1I have often heard from my elders, who said that they in turn had heard it as boys from old men, that Gaius Fabricius used to wonder that, when he was envoy at the court of King Pyrrhus, he had heard from Cineas of Thessaly that there was a man at Athens who professed himself a wise man and who said that everything we did ought to be referred to pleasure. 1And Manius Curius and Tiberius Coruncanius, hearing this from him, used to wish that the Samnites and Pyrrhus himself might be persuaded of it, so that they might be more easily conquered once they had given themselves up to pleasures.
1Manius Curius had lived with Publius Decius, who five years before Curius was consul had devoted himself for the state in his fourth consulship: Fabricius knew him too, and so did Coruncanius, who judged both from their own lives and from the deed of this Decius of whom I speak that there is surely something by nature fine and glorious, which is sought for its own sake and which all the best men pursue, spurning and despising pleasure. 44Why then so much about pleasure? 44Because it is not only no reproach, but even the highest praise of old age, that it does not greatly long for any pleasures. 44It goes without banquets and loaded tables and frequent cups.
44It goes without, then, drunkenness also, and indigestion and sleeplessness. 44But if something must be granted to pleasure, since we do not easily resist its allurements — for Plato divinely calls pleasure 'the bait of evils', because men are caught by it, of course, as fish are — although old age goes without immoderate feasts, it can still take delight in modest banquets. 44Gaius Duilius, son of Marcus, who had been the first to defeat the Carthaginians with a fleet, I often saw as a boy, an old man returning from dinner; 44he took delight in a wax torch and a piper, which he had assumed for himself as a private citizen without any precedent: so much licence did glory give.
45But why do I speak of others? 45I will now return to myself. 45First of all, I always had my fellows of a brotherhood — the brotherhoods were established in my quaestorship, when the Idaean rites of the Great Mother were adopted — so I used to feast with my fellows, altogether moderately, but there was a certain fire of youth, and as that advances everything becomes milder day by day. 45For I did not measure my delight in those banquets by bodily pleasures more than by the gathering of friends and the conversation; 45for our ancestors did well to name the reclining of friends at a feast, because it involved a sharing of life, a 'convivium', better than the Greeks, who call this same thing now a 'drinking together', now a 'dining together', so that they seem to value most what is least important in that sort of thing.