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But Cleodorus imagines that there ought to be food, so that there may be tables and wine-bowls and sacrifices to Demeter and the Daughter. Then let the next man argue that it is but right and proper that there be battles and war, so that we may have fortifications and dockyards and arsenals, and may offer sacrifice to celebrate the slaying of an hundred foemen,The explanation may be found in Pausanias, iv. 19; cf. also Plutarch, Moralia, 660 F and Life of Romulus, chap. xxv. (p. 33 D). as they say is the custom among the Messenians. Still another man, I imagine, may enter tain a violent hatred against health; for it will be a terrible thing if nobody is ill, and there is no longer any use for a soft bed or couch, and we shall not offer sacrifice to Asclepius or the averting deities, and the profession of medicine together with its numerous instruments and remedies shall be consigned to inglorious desuetude and contempt. Yet, what difference is there between this sort of reasoning and the other? The fact is that food is taken as a remedy for hunger, and all who use food in a prescribed way are said to be giving themselves treatment, not with the thought they are doing something pleasant and grateful, but that this is necessary to comply with Nature’s imperative demand. Indeed, it is possible to enumerate more pains than pleasures derived from food; or rather may it be said that the pleasure affects but a very limited area in the body, and lasts for no long time; but as for the ugly and painful experiences crowded upon us by the bother and discomfort which wait upon digestion, what need to tell their number? I think that Homer Il. v. 341. had their very number in view when, in the case of the gods, he finds an argument to prove that they do not die in the fact that they do not live by food: Since they eat no bread and drink no wine brightly sparkling, Therefore their bodies are bloodless, and they are called the Immortals. He intimates by this that food is not only an element conducive to life, but that it is also conducive to death. For it is from this source that diseases come, thriving on the very same food as men’s bodies, Cf. Moralia, 731 D, where the same idea is put in different words. which find no less ill in fulness than in fasting. For oftentimes it is harder work to use up and again to distribute food, after it has been taken into the body, than it was to procure it and get it together in the first place. But just as the Danaids would be at a loss to know what kind of life and occupation they should follow if they should be relieved of their drudgery in trying to fill the great jar, so we are at a loss to know, if perchance we should have the opportunity to cease from heaping into this relentless flesh of ours all the multitudinous products of land and sea, what we shall do, since, owing to lack of acquaintance with noble things, we now content ourselves with the life conditioned on necessities. Just as men who have been slaves, when they are set free, do for themselves on their own account those very things which they used to do in service to their masters, Cf. Porphyry, De abstinentia, iii. 27. so the soul now supports the body with much toil and trouble, but if it be relieved of its drudgery, it will quite naturally maintain itself in its new freedom and live with an eye to itself and the truth, since there will be nothing to distract or divert it.
