Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/238

 the misery or happiness of life, differed from one another, so that some of them deserved to be esteemed, some to be despised, and others were indifferent. But as to those things which deserved to be esteemed, some of them had in themselves sufficient reason for being preferred to others, as good health, soundness of the senses, freedom from pain, glory, riches, and similar things. But others were not of this kind. And in like manner, as to those things which were worthy of no esteem at all, some had cause enough in themselves why they should be rejected, such as pain, disease, loss of senses, poverty, ignominy, and things like them, and some had not. And thus, from this distinction, came what Zeno called προηγμένον, and on the other hand what he called ἀποπροηγμένον, as though writing in so copious a language, he chose to employ new terms of his own invention; a license which is not allowed to us in this barren language of ours; although you often insist that it is richer than the Greek. But it is not foreign to our present subject, in order that the meaning of the word may be more easily understood, to explain the principle on which Zeno invented these terms.

XVI. For as, says he, no one in a king's palace says that the king is, as it were, led forward towards his dignity (for that is the real meaning of the word προηγμένον, but the term is applied to those who are of some rank whose order comes next to his, so as to be second to the kingly dignity); so in life too, it is not those things which are in the first rank, but those which are in the second which are called προηγμένα, or led forward. And we may translate the Greek by productum (this will be a strictly literal translation), or we may call it and its opposite promotum and remotum, or as we have said before, we may call προηγμένον, præpositum or præcipuum, and its opposite rejectum. For when the thing is understood, we ought to be very ductile as to the words which we employ.

But since we say that everything which is good holds the first rank, it follows inevitably that this which we call præcipuum or præpositum, must be neither good nor bad. And therefore we define it as something indifferent, attended with a moderate esteem. For that which they call ἀδιάφορον, it occurs to me to translate indifferens. Nor, indeed, was it at all possible that there should be nothing left intermediate,