the chief good by a strong constitution of body, and
a well assured hope of its continuance,--for you to cut off every access of
fortune? Why, you may instantly be deprived of that good. Yet the simple
are taken with these propositions, and a vast crowd is led away by such
sentences to become their followers.

X. But it is the duty of one who would argue accurately, to consider not
what is said, but what is said consistently. As in that very opinion which
we have adopted in this discussion, namely, that every good man is always
happy; it is clear what I mean by good men: I call those both wise and
good men, who are provided and adorned with every virtue. Let us see,
then, who are to be called happy. I imagine, indeed, that those men are to
be called so, who are possessed of good without any alloy of evil: nor is
there any other notion connected with the word that expresses happiness,
but an absolute enjoyment of good without any evil. Virtue cannot attain
this, if there is anything good besides itself: for a crowd of evils would
present themselves, if we were to allow poverty, obscurity, humility,
solitude, the loss of friends, acute pains of the body, the loss of
health, weakness, blindness, the ruin of one's country, banishment,
slavery, to be evils: for a wise man may be afflicted by all these evils,
numerous and important as they are, and many others also may be added; for
they are brought on by chance, which may attack a wise man: but if these
things are evils, who can maintain that a wise man is always happy, when
all these evils may light on him at the same time? I therefore do not
easily agree with my friend Brutus, nor with our common masters, nor those
ancient ones, Aristotle, Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemon, who reckon all
that I have mentioned above as evils, and yet they say that a wise man is
always happy; nor can I allow them, because they are charmed with this
beautiful and illustrious title, which would very well become Pythagoras,
Socrates, and Plato, to persuade my mind, that strength, health, beauty,
riches, honours, power, with the beauty of which they are ravished, are
contemptible, and that all those things which are the opposites of these
are not to be regarded. Then might they declare openly, with a loud voice,
that neither the attacks of fortune, nor the opinion of the multitude, nor
pain, nor poverty, occasion them any apprehensions; and that they have
everything within themselves, and that the