ety to the Tyrant of Sicily? or,
when you are Pylades, will you affirm that you are Orestes, that you may
die for your friend? or, if you were Orestes, would you contradict
Pylades, and give yourself up? and, if you could not succeed then, would
you intreat that you might be both put to death together?

XXV. You, indeed, O Torquatus, would do all these things. For I do not
think that there is anything deserving of great praise, which you would be
likely to shrink from out of fear of death or pain: nor is it the question
what is consistent with your nature, but with the doctrines of your
school--that philosophy which you defend, those precepts which you have
learnt, and which you profess to approve of, utterly overthrow
friendship--even though Epicurus should, as indeed he does, extol it to the
skies. Oh, you will say, but he himself cultivated friendship. As if any
one denied that he was a good, and courteous, and kind-hearted man; the
question in these discussions turns on his genius, and not on his morals.
Grant that there is such perversity in the levity of the Greeks, who
attack those men with evil speaking with whom they disagree as to the
truth of a proposition. But, although he may have been courteous in
maintaining friendships, still, if all this is true, (for I do not affirm
anything myself), he was not a very acute arguer. Oh, but he convinced
many people. And perhaps it was quite right that he should; still, the
testimony of the multitude is not of the greatest possible weight; for in
every art, or study, or science, as in virtue itself, whatever is most
excellent is also most rare. And to me, indeed, the very fact of he
himself having been a good man, and of many Epicureans having also been
such, and being to this day faithful in their friendships, and consistent
throughout their whole lives, and men of dignified conduct, regulating
their lives, not by pleasure, but by their duty, appears to show that the
power of what is honourable is greater, and that of pleasure smaller. For
some men live in such a manner that their language is refuted by their
lives; and as others are considered to speak better than they act, so
these men seem to me to act better than they speak.

XXVI. However, all this is nothing to the purpose. Let us just consider
those things which have been said by you about friendship, and among them
I fancied that I recognized one thing as having been said by Epicurus
himself, namely, that friend