(406) I mean this: When a carpenter is ill he asks the physician for a rough and ready cure; an emetic or a purge or a cautery or the knife,—these are his remedies. And if some one prescribes for him a course of dietetics, and tells him that he must swathe and swaddle his head, and all that sort of thing, he replies at once that he has no time to be ill, and that he sees no good in a life which is spent in nursing his disease to the neglect of his customary employment; and therefore bidding good-bye to this sort of physician, he resumes his ordinary habits, and either gets well and lives and does his business, or, if his constitution fails, he dies and has no more trouble. Yes, he said, and a man in his condition of life ought to use the art of medicine thus far only. Has he not, I said, an occupation; and what profit would there be in his life if he were deprived of his occupation? Quite true, he said. But with the rich man this is otherwise; of him we do not say that he has any specially appointed work which he must perform, if he would live. He is generally supposed to have nothing to do. Then you never heard of the saying of Phocylides, that as soon as a man has a livelihood he should practise virtue? Nay, he said, I think that he had better begin somewhat sooner. Let us not have a dispute with him about this, I said; but rather ask ourselves: Is the practice of virtue obligatory on

(406) besprinkled with barley-meal and grated cheese, which are certainly inflammatory, and yet the sons of Asclepius who were at the Trojan war do not blame the damsel who gives him the drink, or rebuke Patroclus, who is treating his case. Well, he said, that was surely an extraordinary drink to be given to a person in his condition. Not so extraordinary, I replied, if you bear in mind that in former days, as is commonly said, before the time of Herodicus, the guild of Asclepius did not practise our present system of medicine, which may be said to educate diseases. But Herodicus, being a trainer, and himself of a sickly constitution, by a combination of training and doctoring found out a way of torturing first and chiefly himself, and secondly the rest of the world. How was that? he said. By the invention of lingering death; for he had a mortal disease which he perpetually tended, and as recovery was out of the question, he passed his entire life as a valetudinarian; he could do nothing but attend upon himself, and he was in constant torment whenever he departed in anything from his usual regimen, and so dying hard, by the help of science he struggled on to old age. A rare reward of his skill! Yes, I said; a reward which a man might fairly expect who never understood that, if Asclepius did not instruct his descendants in valetudinarian arts, the omission arose, not from ignorance or inexperience of such a branch of medicine, but because he knew that in all well-ordered states every individual has an occupation to which he must attend, and has therefore no leisure to spend in continually being ill. This we remark in the case of the artisan, but, ludicrously enough, do not apply the same rule to people of the richer sort. How do you mean? he said.

(407) for such a cure would have been of no use either to himself, or to the State. Then, he said, you regard Asclepius as a statesman. Clearly; and his character is further illustrated by his sons. Note that they were heroes in the days of old and practised the medicines of which I am speaking at the siege of Troy: You will remember how, when Pandarus wounded Menelaus, they ‘Sucked the blood out of the wound, and sprinkled soothing remedies 40 ,’ but they never prescribed what the patient was afterwards to eat or drink in the case of Menelaus, any more than in the case of Eurypylus; the remedies, as they conceived, were enough to heal any man who before he was wounded was healthy and regular in his habits; and even though he did happen to drink a posset of Pramnian wine, he might get well all the same. But they would have nothing to do with unhealthy and intemperate subjects, whose lives were of no use either to themselves or others; the art of medicine was not designed for their good, and though they were as rich as Midas, the sons of Asclepius would have declined to attend them. They were very acute persons, those sons of Asclepius. Naturally so, I replied. Nevertheless, the tragedians and Pindar disobeying our behests, although they acknowledge that Asclepius was the son of Apollo, say also that he was bribed into healing a rich man who was at the point of

(1) Since men live but for a very short period, if their life is compared with the whole of time, they will make a most beautiful journey as it were, if they pass through life with tranquillity. This however they will possess in the most eminent degree, if they accurately and scientifically know themselves, viz. if they know that they are mortal and of a fleshly nature, and that they have a body which is corruptible and can be easily injured, and which is exposed to every thing most grievous and severe, even to their latest breath. And in the first place, let us direct our attention to those things which happen to the body; and these are pleurisy, inflammation of the lungs, phrensy, gout, stranguary, dysentery, lethargy, epilepsy, putrid ulcers, and ten thousand other diseases.

