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[33]
7. It is subjects of this sort that I believe
Panaetius would have followed up, had not some
accident or business interfered with his design. For
the elucidation of these very questions there are in
his former books rules in plenty, from which one
can learn what should be avoided because of its immorality and what does not have to be avoided for
the reason that it is not immoral at all.
We are now putting the capstone, as it were, upon
our structure, which is unfinished, to be sure, but still
almost completed; and, as mathematicians make a
practice of not demonstrating every proposition, but
require that certain axioms be assumed as true, in
order more easily to explain their meaning, so, my
[p. 301]
dear Cicero, I ask you to assume with me, if you can, 1
that nothing is worth the seeking for its own sake
except what is morally right. But if Cratippus2 does
not permit this assumption, you will still grant this
at least—that what is morally right is the object
most worth the seeking for its own sake. Either
alternative is sufficient for my purposes; first the one
and then the other seems to me the more probable;
and, besides these, there no other alternative that
seems probable at all.3
1 Moral Right the only good or the chief good.
2 As a Peripatetic, Cratippus insisted that there was natural good as well as moral good; thus health, honour, etc., were good and worth seeking for their own sake, though in less degree than virtue. But the Stoics (and Cicero is now speaking as a Stoic) called all those other blessings not “good” nor “worth seeking for their own sake,” but “indifferent.”
3 With this he waves aside, without even the honour of mentioning them, the Epicureans, Cyrenaics, etc.
M. Tullius Cicero. De Officiis. With An English Translation. Walter Miller. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1913.
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