32
From the same standpoint he made a comment exactly like that of Momus. Just as the latter found fault with the god Poseidon: see Hermotimus, 20. who made the bull for not putting the horns in front of the eyes, so he censured those who wear garlands for not knowing where they should go. “If it is the scent of their violets and roses that they like,” he said, “they certainly ought to put their garlands under their noses, as close as may be to the intake of the breath, so as to inhale the greatest possible amount of pleasure.”
33
Another thing, he ridiculed the men who devote such a surprising degree of energy to dinners in the effort to secure variety in flavours and new effects in pastry. He said that these underwent a great deal of inconvenience through their devotion to a brief and temporary pleasure. Indeed, he pointed out that all their trouble was taken for the sake of four finger-breadths, the extent of the’ longest human throat. “Before eating,” said he, “they get no good out of what they have bought, _\and after eating, the sense of fulness is no more agreeable because it derives from expensive food; it follows, then, that it is the pleasure of swallowing which has cost them so dear.” And he said that it served them right for being uneducated and consequently unfamiliar with the truer pleasures, which are all dispensed by philosophy to those who elect a life of toil.
