Tusculan Disputations 5 ¶60 — Cicero (on the Stoics)

Cicero (on the Stoics), Tusculan Disputations 5 ¶60

For even as trading is said to be lucrative, and farming advantageous, not because the one never meets with any loss, nor the other with any damage from the inclemency of the weather, but because they succeed in general; so life may be properly called happy, not from its being entirely made up of good things, but because it abounds with these to a great and considerable degree. By this way of reasoning, then, a happy life may attend virtue even to the moment of execution; nay, may descend with her into Phalaris’s bull, according to Aristotle, Xenocrates, Speusippus, Polemon, and will not be gained over by any allurements to forsake her. Of the same opinion will Calliphon and Diodorus be, for they are both of them such friends to virtue as to think that all things should be discarded and far removed that are incompatible with it. The rest seem to be more hampered with these doctrines, but yet they get clear of them, such as Epicurus, Hieronymus, and whoever else thinks it worth while to defend the deserted Carneades. For there is not one of them who does not think the mind to be judge of those goods, and able sufficiently to instruct him how to despise what has the appearance only of good or evil. For what seems to you to be the case with Epicurus is the case also with Hieronymus and Carneades, and, indeed, with all the rest of them, for who is there who is not sufficiently prepared against death and pain? I will begin, with your leave, with him whom we call soft and voluptuous. What? does he seem to you to be afraid of death or pain when he calls the day of his death happy, and who, when he is afflicted by the greatest pains, silences them all by recollecting arguments of his own discovering? And this is not done in such a manner as to give room for imagining that he talks thus wildly from some sudden impulse, but his opinion of death is that on the dissolution of the animal all sense is lost, and what is deprived of sense is, as he thinks, what we have no concern at all with. And as to pain, too, he has certain rules to follow then: if it be great, the comfort is that it must be short; if it be of long continuance, then it must be supportable. What, then? Do those grandiloquent gentlemen state anything better than Epicurus in opposition to these two things which distress us the most? And as to other things, do not Epicurus and the rest of the philosophers seem sufficiently prepared? Who is there who does not dread poverty? And yet no true philosopher ever can dread it.