of voices,

but most of them have as their harbingers, forerunners, and heralds, attacks of indigestion and lassitude. Feelings of heaviness or of fatigue, says Hippocrates, [*](Aphorisms, ii. 5 (ed. Chartier, 38, 43, Kuhn, iii. p. 712).) when due to no external cause, indicate disease, since, presumably, the spirit about the nerves is subjected to tension and pressure owing to fullness within the body. Nevertheless, some men, although their body itself all but resists and would fain drag them to their beds and their rest, are led by gluttony and self-indulgence to rush off to the baths and eagerly to join in the drinking-bouts, as if they were laying in provisions for a siege and were fearful lest the fever seize them before they have had luncheon. Others, less gross than these, are not indeed caught in this folly, but very stupidly, just because they are ashamed to admit having a headache or indigestion, and to keep their clothes on all day, when a crowd on their way to the gymnasium invite them to come along, they get up and go, strip with the others, and go through the same exercises as do those who are in sound health. But as for the majority, Hope, backed by a proverb which well accords with incontinence and weakness of purpose, persuades and induces them to get up and go recklessly to their accustomed haunts, thinking to expel and dispel wine with wine, and headache with headache.[*](Similia similibus curentur. The proverb as not been handed down in this form, but Plutarch may have in mind the proverb found in Pollux, ix. 120 (see Kock, Com. Att. Frag. iii. p. 500, and his notes, especially the reference to Athenaeus, 44 a): Nail with nail and peg with peg (a man drives out). Sligtly different versions may be found in Leutsch and Schneidewin, Paroemiographi Graeci, ii. pp. 116 and 171.) Against this hope should be set Cato’s caution which that grand old man phrased in this way [*](Cf.Moralia, 825 D.): Make the great small, and abolish the small altogether ; also the thought that it is better to submit patiently to fasting and resting with nothing to show for it, rather than to take any chances by rushing pell-mell to a bath or a dinner. For if there is anything the matter with us, failure to take proper precaution and to put a check on ourselves will do us harm; and if nothing is the matter, it will do no harm for the body to be subjected to some restrictions and cleared of some of its encumbrances. But that childish person who is afraid to let his friends and servants discover that he is in a state of discomfort from excessive eating or drinking, will, if he is ashamed to admit having indigestion to-day, tomorrow admit having diarrhoea or fever or gripes. The shame of want makes want a shame to bear,[*](From an unknown play of Menander; cf. Kock, Com. Att. Frag. iii. p. 220.) but much more is it a shame to bear indigestion, overloading, and over-fullness in a body which is dragged to the bath like a rotten and leaky boat into the sea. For just exactly as some persons, when they are voyaging and a storm is raging, are ashamed to tarry on shore, and so they put out to sea, and then are in most shameful case, shrieking and sea-sick, so those who regard it as ignoble, amidst suspicious premonitory symptoms of their body, to spend one day in bed, and not to take their meals at table, keep to their bed most shamefully for many days, under purging and poulticing, servile and attentive to physicians, asking for wine or cold water, and suffering themselves to do and to utter many extravagant and ignoble things because of their distress and fear.

ZEUXIPPUS. Moreover, it is well that those who because of pleasures fail in self-control, and give way to their desires or are carried away by them, should be instructed and reminded that pleasures derive most of their satisfaction from the body;