To dress, to dance, to sing, our sole delight,
The feast or bath by day, and love by night.
And another person, not unlike Sardanapalus in disposition, gives this advice and these rules to those who are deficient in wisdom:—
I to all mortals now give this advice:
Live for the day with pleasure; he who dies
Is nought; an empty shade beneath the earth:
Man lives but a short space, and therefore should,
While life remains, enjoy himself.
And Amphis the comic poet, in his Ialemus, says—
The man who knows that he is but a mortal,
And yet seeks not enjoyment while alive,
Leaving all other cares, is but a fool
In mine and all wise men's opinion,
And most unhappy in his destiny.
And, in his play entitled the Gynæcocracy, he says nearly the same—
Drink and play, our mortal life
On earth can but a brief space last;
Death alone will last for ever.
When once our too brief term is past.
And a man of the name of Bacchides, who lived on the same principles as Sardanapalus, after he was dead had the following inscription placed on his tomb:—
Eat, drink, indulge thy soul with all delights,
This stone is all that now remains for Bacchides.
15. Alexis, in his Tutor of Intemperate Men—(as Sotion the Alexandrian says, in his Commentary on the Silli of Timon; for I myself have never met with the play, though I have read more than eight hundred plays of what is called the Middle Comedy, and have made extracts from them, but still I have never fallen in with the Tutor of Intemperate Men, nor do I recollect having seen any mention of it in any regular list of such plays; for Callimachus has not inserted it in his catalogue nor has Aristophanes, nor even those scholars at Pergamus, who have handed down to us lists of plays,)—however, Sotion says that in that play a slave, named Xanthias, was represented as exhorting all his fellow-slaves to a life of luxury, and saying—