Advice About Keeping Well (24)

ZEUXIPPUS. For health is not to be purchased by idleness and inactivity, which are the greatest evils attendant on sickness, and the man who thinks to conserve his health by uselessness and ease does not differ from him who guards his eyes by not seeing, and his voice by not speaking. For a man in good health could not devote himself to any better object than to numerous humane activities. Least of all is it to be assumed that laziness is healthful, if it destroys what health aims at; and it is not true either that inactive people are more healthy. For Xenocrates did not keep in better health than Phocion, nor Theophrastus than Demetrius, and the running away from every activity that smacked of ambition did not help Epicurus and his followers at all to attain their much-talked-of condition of perfect bodily health. But we ought, by attention to other details, to preserve the natural constitution of our bodies, recognizing that every life has room for both disease and health.

ZEUXIPPUS. However, our friend said that to men in public life should be given advice opposite to that which Plato [*] used to give to the young men. For the philosopher, as he took his leave after the exercise, was in the habit of saying, Be sure, my boys, that you store up the lesson of this hour of leisure for some good end. But we would advise those who take part in the government to employ their active labours for good and necessary ends, and not subject their bodies to stress on account of small and paltry matters, as is the way of most people, who make themselves miserable over incidental things, and wear themselves out with loss of sleep, going to this place and that place, and running about, all for no useful or decent purpose, but only from a spirit of insolence, envy, or rivalry against others, or in the pursuit of unprofitable and empty repute. It was in special reference to such people, as I think, that Demolitus said,[*] that, if the body were to enter suit against the soul for cruel and abusive treatment, the soul would not be acquitted. Perhaps, too, there is some truth in what Theophrastus said,[*] in his metaphorical statement, that the soul pays a high rental to the body. At any rate, the body reaps the fruit of more evils from the soul than the soul from the body, inasmuch as the soul uses the body unreasonably, and the body does not get the care that it deserves. For whenever the soul is occupied with its own emotions, strivings, and concerns, it is prodigal of the body. I do not know what possessed Jason [*] to say: We must do wrong in small ways for the sake of doing right in large ways. But we, with good reason, would advise the man in public life to be indifferent to small things, and to take his ease and give himself plenty of rest while attending to them, if, when he comes to honourable and important activities, he wishes to have his body not worn by drudging, nor dull, nor on the point of giving out, but refreshed by quiet, like a ship in the dock; so that when the soul again points the way to needful activities, it May run like weanling colt beside its dam.[*]