from Greece, read and
learn these works of theirs from our childhood; and look on this as a
liberal and learned education.

XII. But why are we angry with the poets? We may find some
philosophers, those masters of virtue, who have taught that pain was
the greatest of evils. But you, young man, when you said but just now
that it appeared so to you, upon being asked by me what appeared
greater than infamy, gave up that opinion at a word. Suppose I ask
Epicurus the same question. He will answer that a trifling degree of
pain is a greater evil than the greatest infamy; for that there is no
evil in infamy itself, unless attended with pain. What pain, then,
attends Epicurus, when he says that very thing, that pain is the
greatest evil! And yet nothing can be a greater disgrace to a
philosopher than to talk thus. Therefore, you allowed enough when you
admitted that infamy appeared to you to be a greater evil than pain.
And if you abide by this admission, you will see how far pain should be
resisted; and that our inquiry should be not so much whether pain be an
evil, as how the mind may be fortified for resisting it. The Stoics
infer from some petty quibbling arguments that it is no evil, as if the
dispute were about a word, and not about the thing itself. Why do you
impose upon me, Zeno? For when you deny what appears very dreadful to
me to be an evil, I am deceived, and am at a loss to know why that
which appears to me to be a most miserable thing should be no evil. The
answer is, that nothing is an evil but what is base and vicious. You
return to your trifling, for you do not remove what made me uneasy. I
know that pain is not vice--you need not inform me of that: but show me
that it makes no difference to me whether I am in pain or not. It has
never anything to do, say you, with a happy life, for that depends upon
virtue alone; but yet pain is to be avoided. If I ask, why? It is
disagreeable, against nature, hard to bear, woful and afflicting.

XIII. Here are many words to express that by so many different forms
which we call by the single word evil. You are defining pain, instead
of removing it, when you say, it is disagreeable, unnatural, scarcely
possible to be endured or borne, nor are you wrong in saying so: but
the man who vaunts himself in such a manner should not give way in his
conduct, if it be true that nothing is good but what is honest, and
nothing evil but what is disgraceful. This would be wishing, not
pro