the very
same thing which I have just said, and you give it the description of
consisting in motion, and of causing some variety: at another time you
speak of some other highest pleasure, which is susceptible of no addition
whatever, but that it is present when every sort of pain is absent, and
you call it then a state, not a motion: let that, then, be pleasure. Say,
in any assembly you please, that you do everything with a view to avoid
suffering pain: if you do not think that even this language is
sufficiently dignified, or sufficiently honourable, say that you will do
everything during your year of office, and during your whole life, for the
sake of your own advantage; that you will do nothing except what is
profitable to yourself, nothing which is not prompted by a view to your
own interest. What an uproar do you not suppose such a declaration would
excite in the assembly, and what hope do you think you would have of the
consulship which is ready for you? And can you follow these principles,
which, when by yourself, or in conversation with your dearest friends, you
do not dare to profess and avow openly? But you have those maxims
constantly in your mouth which the Peripatetics and Stoics profess. In the
courts of justice and in the senate you speak of duty, equity, dignity,
good faith, uprightness, honourable actions, conduct worthy of power,
worthy of the Roman people; you talk of encountering every imaginable
danger in the cause of the republic--of dying for one's country. When you
speak in this manner we are all amazed, like a pack of blockheads, and you
are laughing in your sleeve: for, among all those high-sounding and
admirable expressions, pleasure has no place, not only that pleasure which
you say consists in motion, and which all men, whether living in cities or
in the country, all men, in short, who speak Latin, call pleasure, but
even that stationary pleasure, which no one but your sect calls pleasure
at all.

XXIV. Take care lest you find yourselves obliged to use our language,
though adhering to your own opinions. But if you were to put on a feigned
countenance or gait, with the object of appearing more dignified, you
would not then be like yourself; and yet are you to use fictitious
language, and to say things which you do not think, or, as you have one
dress to wear at home, and another in which you appear in court, are you
to disguise your opinions in a similar manner, so as to make a parade with
you