or who will grant you your first premises? And if
it should be granted to you, then you have no need of the second: for if
everything good is praiseworthy, so is everything honourable; who, then,
will grant you this, except Pyrrho, Aristo, and men like them?--whom you do
not approve of. Aristotle, Xenocrates, and all that school, will not grant
it; inasmuch as they call health, strength, riches, glory, and many other
things good, but not praiseworthy; and they therefore do not think that
the chief good is contained in virtue alone, though still they do prefer
virtue to everything else. What do you think that those men will do who
have utterly separated virtue from the chief good, Epicurus, Hieronymus,
and those too, if indeed there are any such, who wish to defend the
definition of the chief good given by Carneades? And how will Callipho and
Diodorus be able to grant you what you ask, men who join to honourableness
something else which is not of the same genus?--Do you, then, think it
proper, Cato, after you have assumed premises which no one will grant to
you, to derive whatever conclusion you please from them? Take this
sorites, than which you think nothing can be more faulty: "That which is
good is desirable; that which is desirable ought to be sought for; that
which ought to be sought for is praiseworthy," and so on through all the
steps. But I will stop here, for in the same manner no one will grant to
you that whatever ought to be sought is therefore praiseworthy; and that
other argument of theirs is far from a legitimate conclusion, but a most
stupid assertion, "that a happy life is one worthy of being boasted of."
For it can never happen that a person may reasonably boast, without
something honourable in the circumstances. Polemo will grant this to Zeno;
and so will his master, and the whole of that school, and all the rest
who, preferring virtue by far to everything else, still add something
besides to it in their definition of the chief good. For, if virtue be a
thing worthy of being boasted of, as it is, and if it is so far superior
to all other things that it can scarcely be expressed how much better it
is; then a man may, possibly, be happy if endowed with virtue alone, and
destitute of everything else; and yet he will never grant to you that
nothing whatever is to be classed among goods, except virtue.

But those men whose chief good has no virtue in it, will perhaps not grant
to you that a happy life has an