4
Cynic It would not be healthy, if it were badly nourished; for bad food injures the body.
4
Lycinus That is true.
5
Cynic If so, it is for you to explain why you blame me and depreciate my life and call it miserable.
5
Lycinus Easily explained. Nature (which you honour) and the Gods have given us the earth, and brought all sorts of good things out of it, providing us with abundance not merely for our necessities, but for our pleasures; and then you abstain from all or nearly all of it, and utilize these good things no more than the beasts. Your drink is water, just like theirs; you eat what you pick up, like a dog, and the dog’s bed is as good as yours; straw is enough for either of you. Then your clothes are no more presentable than a beggar’s. Now, if this sort of contentment is to pass for wisdom, God must have been all wrong in making sheep woolly, filling grapes with wine, and providing all our infinite variety of oil, honey, and the rest, that we might have food of every sort, pleasant drink, money, soft beds, fine houses, all the wonderful paraphernalia of civilization, in fact; for the productions of art are God’s gifts to us too. To live without all these would be miserable enough even if one could not help it, as prisoners cannot, for instance; it is far more so if the abstention is forced upon a man by himself; it is then sheer madness.
