Advice About Keeping Well (8)

ZEUXIPPUS. At some other time, then, it may be that we shall have to speak against pleasures, and show what an intrinsic beauty and dignity belongs to continence; but the present discourse is on the side of many pleasures and great. For diseases do not take from us and spoil for us so many of our enterprises or hopes or travels or pastimes as they do of our pleasures. Hence contempt for health is least profitable for those who make pleasure their chief aim. For infirmities allow many persons to be philosophers, or actually even generals or kings, but the pleasures and enjoyments of the body in some cases do not come to life at all in time of disease, and those that come to life yield but a brief part of what they properly should, and even that is not pure, but contaminated with much that is foreign, and marked, as it were, by the beatings of surge and storm. For it is not true that In well-gorged bodies Love resides,[*] but rather in serenity and calmness of the flesh does love find its end in pleasure, as also do eating and drinking; and health affords to pleasures, as calm weather to the halcyons,[*] a safe and lovely nesting and hatching of their young. Prodicus seems to have put the matter very neatly in saying that fire is the best of sauces [*]; but one might more truly speak of health as being the most divine and agreeable sauce. For boiled, baked, or fried foods afford no proper pleasure or even gratification to those who are suffering from disease, debauch, or nausea, while a clean and unspoiled appetite makes everything, to a sound body, pleasant and eagerly craved, as Homer has said,[*] — that is, agreeable.