looks on pain as the greatest of all evils. We must apply, then, for
relief elsewhere, and nowhere better (if we seek for what is most
consistent with itself) than to those who place the chief good in
honesty, and the greatest evil in infamy. You dare not so much as
groan, or discover the least uneasiness in their company, for virtue
itself speaks to you through them.

XX. Will you, when you may observe children at Lacedæmon, and young men
at Olympia, and barbarians in the amphitheatre, receive the severest
wounds, and bear them without once opening their mouths--will you, I
say, if any pain should by chance attack you, cry out like a woman?
Will you not rather bear it with resolution and constancy? and not cry,
It is intolerable; nature cannot bear it! I hear what you say: Boys
bear this because they are led thereto by glory; some bear it through
shame, many through fear, and yet are we afraid that nature cannot bear
what is borne by many, and in such different circumstances? Nature not
only bears it, but challenges it, for there is nothing with her
preferable, nothing which she desires more than credit, and reputation,
and praise, and honor, and glory. I choose here to describe this one
thing under many names, and I have used many that you may have the
clearer idea of it; for what I mean to say is, that whatever is
desirable of itself, proceeding from virtue, or placed in virtue, and
commendable on its own account (which I would rather agree to call the
only good than deny it to be the chief good) is what men should prefer
above all things. And as we declare this to be the case with respect to
honesty, so we speak in the contrary manner of infamy; nothing is so
odious, so detestable, nothing so unworthy of a man. And if you are
thoroughly convinced of this (for, at the beginning of this discourse,
you allowed that there appeared to you more evil in infamy than in
pain), it follows that you ought to have the command over yourself,