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 other. Accordingly, their father, when with all his exhortations he could not persuade his sons to think of a higher marriage, brings these damsels to them out of the fields, having persuaded their father to give them to him, and marries them to his sons. And they were always called the [Greek: kallipygoi]; as Cercidas of Megalopolis says in his Iambics, in the following line—

There was a pair of [Greek: kallipygoi] women At Syracuse.

So they, having now become rich women, built a temple to Venus, calling the goddess [Greek: kallipygos], as Archelaus also relates in his Iambics.

And that the luxury of madness is exceedingly great is very pleasantly argued by Heraclides of Pontus, in his treatise on Pleasure, where he says—"Thrasylaus the Æxonensian, the son of Pythodorus, was once afflicted with such violent madness, that he thought that all the vessels which came to the Piræus belonged to him. And he entered them in his books as such; and sent them away, and regulated their affairs in his mind, and when they returned to port he received them with great joy, as a man might be expected to who was master of so much wealth. And when any were lost, he never inquired about them, but he rejoiced in all that arrived safe; and so he lived with great pleasure. But when his brother Crito returned from Sicily, and took him and put him into the hands of a doctor, and cured him of his madness, he himself related his madness, and said that he had never been happier in his life; for that he never felt any grief, but that the quantity of pleasure which he experienced was something unspeakable."

BOOK XIII.

1. Antiphanes the comic writer, my friend Timocrates, when he was reading one of his own comedies to Alexander the king, and when it was plain that the king did not think much of it, said to him, "The fact is, O king, that a man who is to appreciate this play, ought to have often supped at picnic feasts, and must have often borne and inflicted blows in