cs are crowded with sentences to the same effect. "Nothing for
opinion, all for conscience." "He who wishes his virtue to be blazed
abroad is not labouring for virtue but for fame." "No one is more
virtuous than the man who sacrifices the reputation of a good man rather
than sacrifice his conscience." "I do not shrink from praise, but I
refuse to make it the end and term of right." "If you do anything to
please men, you have fallen from your estate." "Even a bad reputation
nobly earned is pleasing." "A great man is not the less great when he
lies vanquished and prostrate in the dust." "Never forget that it is
possible to be at once a divine man, yet a man unknown to all the
world." "That which is beautiful is beautiful in itself; the praise of
man adds nothing to its quality." Marcus Aurelius, following an example
that is ascribed to Pythagoras, made it a special object of mental
discipline, by continually meditating on death, and evoking, by an
effort of the imagination, whole societies that had passed away, to
acquire a realised sense of the vanity of posthumous fame. The younger
Pliny painted faithfully the ideal of stoicism when he described one of
his friends as a man "who did nothing for ostentation but all for
conscience; who sought the reward of virtue in itself, and not in the
praise of man." Nor were the Stoics less emphatic in distinguishing the
obligation from the attraction of virtue. It was on this point that they
separated from the more refined Epicureans, who were often willing to
sublimate to the highest degree the kind of pleasure they proposed as an
object, provided only it were admitted that pleasure is necessarily the
ultimate end of our actions. But this the Stoics firmly denied.
"Pleasure," they argued, "is the companion, not the guide, of our
course." "We do not love virtue because it gives us pleasure, but it
gives us pleasure because we love it." "The wise man will not sin,
though both gods and men should overlook the deed, for it is not through
the fear of punishment or of shame that he abstains from sin. It is from
the desire and obligation of what is just and good." "To ask to be paid
for virtue is as if the eye demanded a recompense for seeing, or the
feet for walking." In doing good, man "should be like the vine which has
produced grapes, and asks for nothing more after it has produced its
proper fruit." His end, according to these teachers, is not to find
peace either in life or in death. I