When winter was already waning, we were walking with the philosopher Favorinus in the court of the Titian baths, enjoying the mild warmth of the sun; and there, as we walked, Sallust's Catiline was being read, a book which Favorinus had seen in the hands of a friend and had asked him to read. The following passage from that book had been recited:

"Avarice implies a desire for money, which no wise man covets; steeped as it were with noxious poisons, it renders the most manly body and soul effeminate; it is even unbounded, nor can either plenty or want make it less."

Then Favorinus looked at me and said: "How does avarice make a man's body effeminate? For I seem to grasp in general the meaning of his statement that it has that effect on a manly soul, but how it also makes his body effeminate I do not yet comprehend."

"I too," said I, "have for a long time been putting myself that question, and if you had not anticipated me, I should of my own accord have asked you to answer it."

Scarcely had I said this with some hesitation when one of the disciples of Favorinus, who seemed to be an old hand in the study of literature, broke in: "I once heard Valerius Probus say that Sallust here used a kind of poetic circumlocution, and meaning to say that a man was corrupted by avarice, spoke of his body and soul, the two factors which indicate a man; for man is made up of body and soul."

"Never," replied Favorinus, "at least, so far as I know, was our Probus guilty of such impertinent and bold subtlety as to say that Sallust, a most skilful artist in conciseness, used poetic paraphrases."

There was with us at the time in the same promenade a man of considerable learning. He too, on being asked by Favorinus whether he had anything to say on the subject, answered to this effect: "We observe that almost all those whose minds are possessed and corrupted by avarice and who have devoted themselves to the acquisition of money from any and every source, so regulate their lives, that compared with money they neglect manly toil and attention to bodily exercise, as they do everything else. For they are commonly intent upon indoor and sedentary pursuits, in which all their vigour of mind and body is enfeebled and, as Sallust says, 'rendered effeminate.'"

Then Favorinus asked to have the same words of Sallust read again, and when they had been read, he said: "How then are we to explain the fact, that it is possible to find many men who are greedy for money, but nevertheless have strong and active bodies?"

To this the man replied thus: "Your answer is certainly to the point. Whoever," said he, "is greedy for money, but nevertheless has a body that is strong and in good condition, must necessarily be possessed either by an interest in, or devotion to, other things as well, and cannot be equally niggardly in his care of himself. For if extreme avarice, to the exclusion of everything else, lay hold upon all a man's actions and desires, and if it extend even to neglect of his body, so that because of that one passion he has regard neither for virtue nor physical strength, nor body, nor soul -- then, and then only, can that vice truly be said to cause effeminacy both of body and soul, since such men care neither for themselves nor for anything else except money."

Then said Favorinus: "Either what you have said is reasonable, or Sallust, through hatred of avarice, brought against it a heavier charge than he could justify."

Plutarch tells us that Arcesilaus the philosopher used strong language about a certain rich man, who was too pleasure-loving, but nevertheless had a reputation for uprightness and freedom from sensuality. For when he observed the man's affected speech, his artfully arranged hair, and his wanton glances, teeming with seduction and voluptuousness, he said:

"It makes no difference with what parts of your body you debauch yourself, front or rear."

A truly wonderful fact is stated by Aristotle in the seventh book of his Problems, and by Plutarch in the eighth book of his Symposiaca. "If," they say, "you place heavy weights on the wood of the palm-tree, and load it so heavily and press it down so hard that the burden is too great to bear, the wood does not give way downward, nor is it made concave, but it rises against the weight and struggles upward and assumes a convex form."

"It is for that reason," says Plutarch, "that the palm has been chosen as the symbol of victory in contests, since the nature of its wood is such that it does not yield to what presses hard upon it and tries to crush it."

Marcus Varro, in the first book of his work entitled Hebdomades or On Portraits, speaks of the many varied excellences and powers of the number seven, which the Greeks call ebdomaV. "For that number," he says, "forms the Greater and the Lesser Bear in the heavens; also the vergiliae, which the Greeks call pleiadeV; and it is likewise the number of those stars which some call 'wandering,' but Publius Nigidius 'wanderers.'"

Varro also says that there are seven circles in the heavens, perpendicular to its axis. The two smallest of these, which touch the ends of the axis, he says are called poloi, or "poles"; but that because of their small diameter they cannot be represented on what is termed an armillary sphere. And the zodiac itself it not uninfluenced by the number seven; for the summer solstice occurs in the seventh sign from the winter solstice, and the winter solstice in the seventh after the summer, and one equinox in the seventh sign after the other. Then too those winter days during which the kingfishers nest on the water he says are seven in number.

