more pleasure in it than uneasiness. Now I
cannot bring myself to say so great a man talks nonsense; but I imagine he
is laughing at us. My opinion is that the greatest pain (I say the
greatest, though it may be ten atoms less than another) is not therefore
short, because acute; I could name to you a great many good men who have
been tormented many years with the acutest pains of the gout. But this
cautious man doth not determine the measure of that greatness or of
duration, so as to enable us to know what he calls excessive, with regard
to pain, or short, with respect to its continuance. Let us pass him by,
then, as one who says just nothing at all; and let us force him to
acknowledge, notwithstanding he might behave himself somewhat boldly under
his cholic and his strangury, that no remedy against pain can be had from
him who looks on pain as the greatest of all evils. We must apply, then,
for relief elsewhere, and nowhere better (if we seek for what is most
consistent with itself) than to those who place the chief good in honesty,
and the greatest evil in infamy. You dare not so much as groan, or
discover the least uneasiness in their company, for virtue itself speaks
to you through them.

XX. Will you, when you may observe children at Lacedaemon, and young men at
Olympia, and barbarians in the amphitheatre, receive the severest wounds,
and bear them without once opening their mouths,--will you, I say, if any
pain should by chance attack you, cry out like a woman? will you not
rather bear it with resolution and constancy? and not cry, It is
intolerable, nature cannot bear it. I hear what you say,--Boys bear this
because they are led thereto by glory: some bear it through shame, many
through fear, and yet are we afraid that nature cannot bear what is borne
by many, and in such different circumstances? Nature not only bears it,
but challenges it, for there is nothing with her preferable, nothing which
she desires more, than credit, and reputation, and praise, and honour, and
glory. I choose here to describe this one thing under many names, and I
have used many that you may have the clearer idea of it; for what I mean
to say is, that whatever is desirable of itself, proceeding from virtue,
or placed in virtue, and commendable on its own account, (which I would
rather agree to call the only good than deny it to be the chief good,) is
what men should prefer above all things. And as we declare this to be the
case with respe