? Yet we never give anything with more care, we never take
such pains in deciding upon our verdict, as when, without any views of
personal advantage, we think only of what is honourable, for we are bad
judges of our duty as long as our view of it is distorted by hope and
fear, and that most indolent of vices, pleasure: but when death has shut
off all these, and brought us as incorrupt judges to pronounce sentence,
we seek for the most worthy men to leave our property to, and we never
take more scrupulous care than in deciding what is to be done with what
does not concern us. Yet, by Hercules, then there steals over us a
great satisfaction as we think, "I shall make this man richer, and by
bestowing wealth upon that man I shall add lustre to his high position."
Indeed, if we never give without expecting some return, we must all die
without making our wills.

XII. It may be said, "You define a benefit as a loan which cannot be
repaid: now a loan is not a desirable thing in itself." When we speak of
a loan, we make use of a figure, or comparison, just as we speak of law
as; the standard of right and wrong, although a standard is not a thing
to be desired for its own sake. I have adopted this phrase in order to
illustrate my subject: when I speak of a loan, I must be understood to
mean something resembling a loan. Do you wish to know how it differs
from one? I add the words "which cannot be repaid," whereas every loan
both can and ought to be repaid. It is so far from being right to bestow
a benefit for one's own advantage, that often, as I have explained, it
is one's duty to bestow it when it involves one's own loss and risk: for
instance, if I assist a man when beset by robbers, so that he gets away
from them safely, or help some victim of power, and bring upon myself
the party spite of a body of influential men, very, probably incurring
myself the same disgrace from which I saved him, although I might have
taken the other side, and looked on with safety at struggles with
which I have nothing to do: if I were to give bail for one who has been
condemned, and when my friend's goods were advertised for sale I were
to give a bond to the effect that I would make restitution to the
creditors, if, in order to save a proscribed person I myself run the
risk of being proscribed. No one, when about to buy a villa at Tusculum
or Tibur, for a summer retreat, because of the health of the locality,
considers how many years' purchase he g