Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/320

 some of which are new, and invented expressly for them, such as producta and reducta, and some of which are merely synonymous; (for what difference can it make whether you wish for a thing or choose it? that which is chosen, and on which deliberate choice is exercised, appears to me to be the better) still, when I have called all these things goods, the question is merely how great goods I call them; when I say they deserved to be wished for, the question is,—how eagerly?

But, if I do not attribute more importance to them when I say that they deserve to be wished for, than you do who say they only deserve to be chosen, and if I do not value them more highly when I call them bona, than you, when you speak of them as producta; then all these things must inevitably be involved in obscurity, and put out of sight, and lost amid the rays of virtue like stars in the sunbeams. But that life in which there is any evil cannot be happy. Then a corn-field full of thick and heavy ears of corn is not a corn-field if you see any tares anywhere; nor is traffic gainful if, amid the greatest gains, you incur the most trifling loss. Do we ever act on different principles in any circumstances of life; and will you not judge of the whole from its greatest part? or is there any doubt that virtue is so much the most important thing in all human affairs, that it throws all the rest into the shade?

I will venture, then, to call the rest of the things which are in accordance with nature, goods, and not to cheat them of their ancient title, rather than go and hunt for some new name for them; and the dignity of virtue I will put, as it were, in the other scale of the balance. Believe me, that scale will outweigh both earth and sea; for the whole always has its name from that which embraces its largest part, and is the most widely diffused. We say that one man lives merrily. Is there, then, an end of this merry life of his if he is for a moment a little poor?

But, in the case of that Marcus Crassus, who, Lucilius says, laughed once in his life, the fact of his having done so did not deliver him from being called ἀγέλαστος. They call Polycrates of Samos happy. Nothing had ever happened to him which he did not like, except that he had thrown into the sea a ring which he valued greatly; therefore he was unhappy as to that one annoyance; but subsequently he was