On the occasion of a shipwreck, when his fellow-passengers found themselves forced to live upon the scantiest fare, he takes the opportunity to point out how extravagantly superfluous must be the ordinary living of the richer part of the community:--
“How easily we can dispense with these superfluities, which, when necessity takes them from us, we do not feel the want of.... Whenever I happen to be in the company of richly-living people I cannot prevent a blush of shame, because I see evident proof that the principles which I approve and commend have as yet no sure and firm faith placed in them.... A warning voice needs to be published abroad in opposition to the prevailing opinion of the human race: ‘You are out of your senses (_insanitis_); you are wandering from the path of right; you are lost in stupid admiration for superfluous luxuries; you value no one thing for its proper worth.’”--(_Ep._ lxxxvii.)
“I now turn to you, whose insatiable and unfathomable gluttony (_profunda et insatiabilis gula_) searches every land and every sea. Some animals it persecutes with snares and traps, with hunting-nets [the customary method of the _battue_ of that period], with hooks, sparing no sort of toil to obtain them. Excepting from mere caprice or daintiness, there is no peace allowed to any species of beings. Yet how much of all these feasts which you obtain by the agency of innumerable hands do you even so much as touch with your lips, satiated as they are with luxuries? How much of that animal, which has been caught with so much expense or peril, does the dyspeptic and bilious owner taste? Unhappy even in this! that you perceive not that you hunger more than your belly. Study,” he concludes his exhortation to his friend, “not to know _more_, but to know _better_.”
“If the human race would but listen to the voice of reason, it would recognise that [fashionable] cooks are as superfluous as soldiers.... Wisdom engages in all useful things, is favourable to peace, and summons the whole human species to concord.”--(_Ep._ xc.)
“In the simpler times there was no need of so large a supernumerary force of medical men, nor of so many surgical instruments or of so many boxes of drugs. Health was simple for a simple reason. Many dishes have induced many diseases. Note how _vast a quantity of lives one stomach absorbs_--devastator of land and sea.[29] No wonder that with so discordant diet disease is ever varying.... Count the cooks: you will no longer wonder at the innumerable number of human maladies.”--(_Ep._ xcv.)