Page:The Deipnosophists (Volume 3).djvu/50

 himself up to pride, when staying near Byzantium, dared to put an inscription on the brazen goblet which is there consecrated to the gods, whose temple is at the entrance of the strait, (and the goblet is in existence to this day,) as if he had dedicated it himself; putting this inscription on it, forgetting himself through his luxury and arrogance—

Pausanias, the general of broad Greece, Offered this goblet to the royal Neptune, A fit memorial of his deathless valour, Here in the Euxine sea. He was by birth A Spartan, and Cleombrotus's son, Sprung from the ancient race of Hercules."

51. "Pharax the Lacedæmonian also indulged himself in luxury," as Theopompus tells us in the fourteenth book of his History, "and he abandoned himself to pleasure in so dissolute and unrestrained a manner, that by reason of his intemperance he was much oftener taken for a Sicilian, than for a Spartan by reason of his country." And in his fifty-second book he says that "Archidamus the Lacedæmonian, having abandoned his national customs, adopted foreign and effeminate habits; so that he could not endure the way of life which existed in his own country, but was always, by reason of his intemperance, anxious to live in foreign countries. And when the Tarentines sent an embassy about an alliance, he was anxious to go out with them as an ally; and being there, and having been slain in the wars, he was not thought worthy even of a burial, although the Tarentines offered a great deal of money to the enemy to be allowed to take up his body."

And Phylarchus, in the tenth book of his Histories, says that Isanthes was the king of that tribe of Thracians called Crobyzi, and that he surpassed all the men of his time in luxury; and he was a rich man, and very handsome. And the same historian tells us, in his twenty-second book, that Ptolemy the Second, king of Egypt, the most admirable of all princes, and the most learned and accomplished of men, was so beguiled and debased in his mind by his unseasonable luxury, that he actually dreamed that he should live for ever, and said that he alone had found out how to become immortal. And once, after he had been afflicted by the gout for many days, when at last he got a little better, and saw through his window-blinds some Egyptians dining by the river side, and eating whatever it might be that they had, and