o the skies, with the usual
extravagance of good orators, it is easy to reduce the other topics to
nothing by comparison, and to hold them up to contempt. They who think
that praise deserves to be sought after, even at the expense of pain,
are not at liberty to deny those men to be happy who have obtained it.
Though they may be under some evils, yet this name of happy has a very
wide application.

XXXI. For even as trading is said to be lucrative, and farming
advantageous, not because the one never meets with any loss, nor the
other with any damage from the inclemency of the weather, but because
they succeed in general; so life may be properly called happy, not from
its being entirely made up of good things, but because it abounds with
these to a great and considerable degree. By this way of reasoning,
then, a happy life may attend virtue even to the moment of execution;
nay, may descend with her into Phalaris's bull, according to Aristotle,
Xenocrates, Speusippus, Polemon; and will not be gained over by any
allurements to forsake her. Of the same opinion will Calliphon and
Diodorus be; for they are both of them such friends to virtue as to
think that all things should be discarded and far removed that are
incompatible with it. The rest seem to be more hampered with these
doctrines, but yet they get clear of them; such as Epicurus,
Hieronymus, and whoever else thinks it worth while to defend the
deserted Carneades: for there is not one of them who does not think the
mind to be judge of those goods, and able sufficiently to instruct him
how to despise what has the appearance only of good or evil. For what
seems to you to be the case with Epicurus is the case also with
Hieronymus and Carneades, and, indeed, with all the rest of them; for
who is there who is not sufficiently prepared against death and pain? I
will begin, with your leave, with him whom we call soft and voluptuous.
What! does he seem, to you to be afraid of death or pain when he calls
the day of his death happy; and who, when he is afflicted by the
greatest pains, silences them all by recollecting arguments of his own
discovering? And this is not done in such a manner as to give room for
imagining that he talks thus wildly from some sudden impulse; but his
opinion of death is, that on the dissolution of the animal all sense is
lost; and what is deprived of sense is, as he thinks, what we have no
concern at all with. And as to pain, too, he has certain rules