be repaid: now a loan is not a desirable thing in itself." When we
speak of a loan, we make use of a figure, or comparison, just as we
speak of law as; the standard of right and wrong, although a
standard is not a thing to be desired for its own sake. I have
adopted this phrase in order to illustrate my subject: when I speak
of a loan, I must be understood to mean something resembling a
loan. Do you wish to know how it differs from one? I add the words
"which cannot be repaid," whereas every loan both can and ought to
be repaid. It is so far from being right to bestow a benefit for
one's own advantage, that often, as I have explained, it is one's
duty to bestow it when it involves one's own loss and risk: for
instance, if I assist a man when beset by robbers, so that he gets
away from them safely, or help some victim of power, and bring upon
myself the party spite of a body of influential men, very, probably
incurring myself the same disgrace from which I saved him, although
I might have taken the other side, and looked on with safety at
struggles with which I have nothing to do: if I were to give bail
for one who has been condemned, and when my friend's goods were
advertised for sale I were to give a bond to the effect that I
would make restitution to the creditors, if, in order to save a
proscribed person I myself run the risk of being proscribed. No
one, when about to buy a villa at Tusculum or Tibur, for a summer
retreat, because of the health of the locality, considers how many
years' purchase he gives for it; this must be looked to by the man
who makes a profit by it. The same is true with benefits; when you
ask what return I get for them, I answer, the consciousness of a
good action. "What return does one get for benefits?" Pray tell me
what return one gets for righteousness, innocence, magnanimity,
chastity, temperance? If you wish for anything beyond these
virtues, you do not wish for the virtues themselves. For what does