ything in it of which a man can rightly
boast, although they also, at times, represent virtues as subjects for
boasting. You see, therefore, that you are either assuming propositions
which are not admitted, or else such as, even if they are granted, will do
you no good.

XIX. In truth, in all these conclusions, I should think this worthy both
of philosophy and of ourselves,--and that, too, most especially so when we
were inquiring into the chief good,--that our lives, and designs, and
wishes should be corrected, and not our expressions. For who, when he has
heard those brief and acute arguments of yours which, as you say, give you
so much pleasure, can ever have his opinion changed by them? For when men
fix their attention on them, and wish to hear why pain is not an evil,
they tell him that to be in pain is a bitter, annoying, odious, unnatural
condition, and one difficult to be borne; but, because there is in pain no
fraud, or dishonesty, or malice, or fault, or baseness, therefore it is
not an evil. Now, the man who hears this said, even if he does not care to
laugh, will still depart without being a bit more courageous as to bearing
pain than he was when he came. But you affirm that no one can be
courageous who thinks pain an evil. Why should he be more courageous if he
thinks it--what you yourself admit it to be--bitter and scarcely endurable?
For timidity is generated by things, and not by words. And you say, that
if one letter is moved, the whole system of the school will be undermined.
Do I seem, then, to you to be moving a letter, or rather whole pages? For
although the order of things, which is what you so especially extol, may
be preserved among them, and although everything may be well joined and
connected together, (for that is what you said,) still we ought not to
follow them too far, if arguments, having set out from false principles,
are consistent with themselves, and do not wander from the end they
propose to themselves.

Accordingly, in his first establishment of his system, your master, Zeno,
departed from nature; and as he had placed the chief good on that
superiority of disposition which we call virtue, and had affirmed that
there was nothing whatever good which was not honourable, and that virtue
could have no real existence if in other things there were things of which
one was better or worse than another; having laid down these premises, he
naturally maintained the conclusions. You say truly; fo