Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/124

 the Eleatic philosophers get their name. Afterwards came Euclid of Megara, a pupil of Socrates, from whom that school got the name of Megaric. And they defined that as the only good which was always one, alike, and identical. They also borrowed a great deal from Plato. But the Eretrian philosophers, who were so called from Menedumus, because he was a native of Eretria, placed all good in the mind, and in that acuteness of the mind by which the truth is discerned. The Megarians say very nearly the same, only that they, I think, develop their theory with more elegance and richness of illustration. If we now despise these men, and think them worthless, at all events we ought to show more respect for Ariston, who, having been a pupil of Zeno, adopted in reality the principles which he had asserted in words; namely, that there was nothing good except virtue, and nothing evil except what was contrary to virtue; and who denied altogether the existence of those influences which Zeno contended for as being intermediate, and neither good nor evil. His idea of the chief good, is being affected in neither direction by these circumstances; and this state of mind he calls ἀδιαφορία; but Pyrrho asserts that the wise man does not even feel them; and that state is called ἀπάθεια.

To say nothing, then, of all these opinions, let us now examine those others which have been long and vigorously maintained. Some have accounted pleasure the chief good; the chief of whom was Aristippus, who had been a pupil of Socrates, and from whom the Cyrenaic school spring. After him came Epicurus, whose school is now better known, though he does not exactly agree with the Cyrenaics about pleasure itself. But Callipho thought that pleasure and honour combined made up the chief good. Hieronymus placed it in being free from all annoyance; Diodorus in this state when combined with honour. Both these last men were Peripatetics. To live honourably, enjoying those things which nature makes most dear to man, was the definition both of the Old Academy, (as we may learn from the writings of Polemo, who is highly approved of by Antiochus,) and of Aristotle, and it is the one to which his friends appear now to come nearest. Carneades also introduced a definition, (not because he approved of it himself, but for the sake of opposition to the Stoics,) that the chief good is to enjoy those