icient to a happy life: and each premise may be made to follow from
the admission of the other, so that if it be admitted that virtue is
sufficient to secure a happy life, it may also be inferred that nothing is
good except what is honourable. They however do not proceed in this
manner; for they would separate books about what is honourable, and what
is the chief good: and when they have demonstrated from the one that
virtue has power enough to make life happy, yet they treat this point
separately; for everything, and especially a subject of such great
consequence, should be supported by arguments and exhortations which
belong to that alone. For you should have a care how you imagine
philosophy to have uttered anything more noble, or that she has promised
anything more fruitful or of greater consequence: for, good Gods! doth she
not engage, that she will render him who submits to her laws so
accomplished as to be always armed against fortune, and to have every
assurance within himself of living well and happily; that he shall, in
short, be for ever happy. But let us see what she will perform? In the
meanwhile I look upon it as a great thing, that she has even made such a
promise. For Xerxes, who was loaded with all the rewards and gifts of
fortune, not satisfied with his armies of horse and foot, nor the
multitude of his ships, nor his infinite treasure of gold, offered a
reward to any one who could find out a new pleasure: and yet, when it was
discovered, he was not satisfied with it, nor can there ever be an end to
lust. I wish we could engage any one by a reward, to produce something the
better to establish us in this belief.

VIII. _A._ I wish that indeed myself; but I want a little information. For
I allow, that in what you have stated, the one proposition is the
consequence of the other; that as, if what is honourable be the only good,
it must follow, that a happy life is the effect of virtue: so that if a
happy life consists in virtue, nothing can be good but virtue. But your
friend Brutus, on the authority of Aristo and Antiochus, does not see
this: for he thinks the case would be the same, even if there were
anything good besides virtue.

_M._ What then? do you imagine that I am going to argue against Brutus?

_A._ You may do what you please: for it is not for me to prescribe what
you shall do.

_M._ How these things agree together shall be examined somewhere else: for
I frequently discussed that point with