Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/257

 other circumstances of life, which consists of nothing but virtue alone,—that that life which is rich also in the other things which are according to nature is not more to be desired on that account, but only more to be accepted; and, though virtue itself makes life so happy that a man cannot be happier, still something is wanting to wise men, even when they are most completely happy; and that they labour to repel pain, disease, and debility.

IX. Oh, what a splendid force is there in such genius, and what an excellent reason is this for setting up a new school! Go on; for it will follow,—and, indeed, you have most learnedly adopted the principle,—that all folly, and all injustice, and all other vices are alike, and that all errors are equal; and that those who have made great progress, through natural philosophy and learning, towards virtue, if they have not arrived at absolute perfection in it, are completely miserable, and that there is no difference between their life and that of the most worthless of men,—as Plato, that greatest of men, if he was not thoroughly wise, lived no better, and in no respect more happily, than the most worthless of men. This is, forsooth, the Stoic correction and improvement of the old philosophy; but it can never find any entrance into the city, or the forum, or the senate-house. For who could endure to hear a man, who professed to be a teacher of how to pass life with dignity and wisdom, speaking in such a manner—altering the names of things; and though he was in reality of the same opinion as every one else, still giving new names to the things to which he attributed just the same force that others did, without proposing the least alteration in the ideas to be entertained of them? Would the advocate of a cause, when summing up for a defendant, deny that exile or the confiscation of his client's property was an evil?—that these things were to be rejected, though not to be fled from?—or would he say that a judge ought not to be merciful?

But if he were speaking in the public assembly,—if Hannibal had arrived at the gates and had driven his javelin into the wall, would he deny that it was an evil to be taken prisoner, to be sold, to be slain, to lose one's country? Or could the senate, when it was voting a triumph to Africanus, have expressed itself,—Because by his virtue and good fortune if there could not properly be said to be any virtue or any