Let us then compare with Epaminondas's Epicurus's mother, rejoicing
that she had lived to see her son cooping himself up in a little
garden, and getting children in common with Polyaenus upon the
strumpet of Cyzicus. As for Metrodorus's mother and sister, how
extravagantly rejoiced they were at his nuptials appears by the
letters he wrote to his brother in answer to his; that is, out of
his own books. Nay, they tell us bellowing that they have not only
lived a life of pleasure, but also exult and sing hymns in the
praise of their own living. Though, when our servants celebrate
the festivals of Saturn or go in procession at the time of the
rural bacchanals, you would scarcely brook the hollowing and din
they make, if the intemperateness of their joy and their
insensibleness of decorum should make them act and speak such
things as these:--

Lean down, boy! why dost sit I let's tope like mad!
Here's belly-timber store; ne'er spare it, lad.
Straight these huzza like wild. One fills up drink;
Another plaits a wreath, and crowns the brink
O' th' teeming bowl. Then to the verdant bays
All chant rude carols in Apollo's praise;
While one the door with drunken fury smites,
Till he from bed his loving consort frights.

And are not Metrodorus's words something like to these when he
writes to his brother thus: It is none of our business to preserve
the Greeks, or to get them to bestow garlands upon us for our wit,
but to eat well and drink good wine, Timocrates, so as not to
offend but pleasure our stomachs. And he saith again, in some
other place in the same epistles: How gay and how assured was I,