ercise themselves in
these indifferent things and such as pertain nothing to them, crying
out with a loud voice that there is only one thing good, specious, and
honorable, the storing up of these things and the communication of them,
and that it is not meet for those to live who have them not, but to
despatch out of the way and famish themselves, bidding a long farewell
to virtue.

They esteem indeed Theognis to have been a man altogether of a base
and abject spirit, for saying, as one overfearful in regard to poverty,
which is an indifferent thing:--

From poverty to fly, into the deep
Throw thyself, Cyrnus, or from rocks so steep.

Yet they themselves exhort the same thing in prose, and affirm that a
man, to free himself from some great disease or exceedingly acute pain,
if he have not at hand sword or hemlock, ought to leap into the sea or
throw himself headlong from a precipice; neither of which is hurtful, or
evil, or incommodious, or makes them who fall into it miserable.

With what, then, says he, shall I begin? And what shall I take for the
principle of duty and matter of virtue, leaving Nature and that which is
according to Nature?

With what, O good sir, do Aristotle and Theophrastus begin? What
beginnings do Xenocrates and Polemo take? Does not also Zeno follow
these, who hold Nature and that which is according to Nature to be the
elements of happiness? But they indeed persisted in these things, as
desirable, good, and profitable; and joining to them virtue, which
employs them and uses every one of them according to its property,
thought to complete and consummate a perfect life and one every way
absolute, producing that concord which is truly suitable and consonant
to Nature. For these men did not run into confusion, like those who leap
up from the ground and presently fall down again upon it, terming
the same things acceptable and not desirable, proper and not good,
unprofitable and yet useful, nothing to us and yet the principles of
duties. But their life was such as their speech, and they exhibited
actions suitable and consonant to their sayings. But they who are of
the Stoic sect--not unlike to that woman in Archilochus, who deceitfully
carried in one hand water, in the other fire--by some doctrines draw
Nature to them, and by others drive her from them. Or rather, by their
deeds and actions they embrace those things which are according to
Nature, as good and desirable, but in words and s