Kitap 3
9
But even taste appears to play but a small part, if any, in Temperance. For taste is concerned with discriminating flavors, as is done by wine-tasters, and cooks preparing savory dishes; but it is not exactly the flavors that give pleasure, or at all events not to the profligate: it is actually enjoying the object that is pleasant, and this is done solely through the sense of touch, alike in eating and drinking and in what are called the pleasures of sex.
10
This is why a certain gourmandApparently a character of comedy, though later writers speak of him as a real person. Some mss. here insert his name, Hospitable, the son of Belch, cf. Aristot. Eud. Eth. 1231a 16, where the story recurs, and Aristoph. Frogs 934. wished that his throat might be longer than a crane’s, showing that his pleasure lay in the sensation of contact.
11
Hence the sense to which Profligacy is related is the most universal of the senses; and there appears to be good ground for the disrepute in which it is held, because it belongs to us not as human beings but as animals. Therefore it is bestial to revel in such pleasures, and to like them better than any others. We do not refer to the most refined of the pleasures of touch, such as the enjoyment of friction and warm baths in the gymnasia; the tactual pleasures of the profligate have to do with certain parts only, not with the whole of the body.
