y strangely intercommune one with another. Now the intellect is the
proper sense of the mind; and therefore that it should have no congenial
speculation, movement, or affection of its own, the attaining to which
should be matter of complacency to it, is the most irrational thing in
the world, if I have not, by Jove, unwittingly done the men wrong, and
been myself imposed upon by some that may perhaps have calumniated them.

Then I said to him: If we may be your judges, you have not; yea, we must
acquit you of having offered them the least indignity; and therefore
pray despatch the rest of your discourse with assurance. How! said
I, and shall not Aristodemus then succeed me, if you are tired out
yourself? Aristodemus said: With all my heart, when you are as much
tired as he is; but since you are yet in your vigor, pray make use of
yourself, my noble friend, and don't think to pretend weariness. Theon
then replied: What is yet behind, I must confess, is very easy; it being
but to go over the several pleasures contained in that part of life that
consists in action. Now themselves somewhere say that there is far more
satisfaction in doing than in receiving good; and good may be done many
times, it is true, by words, but the most and greatest part of good
consists in action, as the very name of beneficence tells us and they
themselves also attest. For you may remember, continued he, we heard
this gentleman tell us but now what words Epicurus uttered, and
what letters he sent to his friends, applauding and magnifying
Metrodorus,--how bravely and like a spark he quitted the city and
went down to the port to relieve Mithrus the Syrian,--and this, though
Metrodorus did not then do anything at all. What and how great then
may we presume the pleasures of Plato to have been, when Dion by the
measures he gave him deposed the tyrant Dionysius and set Sicily at
liberty? And what the pleasures of Aristotle, when he rebuilt his native
city Stagira, then levelled with the ground, and brought back its exiled
inhabitants? And what the pleasures of Theophrastus and of Phidias, when
they cut off the tyrants of their respective countries? For what need
a man recount to you, who so well know it, how many particular persons
they relieved, not by sending them a little wheat or a measure of meal
(as Epicurus did to some of his friends), but by procuring restoration
to the banished, liberty to the imprisoned, and restitution of wives and
children t