moment when he was being tortured with
sleeplessness and hunger, more happy than Thorius while drinking on a bed
of roses.

Regulus had had the conduct of great wars; he had been twice consul; he
had had a triumph; and yet he did not think those previous exploits of his
so great or so glorious as that last misfortune which he incurred, because
of his own good faith and constancy; a misfortune which appears pitiable
to us who hear of it, but was actually pleasant to him who endured it. For
men are happy, not because of hilarity, or lasciviousness, or laughter, or
jesting, the companion of levity, but often even through sorrow endured
with firmness and constancy. Lucretia, having been ravished by force by
the king's son, called her fellow-citizens to witness, and slew herself.
This grief of hers, Brutus being the leader and mover of the Roman people,
was the cause of liberty to the whole state. And out of regard for the
memory of that woman, her husband and her father were made consuls(35) the
first year of the republic. Lucius Virginius, a man of small property and
one of the people, sixty years after the reestablishment of liberty, slew
his virgin daughter with his own hand, rather than allow her to be
surrendered to the lust of Appius Claudius, who was at that time invested
with the supreme power.

XXI. Now you, O Torquatus, must either blame all these actions, or else
you must abandon the defence of pleasure. And what a cause is that, and
what a task does the man undertake who comes forward as the advocate of
pleasure, who is unable to call any one illustrious man as evidence in her
favour or as a witness to her character? For as we have awakened those men
from the records of our annals as witnesses, whose whole life has been
consumed in glorious labours; men who cannot bear to hear the very name of
pleasure: so on your side of the argument history is dumb. I have never
heard of Lycurgus, or Solon, Miltiades, or Themistocles, or Epaminondas
being mentioned in the school of Epicurus; men whose names are constantly
in the mouth of all the other philosophers. But now, since we have begun
to deal with this part of the question, our friend Atticus, out of his
treasures, will supply us with the names of as many great men as may be
sufficient for us to bring forward as witnesses. Is it not better to say a
little of these men, than so many volumes about Themista?(36) Let these
things be confined to the Greeks: although we ha