Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/175

 gence. None of us imagine that debauched men of that sort live pleasantly. You, however, rather mean to speak of refined and elegant bons vivans, men who, by the employment of the most skilful cooks and bakers, and by carefully culling the choicest products of fishermen, fowlers, and hunters, avoid all indigestion—

As Lucilius says, men who

and so on—men in the enjoyment of luxuries such that, if they are taken away, Epicurus says that he does not know what there is that can be called good. Let them also have beautiful boys to attend upon them; let their clothes, their plate, their articles of Corinthian vertu, the banqueting-room itself, all correspond, still I should never be induced to say that these men so devoted to luxury were living either well or happily. From which it follows, not indeed that pleasure is not pleasure, but that pleasure is not the chief good. Nor was Lælius, who, when a young man, was a pupil of Diogenes the Stoic, and afterwards of Panætius, called a wise man because he did not understand what was most pleasant to the taste, (for it does not follow that the man who has a discerning heart must necessarily have a palate destitute of discernment,) but because he thought it of but small importance.

And it was well said by Lælius, and he may be truly called a wise man,—

The man who says this is one who, as he attributes no importance to pleasure himself, denies that the man feasts well who refers everything to pleasure. And yet he does not deny that Gallonius has at times feasted as he wished; for that would