may
laugh at him, but if you in your mind survey the east and the west,
reaching even to the regions separated from us by vast wildernesses, if
you think of all the creatures of the earth, all the riches which the
bounty of nature lavishes, it shows a great spirit to be able to say, as
though you were a god, "All these are mine." Thus it is that he covets
nothing, for there is nothing which is not contained in everything, and
everything is his.

IV. "This," say you, "is the very thing that I wanted! I have caught
you! I shall be glad to see how you will extricate yourself from the
toils into which you have fallen of your own accord. Tell me, if the
wise man possesses everything, how can one give anything to a wise man?
for even what you give him is his already. It is impossible, therefore,
to bestow a benefit upon a wise man, if whatever is given him comes from
his own store; yet you Stoics declare that it is possible to give to
a wise man. I make the same inquiry about friends as well: for you
say that friends own everything in common, and if so, no one can give
anything to his friend, for he gives what his friend owned already in
common with himself."

There is nothing to prevent a thing belonging to a wise man, and yet
being the property of its legal owner. According to law everything in a
state belongs to the king, yet all that property over which the king has
rights of possession is parcelled out among individual owners, and
each separate thing belongs to somebody: and so one can give the king
a house, a slave, or a sum of money without being said to give him what
was his already; for the king has rights over all these things, while
each citizen has the ownership of them. We speak of the country of the
Athenians, or of the Campanians, though the inhabitants divide them
amongst themselves into separate estates; the whole region belongs to
one state or another, but each part of it belongs to its own individual
proprietor; so that we are able to give our lands to the state, although
they are reckoned as belonging to the state, because we and the state
own them in different ways. Can there be any doubt that all the private
savings of a slave belong to his master as well as he himself? yet he
makes his master presents. The slave does not therefore possess nothing,
because if his master chose he might possess nothing; nor does what he
gives of his own free will cease to be a present, because it might have
been wrung f