eel his mind affected with
pleasure? and who that has been brought up in a respectable family, and
educated as becomes a freeman, is not offended with baseness as such,
though it may not be likely to injure him personally? Who can keep his
equanimity while looking on a man who, he thinks, lives in an impure and
wicked manner? Who does not hate sordid, fickle, unstable, worthless men?
But what shall we be able to say, (if we do not lay it down that baseness
is to be avoided for its own sake), is the reason why men do not seek
darkness and solitude, and then give the rein to every possible infamy,
except that baseness of itself detects them by reason of its own intrinsic
foulness? Innumerable arguments may be brought forward to support this
opinion; but it is needless, for there is nothing which can be less a
matter of doubt than that what is honourable ought to be sought for its
own sake; and, in the same manner, what is disgraceful ought to be
avoided.

But after that point is established, which we have previously mentioned,
that what is honourable is the sole good; it must unavoidably be
understood that that which is honourable, is to be valued more highly than
those intermediate goods which we derive from it. But when we say that
folly, and rashness, and injustice, and intemperance are to be avoided on
account of those things which result from them, we do not speak in such a
manner that our language is at all inconsistent with the position which
has been laid down, that that alone is evil which is dishonourable.
Because those things are not referred to any inconvenience of the body,
but to dishonourable actions, which arise out of vicious propensities
(_vitia_). For what the Greeks call {~GREEK SMALL LETTER KAPPA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER KAPPA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~} I prefer translating by _vitium_
rather than by _malitia_.

XII. Certainly; Cato, said I, you are employing very admirable language,
and such as expresses clearly what you mean; and, therefore, you seem to
me to be teaching philosophy in Latin, and, as it were, to be presenting
it with the freedom of the city. For up to this time she has seemed like a
stranger at Rome, and has not put herself in the way of our conversation;
and that, too, chiefly because of a certain highly polished thinness of
things and words. For I am aware that there are some men who are able to
philosophise in any lan