tions, or one's country, are indeed dear to me for their own
sake, but still are not of the same class as the other kind. Nor, indeed,
could any one ever arrive at the chief good, if all those things which are
external, although desirable, were contained in the chief good.

XXIV. How then, you will say, can it be true that everything is referred
to the chief good, if friendship, and relationship, and all other external
things are not contained in the chief good? Why, on this
principle,--because we protect those things which are external with those
duties which arise from their respective kinds of virtue. For the
cultivation of the regard of a friend or a parent, which is the discharge
of a duty, is advantageous in the actual fact of its being such, inasmuch
as to discharge a duty is a good action; and good actions spring from
virtues; and wise men attend to them, using nature as a kind of guide.

But men who are not perfect, though endued with admirable talents and
dispositions, are often excited by glory, which has the form and likeness
of honourableness. But if they were to be thoroughly acquainted with the
nature of that honourableness which is wholly complete and perfect, that
one thing which is the most admirable of all things, and the most
praiseworthy, with what joy would they be filled, when they are so greatly
delighted at its outline and bare idea! For who that is given up to
pleasure, and inflamed with the conflagration of desire in the enjoyment
of those things which he has most eagerly wished for, can we imagine to be
full of such joy as the elder Africanus after he had conquered Hannibal,
or the younger one after he had destroyed Carthage? What man was there who
was so much elated with the way in which all the people flocked to the
Tiber on that day of festivity as Lucius Paullus, when he was leading in
triumph king Perses as his prisoner, who was conveyed down on the same
river?

Come now, my friend Lucius, build up in your mind the lofty excellence of
virtue, and you will not doubt that the men who are possessed of it, and
who live with a magnanimous and upright spirit, are always happy; men who
are aware that all the movements of fortune, all the changes of affairs
and circumstances, must be insignificant and powerless if ever they come
to a contest with virtue. For those things which are considered by us as
goods of the body, do indeed make up a happy life, but still not without
leaving it possible fo