ing
time'." Wherefore also they punish those who do these things unskilfully
and faultily; for that they were commanded to do them well, and they
have done them ill. If therefore a wise man commands his servant to say
or do something, and punishes him for doing it unseasonably or not as he
ought, is it not manifest that he commanded him to do a good action and
not an indifferent one? But if wise men command wicked ones indifferent
things, what hinders but the commands of the law may be also such?
Moreover, the impulse (called [Greek omitted]) is, according to him, the
reason of a man commanding him to do something, as he has written in
his book of the law. Is not therefore also the aversion (called [Greek
omitted]) a prohibiting reason, and a disinclination, a disinclination
agreeable to reason? Caution therefore is also reason prohibiting a w
cautious is proper only to the wise, and not to the wicked. If, then,
the reason of a wise man is one thing and the law another, wise men
have caution contrary to the law; but if the law is nothing else but the
reason of a wise man, the law is found to forbid wise men the doing of
those things of which they are cautious.

Chrysippus says, that nothing is profitable to the wicked, that the
wicked have neither use nor need of anything. Having said this in his
First Book of Good Deeds, he says again, that both commodiousness and
grace pertain to mean or indifferent things, none of which according to
them, is profitable. In the same place he affirms, that there is nothing
proper, nothing convenient for a vicious man, in these words: "On the
same principle we declare that there is nothing foreign or strange to
the good man, and nothing proper or rightfully belonging to the bad man,
since the one is good and the other bad." Why, then, does he break our
heads, writing particularly in every one of his books, as well natural
as moral, that as soon as we are born we are appropriated to ourselves,
our parts, and our offspring? And why in his First Book of Justice does
he say that the very brutes, proportionably to the necessity of
their young, are appropriated to them, except fishes, whose young are
nourished by themselves? For neither have they sense who have
nothing sensible, nor they appropriation who have nothing proper; for
appropriation seems to be the sense and perception of what is proper.

And this opinion is consequent to their principal ones. It is moreover
manifest that Chrysipp