the Peripatetics called goods,
were only things preferable, not good. And also that the ancients had been
very foolish when they said that these excellences of the body were
desirable for their own sake: they were to be accepted, but not to be
desired. And the same might be said of all the other circumstances of
life, which consists of nothing but virtue alone,--that that life which is
rich also in the other things which are according to nature is not more to
be desired on that account, but only more to be accepted; and, though
virtue itself makes life so happy that a man cannot be happier, still
something is wanting to wise men, even when they are most completely
happy; and that they labour to repel pain, disease, and debility.

IX. Oh, what a splendid force is there in such genius, and what an
excellent reason is this for setting up a new school! Go on; for it will
follow,--and, indeed, you have most learnedly adopted the principle,--that
all folly, and all injustice, and all other vices are alike, and that all
errors are equal; and that those who have made great progress, through
natural philosophy and learning, towards virtue, if they have not arrived
at absolute perfection in it, are completely miserable, and that there is
no difference between their life and that of the most worthless of men,--as
Plato, that greatest of men, if he was not thoroughly wise, lived no
better, and in no respect more happily, than the most worthless of men.
This is, forsooth, the Stoic correction and improvement of the old
philosophy; but it can never find any entrance into the city, or the
forum, or the senate-house. For who could endure to hear a man, who
professed to be a teacher of how to pass life with dignity and wisdom,
speaking in such a manner--altering the names of things; and though he was
in reality of the same opinion as every one else, still giving new names
to the things to which he attributed just the same force that others did,
without proposing the least alteration in the ideas to be entertained of
them? Would the advocate of a cause, when summing up for a defendant, deny
that exile or the confiscation of his client's property was an evil?--that
these things were to be rejected, though not to be fled from?--or would he
say that a judge ought not to be merciful?

But if he were speaking in the public assembly,--if Hannibal had arrived at
the gates and had driven his javelin into the wall, would he deny that it
was an e