But the diseases which happen to the soul are much greater and more dire than these. For all the iniquitous, evil, illegal, and impious conduct in the life of man, originates from the passions of the soul. For through preternatural immoderate desires many have become subject to unrestrained impulses, and have not refrained from the most unholy pleasures, arising from being connected with daughters or even mothers. Many also have been induced to destroy their fathers, and their own offspring. But what occasion is there to be prolix in narrating externally impending evils, such as excessive rain, drought, violent heat and cold; so that frequently from the anomalous state of the air, pestilence and famine are produced, and all-various calamities, and whole cities become desolate?

Since therefore many such-like calamities are impendent, we should neither be elevated by the possession of corporeal goods, which may rapidly be consumed by the incursions of a small fever, nor with what are conceived to be prosperous external circumstances, which frequently in their own nature perish more rapidly than they accede. For all these are uncertain and unstable, and are found to have their existence in many and various mutations; and no one of them is permanent, or immutable, or stable, or indivisible. Hence well considering these things, and also being persuaded, that if what is present and is imparted to us, is able to remain for the smallest portion of time, it is as much as we ought to expect; we shall then live in tranquillity and with hilarity, generously bearing whatever may befal us.

(408) death, and for this reason he was struck by lightning. But we, in accordance with the principle already affirmed by us, will not believe them when they tell us both;—if he was the son of a god, we maintain that he was not avaricious; or, if he was avaricious, he was not the son of a god. All that, Socrates, is excellent; but I should like to put a question to you: Ought there not to be good physicians in a State, and are not the best those who have treated the greatest number of constitutions good and bad? and are not the best judges in like manner those who are acquainted with all sorts of moral natures? Yes, I said, I too would have good judges and good physicians. But do you know whom I think good? Will you tell me? I will, if I can. Let me however note that in the same question you join two things which are not the same. How so? he asked. Why, I said, you join physicians and judges. Now the most skilful physicians are those who, from their youth upwards, have combined with the knowledge of their art the greatest experience of disease; they had better not be robust in health, and should have had all manner of diseases in their own persons. For the body, as I conceive, is not the instrument with which they cure the body; in that case we could not allow them ever to be or to have been sickly; but they cure the body with the mind, and the mind which has become and is sick can cure nothing. That is very true, he said.

(405) a master in dishonesty; able to take every crooked turn, and wriggle into and out of every hole, bending like a withy and getting out of the way of justice: and all for what?—in order to gain small points not worth mentioning, he not knowing that so to order his life as to be able to do without a napping judge is a far higher and nobler sort of thing. Is not that still more disgraceful? Yes, he said, that is still more disgraceful. Well, I said, and to require the help of medicine, not when a wound has to be cured, or on occasion of an epidemic, but just because, by indolence and a habit of life such as we have been describing, men fill themselves with waters and winds, as if their bodies were a marsh, compelling the ingenious sons of Asclepius to find more names for diseases, such as flatulence and catarrh; is not this, too, a disgrace? Yes, he said, they do certainly give very strange and newfangled names to diseases. Yes, I said, and I do not believe that there were any such diseases in the days of Asclepius; and this I infer from the circumstance that the hero Eurypylus, after he has been wounded in Homer, drinks a posset of Pramnian wine well

(407) the rich man, or can he live without it? And if obligatory on him, then let us raise a further question, whether this dieting of disorders, which is an impediment to the application of the mind in carpentering and the mechanical arts, does not equally stand in the way of the sentiment of Phocylides? Of that, he replied, there can be no doubt; such excessive care of the body, when carried beyond the rules of gymnastic, is most inimical to the practice of virtue. 39 Yes, indeed, I replied, and equally incompatible with the management of a house, an army, or an office of state; and, what is most important of all, irreconcileable with any kind of study or thought or self-reflection—there is a constant suspicion that headache and giddiness are to be ascribed to philosophy, and hence all practising or making trial of virtue in the higher sense is absolutely stopped; for a man is always fancying that he is being made ill, and is in constant anxiety about the state of his body. Yes, likely enough. And therefore our politic Asclepius may be supposed to have exhibited the power of his art only to persons who, being generally of healthy constitution and habits of life, had a definite ailment; such as these he cured by purges and operations, and bade them live as usual, herein consulting the interests of the State; but bodies which disease had penetrated through and through he would not have attempted to cure by gradual processes of evacuation and infusion: he did not want to lengthen out good-for-nothing lives, or to have weak fathers begetting weaker sons;—if a man was not able to live in the ordinary way he had no business to cure him;

