life merely enables me to die; I have given you a
life complete, perfect; you begat me without intelligence, a burden upon
others. Do you wish to know how far from a benefit it was to give life
under such conditions? You should have exposed me as a child, for you
did me a wrong in begetting me. What do I gather from this? That the
cohabitation of a father and mother is the very least of benefits to
their child, unless in addition this beginning of kindnesses be followed
up by others, and confirmed by other services. It is not a good thing
to live, but to live well. "But," say you, "I do live well." True, but
I might have lived ill; so that your part in me is merely this, that I
live. If you claim merit to yourself for giving me mere life, bare and
helpless, and boast of it as a great boon, reflect that this you claim
merit for giving me is a boon which I possess in common with flies and
worms. In the next place, if I say no more than that I have applied
myself to honourable pursuits, and have guided the course of my life
along the path of rectitude, then you have received more from your
benefit than you gave; for you gave me to myself ignorant and unlearned,
and I have returned to you a son such as you would wish to have
begotten.

XXXII. My father supported me. If I repay this kindness, I give him
more than I received, because he has the pleasure, not only of being
supported, but of being supported by a son, and receives more delight
from my filial devotion than from the food itself, whereas the food
which he used to give me merely affected my body. What? if any man
rises so high as to become famous among nations for his eloquence, his
justice, or his military skill, if much of the splendour of his renown
is shed upon his father also, and by its clear light dispels the
obscurity of his birth, does not such a man confer an inestimable
benefit upon his parents? Would anyone have heard of Aristo and Gryllus
except through Xenophon and Plato, their sons? Socrates keeps alive
the memory of Sophroniscus. It would take long to recount the other
men whose names survive for no other reason than that the admirable
qualities of their sons have handed them down to posterity. Did the
father of Marcus Agrippa, of whom nothing was known, even after Agrippa
became famous, confer the greater benefit upon his son, or was that
greater which Agrippa conferred upon his father when he gained the
glory, unique in the annals of war, of a nava