Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/128

 But you are all afraid for me, lest I should descend to opinions, and adopt and approve of something that I do not understand; which you would be very sorry for me to do. What advice do you give me? Chrysippus often testifies that there are three opinions only about the chief good which can be defended; he cuts off and discards all the rest. He says that either honour is the chief good, or pleasure, or both combined. For that those who say that the chief good is to be free from all annoyance, shun the unpopular name of pleasure, but hover about its neighbourhood. And those also do the same who combine that freedom from annoyance with honour. And those do not much differ from them who unite to honour the chief advantages of nature. So he leaves three opinions which he thinks may be maintained by probable arguments.

Be it so. Although I am not easily to be moved from the definition of Polemo and the Peripatetics, and Antiochus, nor have I anything more probable to bring forward. Still, I see how sweetly pleasure allures our senses. I am inclined to agree with Epicurus or Aristippus. But virtue recalls me, or rather leads me back with her hand; says that these are the feelings of cattle, and that man is akin to the Deity. I may take a middle course; so that, since Aristippus, as if we had no mind, defends nothing but the body, and Zeno espouses the cause of the mind alone, as if we were destitute of body, I may follow Callipho, whose opinion Carneades used to defend with such zeal, that he appeared wholly to approve of it; although Clitomachus affirmed that he never could understand what Carneades approved of. But if I were to choose to follow him, would not truth itself, and all sound and proper reason, oppose me? Will you, when honour consists in despising pleasure, unite honour to pleasure, joining, as it were, a man to a beast?

XLVI. There is now, then, only one pair of combatants left—pleasure and honour; between which Chrysippus, as far as I can see, was not long in perplexity how to decide. If you follow the one, many things are overthrown, especially the fellowship of the human race, affection, friendship, justice, and all other virtues, none of which can exist at all without disinterestedness: for the virtue which is impelled to action by pleasure, as by a sort of wages, is not really virtue, but only a deceitful imitation and pretence of virtue. Listen, on