על עבודת האדמה כ״גOn Husbandry 23
א׳
1[102] The sense suggested by the words “sitting on the track” is, I am convinced, something of this kind. By “track” is meant the road for horses and carriages trodden both by men and by beasts of burden. They say that pleasure is very like this road;
ב׳
2[103] for almost from birth to late old age this road is traversed and used as a promenade and a place of recreation in which to spend leisure hours not by men only but by every other kind of living creatures. For there is no single thing that does not yield to the enticement of pleasure, and get caught and dragged along in her entangling nets, through which it is difficult to slip and make your escape.
ג׳
3[104] But the roads of sound-sense and self-mastery and of the other virtues, if not untrodden, are at all events unworn; for scanty is the number of those that tread them, that have genuinely devoted themselves to the pursuit of wisdom, and entered into no other association than that with the beautiful and noble, and have renounced everything else whatever.
ד׳
4[105] To continue. There “lies in ambush,” and that not once only, everyone into whom a zeal and care for endurance enters, in order that making his onslaught from his lurking-place he may block the way of familiar pleasure, the fountain of ever-flowing ills, and rid the domain of the soul of her.
ה׳
5[106] Then, as he goes straight on to say, he will as a matter of course “bite the horse’s heel”; for it is characteristic of endurance and self-mastery to disturb and upset the means by which vaunting vice and passion, keen and swift and unruly, make their approach.