war; would you on that account argue that the services of a nurse
were more valuable than the most important undertakings? Yet is not
the nurse as important as the father, since without the benefits
which I have received from each of them alike, I should have been
alike unable to effect anything? If I owe all that I now can do to
my original beginning, I cannot regard my father or my grandfather
as being this original beginning; there always will be a spring
further back, from which the spring next below is derived. Yet no
one will argue that I owe more to unknown and forgotten ancestors
than to my father; though really I do owe them more, if I owe it to
my ancestors that my father begat me.

XXX. "Whatever I have bestowed upon my father," says my opponent,
"however great it may be, yet is less valuable than what my father
has bestowed upon me, because if he had not begotten me, it never
could have existed at all." By this mode of reasoning, if a man has
healed my father when ill, and at the point of death, I shall not
be able to bestow anything upon him equivalent to what I have
received from him; for had my father not been healed, he could not
have begotten me. Yet think whether it be not nearer the truth to
regard all that I can do, and all that I have done, as mine, due to
my own powers and my own will? Consider what the fact of my birth
is in itself; you will see that it is a small matter, the outcome
of which is dubious, and that it may lead equally to good or to
evil; no doubt it is the first step to everything, but because it
is the first, it is not on that account more important than all the
others. Suppose that I have saved my father's life, raised him to
the highest honours, and made him the chief man in his city, that I
have not merely made him illustrious by my own deeds, but have
furnished him himself with an opportunity of performing great