SOURCE: Lorenzo Valla, "Book III," in On Pleasure (De voluptate), translated by A. Kent and Maristella Lorch, Abaris Books, Inc., 1977, pp. 228-327.

Valla, an Italian intellectual, served as the Librarian of the Vatican. His Devero bono, or On Pleasure, takes the form of a letter in which the writer, who identifies himself as an Epicurean, refutes the arguments of a friend who advocates stoicism. The excerpts that follow exemplify the speaker's stance on Epicureanism.'

I believe that if this dispute about the comparative worths of pleasure and virtue should come to the vote of the people, that is, of the world (for this is a worldly contest), and if the issue were whether the primacy in wisdom should be awarded to either the Epicureans or the Stoics, then the vote for our side would be so large that you would seem to have been not only rejected...