Cicero (on the Stoics) · 106–43 BCE
Tusculan Disputations 3 ¶30 — Cicero (on the Stoics)
From “On Grief of Mind”
Translation by C. D. Yonge (1853)
Cicero (on the Stoics), Tusculan Disputations 3 ¶30
You have here a representation of a happy life according to Epicurus, in the words of Zeno, so that there is no room for contradiction in any point. What, then? Can the proposing and thinking of such a life make Thyestes’s grief the less, or Aeëtes’s, of whom I spoke above, or Telamon’s, who was driven from his country to penury and banishment? in wonder at whom men exclaimed thus: Is this the man surpassing glory raised? Is this that Telamon so highly praised By wondering Greece, at whose sight, like the sun, All others with diminish’d lustre shone?
Cite this passage
Cicero (on the Stoics), Tusculan Disputations 3 ¶30, tr. C. D. Yonge (1853)
https://whatwouldstoicsdo.com/passage/tusculan-disputations/3.30
Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, tr. C. D. Yonge (1853). Text: Standard Ebooks (CC0). Sources and licences
In plain English
AI-written notesA rhetorical challenge to the Epicurean recipe for happiness: could picturing a pleasant, painless life really comfort people ruined by exile, lost status or family disaster, like the tragic figures named here? The implication is that thoughts of pleasure are too thin to help with real calamity.
Older wording
- “penury”
- — extreme poverty
Themes and situations
- Grief and mourning
- Pleasure and pain
- Exile and loss of home
Quote cards
The opening line of this passage as an image, with its citation — for sharing or keeping.