enjoyment, and pain is one of those stern facts before which all theories are powerless.  Again, by their fondness for paradox, they reduce all offences to the same dead level.  It is, in their eyes, as impious to beat a slave as to beat a parent:  because, as they say, “nothing can be more virtuous than virtue,—­nothing more vicious than vice”.  And lastly, this stubbornness of opinion affects their personal character.  They too often degenerate into austere critics and bitter partisans, and go far to banish from among us love, friendship, gratitude, and all the fair humanities of life.

The fifth book carries us back some twenty years, when we find Cicero once more at Athens, taking his afternoon walk among the deserted groves of the Academy.  With him are his brother Quintus, his cousin Lucius, and his friends Piso and Atticus.  The scene, with its historic associations, irresistibly carries their minds back to those illustrious spirits who had once made the place their own.  Among these trees Plato himself had walked; under the shadow of that Porch Zeno had lectured to his disciples;[1] yonder Quintus points out the “white peak of Colonus”, described by Sophocles in “those sweetest lines;” while glistening on the horizon were the waves of the Phaleric harbour, which Demosthenes, Cicero’s own great prototype, had outvoiced with the thunder of his declamation.  So countless, indeed, are the memories of the past called up by the genius of the place, that (as one of the friends remarks) “wherever we plant our feet, we tread upon some history”.  Then Piso, speaking at Cicero’s request, begs his friends to turn from the degenerate thinkers of their own day to those giants of philosophy, from whose writings all liberal learning, all history, and all elegance of language may be derived.  More than all, they should turn to the leader of the Peripatetics, Aristotle, who seemed (like Lord Bacon after him) to have taken all knowledge as his portion.  From these, if from no other source, we may learn the secret of a happy life.  But first we must settle what this ‘chief good’ is—­this end and object of our efforts—­and not be carried to and fro, like ships without a steersman, by every blast of doctrine.

[Footnote 1:  The Stoics took their name from the ‘stoa’, or portico in the Academy, where they sat at lecture, as the Peripatetics (the school of Aristotle) from the little knot of listeners who followed their master as he walked.  Epicurus’s school were known as the philosophers of ‘the Garden’, from the place where he taught.  The ‘Old Academy’ were the disciples of Plato; the ‘New Academy’ (to whose tenets Cicero inclined) revived the great principle of Socrates—­of affirming nothing.]

If Epicurus was wrong in placing Happiness

  “In corporal pleasure and in careless ease”,

no less wrong are they who say that “honour” requires pleasure to be added to it, since they thus make honour itself dishonourable.  And again, to say with others that happiness is tranquillity of mind, is simply to beg the question.