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 openly, with a
loud voice, that neither the attacks of fortune, nor the opinion of the
multitude, nor pain, nor poverty, occasions them any apprehensions; and
that they have everything within themselves, and that there is nothing
whatever which they consider as good but what is within their own
power. Nor can I by any means allow the same person who falls into the
vulgar opinion of good and evil to make use of these expressions, which
can only become a great and exalted man. Struck with which glory, up