writing to him about some handsome boys, and desiring to know of
him whether he would have him buy them for him, was within a small
matter of being discharged his office for it? And yet who might
better have them than he? But as Hippocrates saith that of two
pains the lesser is forgot in the greater, so the pleasures that
accrue from action and the love of glory, while they cheer and
refresh the mind, do by their transcendency and grandeur obliterate
and extinguish the inferior satisfactions of the body.

If, then, the remembering of former good things (as they affirm) be that which most contributes to a pleasurable living, not one of us will then credit Epicurus when he, tells us that, while he was dying away in the midst of the strongest agonies and distempers, he yet bore himself up with the memory of the pleasures he formerly enjoyed. For a man may better see the resemblance of his own face in a troubled deep or a storm, than a smooth and smiling remembrance of past pleasure in a body tortured with such lancing and rending pains. But now the memories of past actions no man can put from him that would. For did Alexander, think you, (or indeed could he possibly) forget the fight at Arbela? Or Pelopidas the tyrant Leontiadas? Or Themistocles the engagement at Salamis? For the Athenians to this very day keep an annual festival for the battle at Marathon, and the Thebans for that at Leuctra; and so, by Jove, do we ourselves (as you very well know) for that which Daiphantus gained at Hyampolis, and all Phocis is filled with sacrifices and public honors. Nor is there any of us that is better satisfied with what himself hath either eaten or drunk than he is with what they have achieved. It is very easy then to imagine what great content, satisfaction, and joy accompanied the authors of these actions in their lifetime, when the very memory of them hath not yet after five hundred years and more lost its rejoicing power. The truth is, Epicurus himself allows there are some pleasures derived from fame. And indeed why should he not, when he himself had such a furious lechery and wriggling after glory as made him not only to disown his masters and scuffle about syllables and accents with his fellow-pedant Democritus (whose principles he stole verbatim), and to tell his disciples there never was a wise man in the world besides himself, but also to put it in writing how Colotes performed adoration to him, as he was one day philosophizing, by touching his knees, and that his own brother Neocles was used from a child to say, "There neither is, nor ever was in the world, a wiser man than Epicurus," and that his mother had just so many atoms within her as, when coming together, must have produced a complete wise man? May not a man then--as Callicratidas once said of the Athenian admiral Conon, that he whored the sea as well say of Epicurus that he basely and covertly forces and ravishes Fame, by not enjoying her publicly but ruffling and debauching her in a corner? For as men's bodies are oft necessitated by famine, for want of other food, to prey against nature upon themselves, a like mischief to this does vainglory create in men's minds, forcing them, when they hunger after praise and cannot obtain it from other men, at last to commend themselves.

And do not they then that stand so well affected towards applause
and fame themselves own they cast away very extraordinary
pleasures, when they decline, magistrature, public offices, and the
favor and confidences of princes, from whom Democritus once said
the grandest blessings of human life are derived? For he will
never induce any mortal to believe, that he that could so highly
value and please himself with the attestation of his brother
Neocles and the adoration of his friend Colotes would not, were he
clapped by all the Greeks at the Olympiads, go quite out of his
wits and even hollow for joy, or rather indeed be elated in the
manner spoken of by Sophocles,

Puffed like the down of a gray-headed thistle.

If it be a pleasing thing then to be of a good fame, it is on the
contrary afflictive to be of an ill one; and it is most certain
that nothing in the world can be more infamous than want of
friendship, idleness, atheism, debauchery, and negligence.
Now these are looked upon by all men except themselves as