Yet, after all, he professes to do little more than translate. So conscious is he that it is to Greece that Rome is indebted for all her literature, and so conscious, also, on the part of his countrymen, of what he terms "an arrogant disdain for everything national", that he apologises to his readers for writing for the million in their mother-tongue. Yet he is not content, as he says, to be "a mere interpreter". He thought that by an eclectic process--adopting and rearranging such of the doctrines of his Greek masters as approved themselves to his own judgment--he might make his own work a substitute for theirs. His ambition is to achieve what he might well regard as the hardest of tasks--a popular treatise on philosophy; and he has certainly succeeded. He makes no pretence to originality; all he can do is, as he expresses it, "to array Plato in a Latin dress", and "present this stranger from beyond the seas with the freedom of his native, city". And so this treatise on the Ends of Life--a grave question even to the most careless thinker--is, from the nature of the case, both dramatic and rhetorical. Representatives of the two great schools of philosophy--the Stoics and Epicureans--plead and counter-plead in his pages, each in their turn; and their arguments are based on principles broad and universal enough to be valid even now. For now, as then, men are inevitably separated into two classes--amiable men of ease, who guide their conduct by the rudder-strings of pleasure--who for the most part "leave the world" (as has been finely said) "in the world's debt, having consumed much and produced nothing";[1] or, on the other hand, zealous men of duty, "Who scorn delights and live laborious days", and act according to the dictates of their honour or their conscience. In practice, if not in theory, a man must be either Stoic or Epicurean. [Footnote 1: Lord Derby.]