(89) Timaeus: apart from the accidents due to necessity. For from the very beginning the triangles of each creature are constructed with a capacity for lasting until a certain time, beyond which no one could ever continue to live. With respect to the structure of diseases also the same rule holds good: whenever anyone does violence thereto by drugging, in despite of the predestined period of time, diseases many and grave, in place of few and slight, are wont to occur. Wherefore one ought to control all such diseases, so far as

(2) “It is reported that you philosophize to every one you may happen to meet, and publicly, which Pythagoras did not think fit to do. And these things, indeed, O Hipparchus, you learnt with diligent assiduity, but you have not preserved them; having tasted, O excellent man, of Sicilian delicacies, which you ought not to have tasted a second time. If, therefore, you abandon these, I shall rejoice; but if not, you will be dead in my opinion. For it will be pious to call to mind the divine and human precepts of Pythagoras, and not to make the goods of wisdom common to those, who have not even in a dream their soul purified. For it is not lawful to extend to every casual person, things which were obtained with such great labors, and such diligent assiduity, nor to divulge the mysteries of the Eleusinian Goddesses to the profane.

For those who do either of these, are equally unjust and impious. But it will be well to consider what a great length of time we consumed in wiping away the stains which had insinuated themselves into our breasts, till, after the lapse of some years, we became fit recipients of the doctrines of Pythagoras. For as dyers previously purify garments, and then fix in the colors with which they wish them to be imbued, in order that the dye may not be washed away, and may never become evanescent; after the same manner also that divine man prepared the souls of those that were lovers of philosophy, so that they might not deceive him in any of those beautiful and good qualities which he hoped they would possess.

For he did not impart spurious doctrines, nor snares, in which most of the sophists, who are at leisure for no good purpose, entangle young men; but he possessed a scientific knowledge of things human and divine. These men, however, making his doctrine a pretext, perform many dreadful deeds, ensnaring youth not in a becoming nor yet in a casual way. Hence they render their auditors noxious and precipitate. For they infuse theorems and divine doctrines into confused and turbid manners. Just as if some one should pour pure and clear water into a deep well full of mud; for he would disturb the mud, and destroy the clear water. The same thing likewise takes place between those who teach and those who are taught after this manner.

For dense thickets and which are full of briars surround the intellect and heart of those who have not been purely initiated in disciplines, obscure the mild, tranquil, and reasoning power of the soul, and openly impede the intellective part from becoming increased and elevated. It is requisite likewise to call intemperance and avarice the mothers of these thickets; both which are naturally prolific. From intemperance, therefore, unlawful marriages, [unjust] desires, corruptions, intoxication, preternatural pleasures, and certain vehement appetites blossom forth, and which impel their possessors into profundities and precipices. For now desires have compelled some not to abstain either from their mothers or their daughters, and violating law, their country, city, and king, with their hands as it were bound behind them, they are violently dragged along like slaves to extreme destruction.

But from avarice germinate rapine, robbery, parricide, sacrilege, sorcery, and such other evils at are the sisters of these. In the first place, therefore, it is necessary to purify the woods in which these passions have fixed their abode, with fire and sword, and all the machines of disciplines; and having liberated the reasoning power from such mighty evils, we may then implant in and deliver to it something useful and good.” So great and so necessary was the attention which, according to Pythagoras, ought to be paid to disciplines prior to philosophy. He likewise ordained that a singular honor, and the most accurate investigation, should be given to the teaching and participation of his dogmas, as he judiciously examined the conceptions of those that came to him, by various documents, and ten thousand forms of scientific theory.