domestic animal, or of a wild beast?

12. What kind of things those are which appear good to the many, we may
learn even from this. For if any man should conceive certain things as
being really good, such as prudence, temperance, justice, fortitude, he
would not after having first conceived these endure to listen to anything
which should not be in harmony with what is really good. But if a man has
first conceived as good the things which appear to the many to be good,
he will listen and readily receive as very applicable that which was said
by the comic writer. Thus even the many perceive the difference. For were
it not so, this saying would not offend and would not be rejected [in the
first case], while we receive it when it is said of wealth, and of the
means which further luxury and fame, as said fitly and wittily. Go on
then and ask if we should value and think those things to be good, to
which after their first conception in the mind the words of the comic
writer might be aptly applied,--that he who has them, through pure
abundance has not a place to ease himself in.

13. I am composed of the formal and the material; and neither of them
will perish into non-existence, as neither of them came into existence
out of non-existence. Every part of me then will be reduced by change
into some part of the universe, and that again will change into another
part of the universe, and so on forever. And by consequence of such a
change I too exist, and those who begot me, and so on forever in the
other direction. For nothing hinders us from saying so, even if the
universe is administered according to definite periods [of revolution].

14. Reason and the reasoning art [philosophy] are powers which are
sufficient for themselves and for their own works. They move then from a
first principle which is their own, and they make their way to the end