found, that the same teacher publishes rules of temperance and at the
same time lessons in love and wantonness; Xenophon, in the very bosom of
Clinias, wrote against the Aristippic virtue. 'Tis not that there is any
miraculous conversion in it that makes them thus wavering; 'tis that
Solon represents himself, sometimes in his own person, and sometimes in
that of a legislator; one while he speaks for the crowd, and another for
himself; taking the free and natural rules for his own share, feeling
assured of a firm and entire health:

"Curentur dubii medicis majoribus aegri."

["Desperate maladies require the best doctors."
--Juvenal, xiii. 124.]

Antisthenes allows a sage to love, and to do whatever he thinks
convenient, without regard to the laws, forasmuch as he is better advised
than they, and has a greater knowledge of virtue. His disciple Diogenes
said, that "men to perturbations were to oppose reason: to fortune,
courage: to the laws, nature." For tender stomachs, constrained and
artificial recipes must be prescribed: good and strong stomachs serve
themselves simply with the prescriptions of their own natural appetite;
after this manner do our physicians proceed, who eat melons and drink
iced wines, whilst they confine their patients to syrups and sops.
"I know not," said the courtezan Lais, "what they may talk of books,
wisdom, and philosophy; but these men knock as often at my door as any
others." At the same rate that our licence carries us beyond what is
lawful and allowed, men have, often beyond universal reason, stretched
the precepts and rules of our life:

"Nemo satis credit tantum delinquere, quantum