r a life to be happy without them. For so slight and
inconsiderable are those additions of goods, that as stars in the orbit of
the sun are not seen, so neither are those qualities, but they are lost in
the brilliancy of virtue. And as it is said with truth that the influence
of the advantages of the body have but little weight in making life happy,
so on the other hand it is too strong an assertion to say that they have
no weight at all: for those who argue thus appear to me to forget the
principles of nature which they themselves have contended for.

We must, therefore, allow these things some influence: provided only that
we understand how much we ought to allow them. It is, however, the part of
a philosopher, who seeks not so much for what is specious as for what is
true, neither utterly to disregard those things which those very boastful
men used to admit to be in accordance with nature; and at the same time to
see that the power of virtue, and the authority, if I may say so, of
honourableness, is so great that all those other things appear to be, I
will not say nothing, but so trivial as to be little better than nothing.
This is the language natural to a man who, on the one hand, does not
despise everything except virtue, and who, at the same time, honours
virtue with the praises which it deserves. This, in short, is a full and
perfect explanation of the chief good; and as the others have attempted to
detach different portions from the main body of it, each individual among
them has wished to appear to have established his own theory as the
victorious one.

XXV. The knowledge of things has been often extolled in a wonderful manner
by Aristotle and Theophrastus for its own sake. And Herillus, being
allured by this single fact, maintained that knowledge was the chief good,
and that there was no other thing whatever that deserved to be sought for
its own sake. Many things have been said by the ancients on the subject of
despising and contemning all human affairs. This was the one principle of
Aristo; he declared that there was nothing which ought to be avoided or
desired except vice and virtue. And our school has placed freedom from
pain among those things which are in accordance with nature. Hieronymus
has said that this is the chief good: but Callipho, and Diodorus after
him, one of whom was devoted to pleasure, and the other to freedom from
pain, could neither of them allow honourableness to be left out, which has