yed, and if he were without fear of death, or of the Gods.

XVIII. You have here a representation of a happy life according to
Epicurus, in the words of Zeno, so that there is no room for contradiction
in any point. What then? Can the proposing and thinking of such a life
make Thyestes grief the less, or AEetes's, of whom I spoke above, or
Telamon's, who was driven from his country to penury and banishment? in
wonder at whom men exclaimed thus:--

Is this the man surpassing glory raised?
Is this that Telamon so highly praised
By wondering Greece, at whose sight, like the sun,
All others with diminish'd lustre shone?

Now, should any one, as the same author says, find his spirits sink with
the loss of his fortune, he must apply to those grave philosophers of
antiquity for relief, and not to these voluptuaries: for what great
abundance of good do they promise? Suppose that we allow that to be
without pain is the chief good? yet that is not called pleasure. But it is
not necessary at present to go through the whole: the question is, to what
point are we to advance in order to abate our grief? Grant that to be in
pain is the greatest evil; whosoever, then, has proceeded so far as not to
be in pain, is he, therefore, in immediate possession of the greatest
good? Why, Epicurus, do we use any evasions, and not allow in our own
words the same feeling to be pleasure, which you are used to boast of with
such assurance? Are these your words or not? This is what you say in that
book which contains all the doctrine of your school; for I will perform,
on this occasion, the office of a translator, lest any one should imagine
that I am inventing anything. Thus you speak: "Nor can I form any notion
of the chief good, abstracted from those pleasures which are perceived by
taste, or from what depends on hearing music, or abstracted from ideas
raised by external objects visible to the eye, or by agreeable motions, or
from those other pleasures which are perceived by the whole man by means
of any of his senses; nor can it possibly be said that the pleasures of
the mind are excited only by what is good; for I have perceived men's
minds to be pleased with the hopes of enjoying those things which I
mentioned above, and with the idea that it should enjoy them without any
interruption from pain." And these are his exact words, so that any one
may understand what were the pleasures with which Epicurus was acquainted.
Then he