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For granted that nature seeks in every way pleasure and enjoyment, old men are physically incapacitated for all pleasures except a few necessary ones, and not only Aphroditê with old men is wroth,Euripides, Aeolus, Frag. 23, Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag. p. 369. Plutarch, Moralia 285 b, gives two lines: ἀλλ’ ῆ τὸ γῆρας τὴν Κύ῀αν χαίρειν ἐᾷ ἧ τ’ Ἀφροδίτη τοῖς γεροῦσαν ἅχθεται, But either eld to Cypris bids farewell Or Aphroditê with old men is wroth. as Euripides says, but their appetites also for food and drink are for the most part blunted and toothless, so that they can, if I may say so, hardly whet and sharpen them. They ought to prepare for themselves pleasures in the mind, not ignoble and illiberal ones like that of Simonides, wrho said to those who reproached him for his avarice that, since old age had deprived him of all other pleasures, he was comforting his declining years with the only one left, the pleasure of gain. Public life, on the other hand, possesses pleasures most noble and great, those in fact from which the gods themselves, as we may reasonably suppose, derive their only or their chief enjoyment. These are the pleasures that spring from good deeds and noble actions. For if Nicias the painter took such delight in the labours of his art that he often had to ask his servants whether he had had his bath and his breakfast; and if Archimedes when intent upon his drawing-tablet had to be dragged away by force, stripped and anointed by his servants, and then drew diagrams upon his anointed body; and if Canus the flute-player, with whom you also are acquainted, used to say that people did not know how much greater pleasure he gave to himself than to others when he played, for if they did, those who wished to hear him would receive pay instead of giving it. In view of these examples, do we not perceive how great are the pleasures the virtues provide, for those who practise them, as the result of the noble deeds they do and their works for the good of the community and of mankind; and that too without tickling or enervating them as do the smooth and gentle motions made on the body? Those have a frantic, unsteady titillation mixed with convulsive throbbing, but the pleasures given by noble works, such as those of which the man who rightly serves the State is the author, not like the golden wings of EuripidesNauck, Trag. Graec. Frag. p. 655, no. 911. but like those heavenly Platonic pinions,Plato, Phaedrus, 246 b=248 e, where the soul is likened to a chariot and charioteer with winged steeds. bear the soul on high as it acquires greatness and lofty spirit mingled with joy.
