Tusculan Disputations 5 ¶1 — Cicero (on the Stoics)

Cicero (on the Stoics), Tusculan Disputations 5 ¶1

This fifth day, Brutus, shall put an end to our Tusculan Disputations, on which day we discussed your favorite subject. For I perceive from that book which you wrote for me with the greatest accuracy, as well as from your frequent conversation, that you are clearly of this opinion: that virtue is of itself sufficient for a happy life. And though it may be difficult to prove this, on account of the many various strokes of fortune, yet it is a truth of such a nature that we should endeavor to facilitate the proof of it. For among all the topics of philosophy, there is not one of more dignity or importance. For as the first philosophers must have had some inducement to neglect everything for the search of the best state of life, surely the inducement must have been the hope of living happily, which impelled them to devote so much care and pains to that study. Now, if virtue was discovered and carried to perfection by them, and if virtue is a sufficient security for a happy life, who can avoid thinking the work of philosophizing excellently recommended by them, and undertaken by me? But if virtue, as being subject to such various and uncertain accidents, were but the slave of fortune, and were not of sufficient ability to support herself, I am afraid that it would seem desirable rather to offer up prayers than to rely on our own confidence in virtue as the foundation for our hope of a happy life. And, indeed, when I reflect on those troubles with which I have been so severely exercised by fortune, I begin to distrust this opinion, and sometimes even to dread the weakness and frailty of human nature, for I am afraid lest, when nature had given us infirm bodies, and had joined to them incurable diseases and intolerable pains, she perhaps also gave us minds participating in these bodily pains, and harassed also with troubles and uneasinesses peculiarly their own. But here I correct myself for forming my judgment of the power of virtue more from the weakness of others, or of myself perhaps, than from virtue itself, for she herself (provided there is such a thing as virtue—and your uncle Brutus has removed all doubt of it) has everything that can befall mankind in subjection to her, and by disregarding such things, she is far removed from being at all concerned at human accidents, and, being free from every imperfection, she thinks that nothing which is external to herself can concern her. But we, who increase every approaching evil by our fear, and every present one by our grief, choose rather to condemn the nature of things than our own errors.