ts of
pleasure and by them alone. Intellect is the best gift of nature or
God: to this divine gift and endowment there is nothing so inimical
as pleasure. For when appetite is our master, there is no place for
self-control; nor where pleasure reigns supreme can virtue hold its
ground. To see this more vividly, imagine a man excited to the highest
conceivable pitch of sensual pleasure. It can be doubtful to no one that
such a person, so long as he is under the influence of such excitation
of the senses, will be unable to use to any purpose either intellect,
reason, or thought. Therefore nothing can be so execrable and so fatal
as pleasure; since, when more than ordinarily violent and lasting, it
darkens all the light of the soul."

These were the words addressed by Archytas to the Samnite Caius Pontius,
father of the man by whom the consuls Spurius Postumius and Titus
Veturius were beaten in the battle of Caudium. My friend Nearchus of
Tarentum, who had remained loyal to Rome, told me that he had heard them
repeated by some old men; and that Plato the Athenian was present, who
visited Tarentum, I find, in the consulship of L. Camillus and Appius
Claudius.

What is the point of all this? It is to show you that, if we were unable
to scorn pleasure by the aid of reason and philosophy, we ought to have
been very grateful to old age for depriving us of all inclination for
that which it was wrong to do. For pleasure hinders thought, is a foe to
reason, and, so to speak, blinds the eyes of the mind. It is, moreover,
entirely alien to virtue. I was sorry to have to expel Lucius, brother
of the gallant Titus Flamininus, from the Senate seven years after his
consulship; but I thought it imperative to affix a stigma on an act of
gross sensuality. For when he was in Gaul as consul, he had yielded to
the entreaties of his paramour at a dinner-party to behead a man who
happened to be in prison condemned on a capital charge. When his brother
Titus was Censor, who preceded me, he escaped; but I and Flaccus could
not countenance an act of such criminal and abandoned lust, especially
as, besides the personal dishonour, it brought disgrace on the
Government.

13. I have often been told by men older than myself, who said that they
had heard it as boys from old men, that Gaius Fabricius was in the
habit of expressing astonishment at having heard, when envoy at the
headquarters of king Pyrrhus, from the Thessalian Cineas, that there was
a