ad
replied that he wished to get some honey from Hymettus, certainly he would
have been thought to have undertaken such an enterprise for an
insufficient cause. And in like manner, if we were to say that a wise man,
furnished and provided with numerous and important virtues and
accomplishments, not, indeed, travelling like him over sea on foot, and
over mountains with his fleet, but embracing the whole heaven, all the
earth, and the universal sea with his mind, had nothing in view but
pleasure, we might say that he, too, was taking a great deal of trouble
for a little honey.

Believe me, Torquatus, we were born for more lofty and noble ends; and you
may see this, not only by considering the parts of the mind, in which
there is the recollection of a countless number of things, (and from
thence proceed infinite conjectures as to the consequences of them, not
very far differing from divination; there is also in them shame, which is
the regulator of desire, and the faithful guardianship of justice, so
necessary to human society, and a firm enduring contempt for pain and
death, shown in the enduring of labours and the encountering of dangers.)
All these things, I say, are in the mind. But I would have you consider
also the limbs and the senses, which, like the other parts of the body,
will appear to you to be not only the companions of the virtues, but also
their slaves. What will you say, if many things in the body itself appear
to deserve to be preferred to pleasure? such as strength, health,
activity, beauty? And if this is the case, how many qualities of the mind
will likewise seem so? For in the mind, the old philosophers--those most
learned men--thought that there was something heavenly and divine. But if
the chief good consisted in pleasure, as you say, then it would be natural
that we should wish to live day and night in the midst of pleasure,
without any interval or interruption, while all our senses were, as it
were, steeped in and influenced wholly by pleasure. But who is there, who
is worthy of the name of a man, who would like to spend even the whole of
one day in that kind of pleasure? The Cyrenaic philosophers, indeed, would
not object. Your sect is more modest in this respect, though their's is
perhaps the more sincere.

However, let us contemplate with our minds, not, indeed, these most
important arts, which are so valuable, that those who were ignorant of
them were accounted useless by our ancestors; but I