Advice About Keeping Well (23)

ZEUXIPPUS. But we need say no more about this class of persons. However, to speak once again of those too exact persons who interject set periods of fasting according to a fixed schedule, they are wrong in teaching their nature to feel a need of restraint when not in need of it, and in making necessary the unnecessary retrenchment at a time which makes demand for what is customarily required. It is better to apply such discipline to the body with a certain freedom, and, if there be no premonitory or suspicious symptoms, to keep, as has been already suggested,[*] our general mode of life responsive to changes so as to meet whatever may befall it, and not to let it be enslaved or bound to one formula of life, which has trained itself to be guided by certain seasons, or numbers, or schedules. For it is not safe, nor easy, nor befitting a citizen or a man, but like the life of an oyster or the trunk of a tree — this immutability and forced compliance in the matter of food and abstinence, movement and rest; it is fitting only for men who have reduced and restricted themselves to a retired, idle, solitary, friendless, and inglorious life, far removed from the duties of citizenship. No, said he, it fits not with my opinion. [*]