Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/221

 business, I will not decline the office, but I claim you for my partner in the duty. I will say this also, that the boy has already shown me many indications both of modesty and of ability; but you see how young he is as yet. To be sure I do, said I; but even now he ought to receive a tincture of those accomplishments which, if he drinks of them now while he is young, will hereafter make him more ready for more important business. And so we will often talk over this matter anxiously together, and we will act in concert. However, let us sit down, says he, if you please. So we sat down.

III. Then Cato said: But now, what books in the world are they that you are looking for here, when you have such a library at home? I want, said I, some of the Aristotelian Commentaries, which I know are here; and I came to carry them off, to read when I have leisure, which is not, as you know, very often the case with me. How I wish, said he, that you had an inclination towards our Stoic sect; for certainly it is natural for you, if it ever was so for any one, to think nothing a good except virtue. May I not, I replied, rejoin that it would be natural for you, as your opinion in reality is the same as mine, to forbear giving new names to things? for our principles are the same,—it is only our language that is at variance. Indeed, said he, our principles are not the same at all; for I can never agree to your calling anything desirable except what is honourable, and to your reckoning such things among the goods,—and, by so doing, extinguishing honourableness, which is, as it were, the light of virtue, and utterly upsetting virtue herself. Those are all very fine words, said I, O Cato; but do you not see that all those pompous expressions are shared by you in common with Pyrrho and Aristo, who think all things equal? And I should like to know what your opinion of them is. Mine? said he; do you want to know what I think of them? I think that those men whom we have either heard of from our ancestors, or seen ourselves, to be good, brave, just, and moderate in the republic,—those who, following nature herself, without any particular learning or system, have done many praiseworthy actions, have been educated by nature herself better than they could have been educated by philosophy, if they had adopted any other philosophy except that which ranks nothing whatever among the goods except what