Cicero tells…

When one wants that the most innocent sentences are historically sound, historical investigation becomes very crafty. Seldom I found myself reading texts apparently totally unrelated with the topic I wanted to verify, but these are those texts that, en passant, mention the key witness.
This happened with an apparently secondary character in Neapolis - The Siren's Recall, Herennius Pontius. At that time, Herennius was one of the most reknown and respected Samnite chiefs, indeed one of his people very different from the stereotype that history (written by the Roman winners) gave us about Samnites.
The Samnites: this almost primitive, half-barbarian people that made Rome suffer so much during its expansion through central Italy. Well, in a way extraordinarily opposite to this image, our Herennius could boast at least a couple of first-class friends and acquaintances.
The first one is Architas, the Taras' (Taranto) philosopher and strategist that made his town most powerful. The second one, if the first name didn't make you jump in your chair, is no less than Plato, whom I believe needs no introduction.
But I am not the one to tell that, Cicero does that, in his Cato Major De Senectute. Here I copy the excerpts of our interest.

XII, 39) The third charge against old age is that it lacks sensual pleasures. What a splendid service does old age render, if it takes from us the greatest blot of youth! Listen, my dear young friends, to a speech of Archytas of Tarentum, among the greatest and most illustrious of men, which was put into my hands when as a young man I was at Tarentum with Q. Maximus. “No ore deadly curse than sensual pleasure has been inflicted on mankind by nature, to gratify which our wanton appetites are roused beyond all prudence or restraint.
40) It is a fruitful source of treasons, revolutions, secret communications with the enemy. In fact, there is no crime, no evil deed, to which the appetite for sensual pleasures does not impel us. Fornications and adulteries, and every abomination of that kind, are brought about by the enticements of pleasure and by them alone. Intellect is the best gift of nature or God: to this divine gift and endowment there is nothing so inimical as pleasure.
41) For when appetite is our master, there is no place for self-control; nor where pleasure reigns supreme can virtue hold its ground.
42) To see this more vividly, imagine a man excited to the highest conceivable pitch of sensual pleasure. It can be doubtful to no one that such a person, so long as he is under the influence of such excitation of the senses, will be unable to use to any purpose either intellect, reason, or thought. Therefore nothing can be so execrable and so fatal as pleasure; since, when more than ordinarily violent and lasting, it darkens all the light of the soul.”
These were the words addressed by Archytas to the Samnite Gaius Pontius, father of the man by whom the consuls Spurius Postumius and Titus Veturius were beaten in the battle of Caudium. My friend Nearchus of Tarentum, who had remained loyal to Rome, told me that he had heard them repeated by some old men; and that Plato the Athenian was present, who visited Tarentum, I find, in the consulship of L. Camillus and Appius Claudius.