This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
[77]
When I was a boy, I used to hear my father tell
that Gaius Fimbria, an ex-consul, was judge in a
case of Marcus Lutatius Pinthia, a Roman knight of
irreproachable character. On that occasion Pinthia
had laid a wager to be forfeited “if he did not prove
in court that he was a good man.” Fimbria declared that he would never render a decision in such
a case, for fear that he might either rob a reputable
man of his good name, if he decided against him, or
be thought to have pronounced someone a good
man, when such a character is, as he said, established by the performance of countless duties and
the possession of praiseworthy qualities without
number.
To this type of good man, then, known not only1
to a Socrates but even to a Fimbria, nothing can
possibly seem expedient that is not morally right.
Such a man, therefore, will never venture to think
—to say nothing of doing—anything that he would
not dare openly to proclaim. Is it not a shame
that philosophers should be in doubt about moral
questions on which even peasants have no doubts
at all? For it is with peasants that the proverb,
already trite with age, originated: when they
praise a man's honour and honesty, they say, “He
is a man with whom you can safely play at odd
and even2 in the dark.” What is the point of
the proverb but this—that what is not proper
brings no advantage, even if you can gain your
[p. 351]
end without anyone's being able to convict you of
wrong?
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.