in our own words the same feeling to be pleasure which you are used to
boast of with such assurance? Are these your words or not? This is what
you say in that book which contains all the doctrine of your school;
for I will perform on this occasion the office of a translator, lest
any one should imagine that I am inventing anything. Thus you speak:
"Nor can I form any notion of the chief good, abstracted from those
pleasures which are perceived by taste, or from what depends on hearing
music, or abstracted from ideas raised by external objects visible to
the eye, or by agreeable motions, or from those other pleasures which
are perceived by the whole man by means of any of his senses; nor can
it possibly be said that the pleasures of the mind are excited only by
what is good, for I have perceived men's minds to be pleased with the
hopes of enjoying those things which I mentioned above, and with the
idea that it should enjoy them without any interruption from pain." And
these are his exact words, so that any one may understand what were the
pleasures with which Epicurus was acquainted. Then he speaks thus, a
little lower down: "I have often inquired of those who have been called
wise men what would be the remaining good if they should exclude from
consideration all these pleasures, unless they meant to give us nothing
but words. I could never learn anything from them; and unless they
choose that all virtue and wisdom should vanish and come to nothing,
they must say with me that the only road to happiness lies through
those pleasures which I mentioned above." What follows is much the
same, and his whole book on the chief good everywhere abounds with the
same opinions. Will you, then, invite Telamon to this kind of life to
ease his grief? And should you observe any one of your friends under
affliction, would you rather prescribe him a sturgeon than a treatise
of Socrates? or advise him to listen to the music of a water organ
rather than to Plato? or lay before him the beauty and variety of some
garden, put a nosegay to his nose, burn perfumes before him, and bid