vil to be taken prisoner, to be sold, to be slain, to lose one's
country? Or could the senate, when it was voting a triumph to Africanus,
have expressed itself,--Because by his virtue and good fortune ... if there
could not properly be said to be any virtue or any good fortune except in
a wise man? What sort of a philosophy, then, is that which speaks in the
ordinary manner in the forum, but in a peculiar style of its own in books?
especially when, as they intimate themselves in all they say, no
innovations are made by them in the facts,--none of the things themselves
are changed, but they remain exactly the same, though in another manner.
For what difference does it make whether you call riches, and power, and
health goods, or only things preferred, as long as the man who calls them
goods attributes no more to them than you do who call them things
preferred? Therefore, Panaetius--a noble and dignified man, worthy of the
intimacy which he enjoyed with Scipio and Laelius--when he was writing to
Quintus Tubero on the subject of bearing pain, never once asserted, what
ought to have been his main argument, if it could have been proved, that
pain was not an evil; but he explained what it was, and what its character
was, and what amount of disagreeableness there was in it, and what was the
proper method of enduring it; and (for he, too, was a Stoic) all that
preposterous language of the school appears to me to be condemned by these
sentiments of his.

X. But, however, to come, O Cato, more closely to what you have been
saying, let us treat this question more narrowly, and compare what you
have just said with those assertions which I prefer to yours. Now, those
arguments which you employ in common with the ancients, we may make use of
as admitted. But let us, if you please, confine our discussion to those
which are disputed. I do please, said he: I am very glad to have the
question argued with more subtlety, and, as you call it, more closely; for
what you have hitherto advanced are mere popular assertions, but from you
I expect something more elegant. From me? said I. However, I will try;
and, if I cannot find arguments enough, I will not be above having
recourse to those which you call popular.

But let me first lay down this position, that we are so recommended to
ourselves by nature, and that we have this principal desire implanted in
us by nature, that our first wish is to preserve ourselves. This is
agreed. It follows, th