Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/247

 which follows, and does not correspond to what has gone before? What is there which is not connected with something else in such a manner, that if you only move one letter the whole will fall to pieces? Nor, indeed, is there anything which can be moved.

But what a grand and magnificent and consistent character is that of the wise man which is drawn by them! For he, after reason has taught him that that which is honourable is alone good, must inevitably be always happy, and must have a genuine right to those names which are often ridiculed by the ignorant. For he will be more properly called king than Tarquin, who was able to govern neither himself nor his family; he will deserve to be called the master of the people more than Sylla, who was only the master of three pestiferous vices, luxury, avarice, and cruelty; he will be called rich more properly than Crassus, who would never have desired to cross the Euphrates without any legitimate cause for war, if he had not been in want of something. Everything will be properly said to belong to that man, who alone knows how to make use of everything. He will also rightly be called beautiful, for the features of the mind are more beautiful than those of the body: he will deservedly be called the only free man, who is neither subject to the domination of any one, nor subservient to his own passions. He will fairly be called invincible, on whose mind, even though his body be bound with chains, no fetters can ever be imposed. Nor will he wait till the last period of his life, so as to have it decided whether he has been happy or not, after he has come to the last day of life and closed his eyes in death, in the spirit of the warning which one of the wise men gave to Crœsus, without showing much wisdom in so doing. For if he had ever been happy, then he would have borne his happy life with him, even as far as the funeral pile built for him by Cyrus.

But if it be true that no one except a good man is happy, and that all good men are happy, then what deserves to be cultivated more than philosophy, or what is more divine than virtue?