Certainly; Cato, said I, you are employing very admirable language, and such as expresses clearly what you mean; and, therefore, you seem to me to be teaching philosophy in Latin, and, as it were, to be presenting it with the freedom of the city. For up to this time she has seemed like a stranger at Rome, and has not put herself in the way of our conversation; and that, too, chiefly because of a certain highly polished thinness of things and words. For I am aware that there are some men who are able to philosophise in any language, but who still employ no divisions and no definitions; and who say themselves that they approve of those things alone to which nature silently assents. Therefore, they discuss, without any great degree of labour, matters which are not very obscure. And, on this account, I am now prepared to listen eagerly to you, and to commit to memory all the names which you give to those matters to which this discussion refers. For, perhaps, I myself may some day have reason to employ them too.
You, then, appear to me to be perfectly right, and to be acting in strict accordance with our usual way of speaking,when you lay it down that there are vices the exact opposites of virtues; for that which is blameable (vituperabile) for its own sake, I think ought, from that very fact, to be called a vice; and perhaps this verb, vitupero, is derived from vitium. But if you had translated κακία by malitia, then the usage of the Latin language would have limited us to one particular vice; but, as it is, all vice is opposed to all virtue by one generic opposite name.