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 every one 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