Oh, what a splendid force is there in such genius, and what an excellent reason is this for setting up a new school!Go on; for it will follow,—and, indeed, you have most learnedly adopted the principle,—that all folly, and all injustice, and all other vices are alike, and that all errors are equal; and that those who have made great progress, through natural philosophy and learning, towards virtue, if they have not arrived at absolute perfection in it, are completely miserable, and that there is no difference between their life and that of the most worthless of men,—as Plato, that greatest of men, if he was not thoroughly wise, lived no better, and in no respect more happily, than the most worthless of men. This is, forsooth, the Stoic correction and improvement of the old philosophy; but it can never find any entrance into the city, or the forum, or the senate-house. For who could endure to hear a man, who professed to be a teacher of how to pass life with dignity and wisdom, speaking in such a manner—altering the names of things; and though he was in reality of the same opinion as every one else, still giving new names to the things to which he attributed just the same force that others did, without proposing the least alteration in the ideas to be entertained of them? Would the advocate of a cause, when summing up for a defendant, deny that exile or the confiscation of his client's property was an evil?—that these things were to be rejected, though not to be fled from?—or would he say that a judge ought not to be merciful?
But if he were speaking in the public assembly,—if Hannibal had arrived at the gates and had driven his javelin into the wall, would he deny that it was an evil to be taken prisoner, to be sold, to be slain, to lose one's country? Or could the senate, when it was voting a triumph to Africanus, have expressed itself,—Because by his virtue and good fortune ...if there could not properly be said to be any virtue or anygood fortune except in a wise man? What sort of a philosophy, then, is that which speaks in the ordinary manner in the forum, but in a peculiar style of its own in books? especially when, as they intimate themselves in all they say, no innovations are made by them in the facts,—none of the things themselves are changed, but they remain exactly the same, though in another manner. For what difference does it make whether you call riches, and power, and health goods, or only things preferred, as long as the man who calls them goods attributes no more to them than you do who call them things preferred? Therefore, Panætius—a noble and dignified man, worthy of the intimacy which he enjoyed with Scipio and Lælius—when he was writing to Quintus Tubero on the subject of bearing pain, never once asserted, what ought to have been his main argument, if it could have been proved, that pain was not an evil; but he explained what it was, and what its character was, and what amount of disagreeableness there was in it, and what was the proper method of enduring it; and (for he, too, was a Stoic) all that preposterous language of the school appears to me to be condemned by these sentiments of his.