These then so great and so many pleasures, that run like perpetual
springs and rills, these men decline and avoid; nor will they
permit those that put in among them so much as to take a taste of
them, but bid them hoist up the little sails of their paltry
cock-boats and fly from them. Nay, they all, both he and she
philosophers, beg and entreat Pythocles, for dear Epicurus's sake,
not to affect or make such account of the sciences called liberal.
And when they cry up and defend one Apelles, they write of him that
he kept himself clean by refraining himself all along from the
mathematics. But as to history--to pass over their aversedness to
other kinds of compositions--I shall only present you with the
words of Metrodorus, who in his treatise of the Poets writes thus:
Wherefore let it never disturb you, if you know not either what
side Hector was of, or the first verses in Homer's Poem, or again
what is in its middle. But that the pleasures of the body spend
themselves like the winds called Etesian or Anniversary, and
utterly determine when once age is past its vigor, Epicurus himself
was not insensible; and therefore he makes it a problematic
question, whether a sage philosopher, when he is an old man and
disabled for enjoyment, may not still be recreated with having
handsome girls to feel and grope him, being not, it seems, of the
mind of old Sophocles, who thanked God he had at length escaped
from this kind of pleasure, as from an untamed and furious master.
But, in my opinion, it would be more advisable for these sensual
lechers, when they see that age will dry up so many of their
pleasures, and that, as Euripides saith,

Dame Venus is to ancient men a foe,
(Euripides, "Aeolus," Frag. 23.)