[48] Mark what it is that I wish to make clear. Food and drink nourishes us, though it be the plainest barley-cake and water from the spring. Why then has vainglory superadded countless sorts of milk cakes and honied pastry and elaborate and diversified blends of innumerable wines highly seasoned with a view to indulgence in pleasure rather than partaking of nourishment?
[49] Again, relishes of the simplest kind are onions, greens, many fruits and cheese, and anything else of that kind as well: if you like, we will put down beside these fish and meat in the case of men who are not vegetarians.
[50] Would it not, then, have been quite sufficient, after broiling them on the coals or roasting them in a rough and ready way just as real heroes used to do, to eat them? Nay, this is not all that your epicure craves for. Having procured the alliance of vainglory and stirred up the greediness within him he is on the look-out for and hunts up pastry-cooks to dress their food and serve their table, men who are famous masters of their art.
[51] These set at work the baits that have been found out ages ago to tempt our miserable belly, and make up and arrange in proper order decoctions of special flavour with which they coax the tongue into subservience: hereupon they forthwith get on to their hook the sense of taste which gives them access to the senses in general: and by means of taste the glutton is quickly revealed as no freeman but a slave.
[52] Clothing, as everybody knows, was produced at first to guard against the harm done to the body by great cold and heat, “wind-proof,” as I think the poets have it, in winter and 〈cooling in summer〉.
[53] Who, then, is the cunning worker of those costly sea-purples, those light transparent summer gauzes, those spider-web shawls, those costumes dyed or woven into gay colouring by hands expert in producing variety by either art, which outdo the painter’s power of imitating nature? Who? I ask. Is it not vainglory?