corning and despising pleasure, all the worthiest men pursued....

But why do I refer to others? Let me now return to myself. First of
all, I always had associates in clubs; and clubs were established when
I was questor, on the Idaean worship of the great mother being adopted.
Therefore I feasted with my associates altogether in a moderate way,
but there was a kind of fervor peculiar to that time of life, and as
that advances, all things will become every day more subdued. For I
did not calculate the gratification of those banquets by the pleasures
of the body so much as by the meetings of friends and conversations.
For well did our ancestors style the reclining of friends at an
entertainment, because it carried with it a union of life, by the name
"convivium" better than the Greeks do, who call this same thing as
well by the name of "compotatio" as "concoenatio"; so that what in
that kind (of pleasures) is of the least value that they appear most
to approve of.

For my part, on account of the pleasure of conversation, I am
delighted also with seasonable entertainments, not only with those of
my own age, of whom very few survive, but with those of your age, and
with you; and I give great thanks to old age, which has increased my
desire for conversation, and taken away that of eating and drinking.
But even if such things delight any person (that I may not appear
altogether to have declared war against pleasure, of which perhaps a
certain limited degree is even natural), I am not aware that even in
these pleasures themselves old age is without enjoyment. For my part,
the presidencies established by our ancestors delight me; and that
conversation, which after the manner of our ancestors, is kept up over
our cups from the top of the table; and the cups, as in the Symposium
of Xenophon, small and dewy, and the cooling of the wine in summer,
and in turn either the sun, or the fire in winter--practises which I
am accustomed to follow among the Sabines also--and I daily join a
party of neighbors, which we prolong with various conversation till
late at night, as far as we can. But there is not, as it were, so
ticklish a sensibility of pleasures in old men. I believe it; but then
neither is there the desire. However, nothing is irksome unless you
long for it. Well did Sophocles, when a certain man inquired of him
advanced in age whether he enjoyed venereal pleasures, reply, "The
gods give me something better; nay, I have run awa