othing better nor more honest than pleasure, understand not
the justice of the gods, nor revere the beauty of virtue; but if Nature
has bestowed on them any point of courage, subtlety, or activity, they
make use of it for the satisfaction of their fleshly pleasure and the
accomplishment of their lusts. And the sapient Metrodorus believes that
this should be so, for he says: "All the fine, subtle, and ingenious
inventions of the soul have been found out for the pleasure and delight
of the flesh, or for the hopes of attaining to it and enjoying it, and
every act which tends not to this end is vain and unprofitable." The
laws being by such discourses and philosophical reasons as these taken
away, there wants nothing to a beast-like life but lions' paws, wolves'
teeth, oxen's paunches, and camels' necks; and these passions and
doctrines do the beasts themselves, for want of speech and letters,
express by their bellowings, neighings, and brayings, all their voice
being for their belly and the pleasure of their flesh, which they
embrace and rejoice in either present or future; unless it be perhaps
some animal which naturally takes delight in chattering and garrulity.

No sufficient praise therefore or equivalent to their deserts can be
given those who, for the restraining of such bestial passions, have
set down laws, established policy and government of state, instituted
magistrates and ordained good and wholesome laws. But who are they
that utterly confound and abolish this? Are they not those who withdraw
themselves and their followers from all part in the government? Are they
not those who say that the garland of tranquillity and a reposed life
are far more valuable than all the kingdoms and principalities in the
world? Are they not those who declare that reigning and being a king is
a mistaking the path and straying from the right way of felicity? And
they write in express terms: "We are to treat how a man may best keep
and preserve the end of Nature, and how he may from the very beginning
avoid entering of his own free will and voluntarily upon offices of
magistracy, and government over the people." And yet again, these other
words are theirs: "There is no need at all that a man should tire out
his mind and body to preserve the Greeks, and to obtain from them
a crown of wisdom; but to eat and drink well, O Timocrates, without
prejudicing, but rather pleasing the flesh." And yet in the constitution
of laws and policy, whic