Tusculan Disputations

was unable to maintain, for after he had once laid down the position that stripes, torments, tortures, the ruin of one’s country, banishment, the loss of children, had great influence on men’s living miserably and unhappily, he durst not any longer use any high and lofty expressions when he was so low and abject in his opinion. How right he was is not the question; he certainly was consistent. Therefore, I am not for objecting to consequences where the premises are admitted. But this most elegant and learned of all the philosophers is not taken to task very severely when he asserts his three kinds of good, but he is attacked by everyone for that book which he wrote on a happy life, in which book he has many arguments why one who is tortured and racked cannot be happy. For in that book he is supposed to say that a man who is placed on the wheel (that is a kind of torture in use among the Greeks) cannot attain to a completely happy life. He nowhere, indeed, says so absolutely, but what he says amounts to the same thing. Can I, then, find fault with him, after having allowed that pains of the body are evils, that the ruin of a man’s fortunes is an evil, if he should say that every good man is not happy, when all those things which he reckons as evils may befall a good man? The same Theophrastus is found fault with by all the books and schools of the philosophers for commending that sentence in his Callisthenes,

Fortune, not wisdom, rules the life of man.

They say: never did philosopher assert anything so languid. They are right, indeed, in that; but I do not apprehend anything could be more consistent. For if there are so many good things that depend on the body, and so many foreign to it that depend on chance and fortune, is it inconsistent to say that fortune, which governs everything, both what is foreign and what belongs to the body, has greater power than counsel? Or would we rather imitate Epicurus? who is often excellent in many things which he speaks, but quite indifferent how consistent he may be or how much to the purpose he is speaking. He commends spare diet, and in that he speaks as a philosopher, but it is for Socrates or Antisthenes to say so, and not for one who confines all good to pleasure. He denies that anyone can live pleasantly unless he lives honestly, wisely, and justly. Nothing is more dignified than this assertion, nothing more becoming a philosopher, had he not measured this very expression of living honestly, justly, and wisely by pleasure. What could be better than to assert that fortune interferes but little with a wise man? But does he talk thus, who, after he has said that pain is the greatest evil, or the only evil, might himself be afflicted with the sharpest pains all over his body, even at the time he is vaunting himself the most against fortune? And this very thing, too, Metrodorus has said, but in better language: “I have anticipated you, Fortune; I have caught you, and cut off every access, so that you cannot possibly reach me.” This would be excellent in the mouth of Aristo the Chian, or Zeno the Stoic, who held nothing to be an evil but what was base. But for you, Metrodorus, to anticipate the approaches of fortune, who confine all that is good to your bowels and marrow⁠—for you to say so, who define the chief good by a strong constitution of body, and well-assured hope of its continuance⁠—for you to cut off every access of fortune! Why, you may instantly be deprived of that good. Yet the simple are taken with these propositions, and a vast crowd is led away by such sentences to become their followers.

But it is the duty of one who would argue accurately to consider not what is said, but what is said consistently. As in that very opinion which we have adopted in this discussion, namely, that every good man is always happy, it is clear what I mean by good men: I call those both wise and good men who are provided and adorned with every virtue. Let us see, then, who are to be called happy. I imagine, indeed, that those men are to be called so who are possessed of good without any alloy of evil. Nor is there any other notion connected with the word that expresses happiness but an absolute enjoyment of good without any evil. Virtue cannot attain this, if there is anything good besides itself. For a crowd of evils would present themselves, if we were to allow poverty, obscurity, humility, solitude, the loss of friends, acute pains of the body, the loss of health, weakness, blindness, the ruin of one’s country, banishment, slavery, to be evils. For a wise man may be afflicted by all these evils, numerous and important as they are, and many others also may be added, for they are brought on by chance, which may attack a wise man. But if these things are evils, who can maintain that a wise man is always happy when all these evils may light on him at the same time? I therefore do not easily agree with my friend Brutus, nor with our common masters, nor those ancient ones, Aristotle, Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemon, who reckon all that I have mentioned above as evils, and yet they say that a wise man is always happy. Nor can I allow them, because they are charmed with this beautiful and illustrious title, which would very well become Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato, to persuade my mind that strength, health, beauty, riches, honors, power, with the beauty of which they are ravished, are contemptible, and that all those things which are the opposites of these are not to be regarded. Then might they declare