Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/311

 own sake, but still are not of the same class as the other kind. Nor, indeed, could any one ever arrive at the chief good, if all those things which are external, although desirable, were contained in the chief good.

XXIV. How then, you will say, can it be true that everything is referred to the chief good, if friendship, and relationship, and all other external things are not contained in the chief good? Why, on this principle,—because we protect those things which are external with those duties which arise from their respective kinds of virtue. For the cultivation of the regard of a friend or a parent, which is the discharge of a duty, is advantageous in the actual fact of its being such, inasmuch as to discharge a duty is a good action; and good actions spring from virtues; and wise men attend to them, using nature as a kind of guide.

But men who are not perfect, though endued with admirable talents and dispositions, are often excited by glory, which has the form and likeness of honourableness. But if they were to be thoroughly acquainted with the nature of that honourableness which is wholly complete and perfect, that one thing which is the most admirable of all things, and the most praiseworthy, with what joy would they be filled, when they are so greatly delighted at its outline and bare idea! For who that is given up to pleasure, and inflamed with the conflagration of desire in the enjoyment of those things which he has most eagerly wished for, can we imagine to be full of such joy as the elder Africanus after he had conquered Hannibal, or the younger one after he had destroyed Carthage? What man was there who was so much elated with the way in which all the people flocked to the Tiber on that day of festivity as Lucius Paullus, when he was leading in triumph king Perses as his prisoner, who was conveyed down on the same river?

Come now, my friend Lucius, build up in your mind the lofty excellence of virtue, and you will not doubt that the men who are possessed of it, and who live with a magnanimous and upright spirit, are always happy; men who are aware that all the movements of fortune, all the changes of affairs and circumstances, must be insignificant and powerless if ever they come to a contest with virtue. For those things which are considered by us as goods of the body, do indeed