BOOK II. XX. 28-33
Man, what are you doing?[1] You are confuting your own self every day, and are you unwilling to give up these frigid attempts of yours? When you eat, where do you bring your hand? To your mouth, or to your eye? When you take a bath, into what do you step? When did you ever call the pot a plate, or the ladle a spit? If I were slave to one of these men, even if I had to be soundly flogged by him every day, I would torment him. "Boy, throw a little oil into the bath." I would have thrown a little fish sauce in, and as I left would pour it down on his head. "What does this mean?" "I had an external impression that could not be distinguished from olive oil; indeed, it was altogether like it. I swear by your fortune." "Here, give me the gruel." 30I would have filled a side dish with vinegar and fish sauce and brought it to him. "Did I not ask for the gruel?" "Yes, master; this is gruel." "Is not this vinegar and fish sauce?" "How so, any more than gruel." "Take and smell it, take and taste it." "Well, how do you know, if the senses deceive us?" If I had had three or four fellow-slaves who felt as I did, I would have made him burst with rage and hang himself, or else change his opinion. But as it is, such men are toying with us; they use all the gifts of nature, while in theory doing away with them.
Grateful men indeed and reverential: Why, if nothing else, at least they eat bread every day, and yet have the audacity to say, "We do not know if there is a Demeter, or a Kore, or a Pluto"[2]; not to
- ↑ There is an abrupt transition here from the Epicureans to the Academics.
- ↑ Demeter and Kore represent agriculture and the "corn-spirit." Pluto is added as the personification of the darkness of earth out of which the plants spring, and as the spouse of Kore, or else, possibly, because he suggests the death of the grain of com before the new shoot appears. Cf. I. Corinth. xv. 36: "That which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die."
