Tusculan Disputations 2 ¶37 — Cicero (on the Stoics)

Cicero (on the Stoics), Tusculan Disputations 2 ¶37

There is some difference between labor and pain. They border upon one another, but still there is a certain difference between them. Labor is a certain exercise of the mind or body, in some employment or undertaking of serious trouble and importance; but pain is a sharp motion in the body, disagreeable to our senses. Both these feelings, the Greeks, whose language is more copious than ours, express by the common name of Πόνος. Therefore they call industrious men painstaking, or, rather, fond of labor; we, more conveniently, call them laborious, for laboring is one thing, and enduring pain another. You see, O Greece! your barrenness of words sometimes, though you think you are always so rich in them. I say, then, that there is a difference between laboring and being in pain. When Caius Marius had an operation performed for a swelling in his thigh, he felt pain; when he headed his troops in a very hot season, he labored. Yet these two feelings bear some resemblance to one another, for the accustoming ourselves to labor makes the endurance of pain more easy to us. And it was because they were influenced by this reason that the founders of the Grecian form of government provided that the bodies of their youth should be strengthened by labor—which custom the Spartans transferred even to their women, who in other cities lived more delicately, keeping within the walls of their houses; but it was otherwise with the Spartans: The Spartan women, with a manly air, Fatigues and dangers with their husbands share; They in fantastic sports have no delight, Partners with them in exercise and fight. And in these laborious exercises pain interferes sometimes. They are thrown down, receive blows, have bad falls, and are bruised, and the labor itself produces a sort of callousness to pain.