Page:1888 Cicero's Tusculan Disputations.djvu/88

 82, it must needs be short." I must have that over again, for I do not apprehend what you mean exactly by "excessive" or "short." That is excessive than which nothing can be greater; that is short than which nothing is shorter. I do not regard the greatness of any pain from which, by reason of the shortness of its continuance, I shall be delivered almost before it reaches me. But if the pain be as great as that of Philoctetes, it will appear great indeed to me, but yet not the greatest that I am capable of bearing; for the pain is confined to my foot. But my eye may pain me, I may have a pain in the head, or sides, or lungs, or in every part of me. It is far, then, from being excessive. Therefore, says he, pain of a long continuance has more pleasure in it than uneasiness. Now, I cannot bring myself to say so great a man talks nonsense; but I imagine he is laughing at us. My opinion is that the greatest pain (I say the greatest, though it may be ten atoms less than another) is not therefore short, because acute. I could name to you a great many good men who have been tormented many years with the acutest pains of the gout. But this cautious man doth not determine the measure of that greatness or of duration, so as to enable us to know what he calls excessive with regard to pain, or short with respect to its continuance. Let us pass him by, then, as one who says just nothing at all; and let us force him to acknowledge, notwithstanding he might behave himself somewhat boldly under his colic and his strangury, that no remedy against pain can be had from him who looks on pain as the greatest of all evils. We must apply, then, for relief elsewhere, and nowhere better (if we seek for what is most consistent with itself) than to those who place the chief good in honesty, and the greatest evil in infamy. You dare not so much as groan, or discover the least uneasiness in their company, for virtue itself speaks to you through them.

XX. Will you, when you may observe children at Lacedæmon, and young men at Olympia, and barbarians in the amphitheatre, receive the severest wounds, and bear them without once opening their mouths—will you, I say, if any pain should by chance attack you, cry out like a woman? Will you not rather bear it with resolution and