any one. What? Can any day which has once passed recur over
again frequently. Most indubitably not; or can any day like it recur? Even
that is impossible, unless it may happen after an interval of many
thousand years, that there may be a return of all the stars at the same
moment to the point from which they set out. There is, therefore, no such
thing as anybody's birthday. But still it is considered that there is. As
if I did not know that. But even if there be, is it to be regarded after a
man's death? And is a man to give injunctions in his will that it shall be
so, after he has told you all, as if with the voice of an oracle, that
there is nothing which concerns us at all after death? These things are
very inconsistent in a man who, in his mind, had travelled over
innumerable worlds and boundless regions, which were destitute of all
limits and boundaries. Did Democritus ever say such a thing as this? I
will pass over every one else, and call him only as a witness whom
Epicurus himself followed to the exclusion of others.

But if a day did deserve to be kept, which was it more fitting to observe,
the day on which a man was born, or that on which he became wise? A man,
you will say, could not have become wise unless he had been born. And, on
the same principle, he could not if his grandmother had never been born.
The whole business, Torquatus, is quite out of character for a learned man
to wish to have the recollection of his name celebrated with banquets
after his death. I say nothing of the way in which you keep these days,
and to how many jokes from witty men you expose yourselves. There is no
need of quarrelling. I only say that it would have been more becoming in
you to keep Epicurus's birthday, than in him to leave injunctions in his
will that it should be kept.

XXXII. However, to return to our subject, (for while we were talking of
pain we digressed to that letter of his,) we may now fairly come to this
conclusion. The man who is in the greatest evil, while he is in it, is not
happy. But the wise man is always happy, and is also occasionally in pain.
Therefore, pain is not the greatest evil. What kind of doctrine, then, is
this, that goods which are past are not lost to a wise man, but that he
ought not to remember past evils. First of all, is it in our power to
decide what we will remember. When Simonides, or some one else, offered to
Themistocles to teach him the art of memory, "I would rather," said he,
"t