graciously; you have then returned the favour--not, indeed, so that
you can think yourself to have repaid it, but so that you can owe
it with a quieter conscience.




BOOK III.

I.


Not to return gratitude for benefits, my AEbutius Liberalis, is
both base in itself, and is thought base by all men; wherefore even
ungrateful men complain of ingratitude, and yet what all condemn is
at the same time rooted in all; and so far do men sometimes run
into the other extreme that some of them become our bitterest
enemies, not merely after receiving benefits from us, but because
they have received them. I cannot deny that some do this out of
sheer badness of nature; but more do so because lapse of time
destroys their remembrance, for time gradually effaces what they
felt vividly at the moment. I remember having had an argument with
you about this class of persons, whom you wished to call forgetful
rather than ungrateful, as if that which caused a man to be
ungrateful was any excuse for his being so, or as if the fact of
this happening to a man prevented his being ungrateful, when we
know that it only happens to ungrateful men. There are many classes
of the ungrateful, as there are of thieves or of homicides, who all
have the same fault, though there is a great variety in its various
forms. The man is ungrateful who denies that he has received a