Besides this, he writes that the course of the moon is completed in four times seven complete days; "for on the twenty-eighth day," he says, "the moon returns to the same point from which it started," and he quotes Aristides of Samos as his authority for this opinion. In this case he says that one should not only take note of the fact that the moon finishes its journey in four times seven, that is eight and twenty days, but also that this number seven, if beginning with one and going on until it reaches itself, it includes the sum of all the numbers through which it has passed and then adds itself, making the number eight and twenty, which is the number of days of the revolution of the moon.

He says that the influence of that number extends to and affects also the birth of human beings. "For," says he, "when the life-giving seed has been introduced into the female womb, in the first seven days it is compacted and coagulated and rendered fit to take shape. Then afterwards in the fourth hebdomad the rudimentary male organ, the head, and the spine which is in the back, are formed. But in the seventh hebdomad, as a rule, that is, by the forty-ninth day," says he, "the entire embryo is formed in the womb." He says that this power has also been observed in that number, that before the seventh month neither male nor female child can be born in health and naturally, and that those which are in the womb the most regular time are born two hundred and seventy-three days after conception, that is, not until the beginning of the fortieth hebdomad.

Of the periods dangerous to the lives and fortunes of all men, which the Chaldaeans call "climacteries," all the gravest are combinations of the number seven. Besides this, he says that the extreme limit of growth of the human body is seven feet. That, in my opinion, is truer than the statement of Herodotus, the story-teller, in the first book of his History, that the body of Orestes was found under ground, and that it was seven cubits in height, that is, twelve and a quarter feet; unless, as Homer thought, the men of old were larger and taller of stature, but now, because the world is ageing, as it were, men and things are diminishing in size.

The teeth too, he says, appear in the first seven months seven at a time in each jaw, and fall out within seven years, and the back teeth are added, as a rule, within twice seven years. He says that the physicians who use music as a remedy declare that the veins of men, or rather their arteries, are set in motion according to the number seven [that is, by the use of the seven-stringed lyre], and this treatment they call thn dia tessarwn sumfwnian, because it results from the harmony of four tones. He also believes that the periods of danger in diseases have greater violence on the days which are made up of the number seven, and that those days in particular seem to be, as the physicians call them, krismoi, or "critical"; namely, the first, second and third hebdomad. And Varro does not fail to mention a fact which adds to the power and influence of the number seven, namely, that those who resolve to die of starvation do not meet their end until the seventh day.

These remarks of Varro about the number seven show painstaking investigation. But he has also brought together in the same place others which are rather trifling: for example, that there are seven wonderful works in the world, that the sages of old were seven, that the usual number of rounds in the races in the circus is seven, and that seven champions were chosen to attack Thebes. Then he adds in that book the further information that he has entered upon the twelfth hebdomad of his age, and that up to that day he has completed seventy hebdomads of books, of which a considerable number were destroyed when his library was plundered, at the time of his proscription.

Aristotle the philosopher relates that Polycrita, a woman of high rank in the island of Naxos, on suddenly and unexpectedly hearing joyful news, breathed her last. Philippides too, a comic poet of no little repute, when he had unexpectedly won the prize in a contest of poets at an advanced age, and was rejoicing exceedingly, died suddenly in the midst of his joy. The story also of Diogoras of Rhodes is widely known. This Diogoras had three young sons, one a boxer, the second a pancratist, and the third a wrestler. He saw them all victors and crowned at Olympia on the same day, and when the three young men were embracing him there, and having placed their crowns on their father's head were kissing him, and the people were congratulating him and pelting him from all sides with flowers, there in the very stadium, before the eyes of the people, amid the kisses and embraces of his sons, he passed away.

Moreover, I have read in our annals that at the time when the army of the Roman people was cut to pieces at Cannae, an aged mother was overwhelmed with grief and sorrow by a message announcing the death of her son; but that report was false, and when not long afterwards the young man returned from that battle to the city, the aged mother, upon suddenly seeing her son, was overpowered by the flood, the shock, and the crash, so to speak, of unlooked-for joy descending upon her, and gave up the ghost.

Thou, Plato, since for learning thou didst yearn,
A tiny book for a vast sum did'st buy,
Which taught thee a Timaeus to compose.