Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/211

 However, let us return to the consideration of past goods. And if you were to utter such maxims as might be capable of consoling Caius Marius, and enabling him when banished, indigent, and up to his neck in a marsh, to relieve his anguish by the recollection of his past trophies, I would listen to you, and approve of all you could say. Nor, indeed, can the happiness of a philosopher be complete or continue to the end, if all the admirable discoveries which he has made, and all his virtuous actions, are to be lost by his own forgetfulness. But, in your case, you assert that the recollection of pleasures which have been felt makes life happy, and of such pleasures too, as affect the body. For if there are any other pleasures, then it is incorrect to say that all the pleasures of the mind originate in its connexion with the body.

But if pleasures felt by the body, even when they are past, can give pleasure, then I do not understand why Aristotle should turn the inscription on the tomb of Sardanapalus into so much ridicule; in which the king of Assyria boasts that he has taken with him all his lascivious pleasures. For, says Aristotle, how could those things which even while he was alive he could not feel a moment longer than while he was actually enjoying them, possibly remain to him after he was dead? The pleasure, then, of the body is lost, and flies away at the first moment, and oftener leaves behind reasons for repenting of it than for recollecting it. Therefore, Africanus is happier when addressing his country in this manner—

And in the rest of his admirable boast—

He is rejoicing here in his labours which are past. But you would bid him exult in past pleasures. He traces back his feelings to things which had never had any reference to his body. You cling to the body to the exclusion of everything else.

XXXIII. But how can that proposition possibly be maintained which you urge, namely, that all the pleasures and pains of the mind are connected inseparably with the pleasures and pains of the body? Is there, then, nothing which ever delights you, (I know whom I am addressing,) is there nothing, O Torquatus, which ever delights you for its own sake? I say nothing about dignity, honourableness, the beauty of virtue, which I have mentioned before. I will put