*33* VII. 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 dear Cicero, I ask you to assume with me, if you can, that nothing is worth the seeking for its own sake except what is morally right. #Moral Right the only good or the chief good.# But if Cratippus[BE] 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 is no other alternative that seems probable at all.[BF] #Vindication of Panaetius: nothing can be expedient that is not morally right.# *34* In the first place, I must undertake the defence of Panaetius on this point; for he has said not that the truly expedient could under certain circumstances clash with the morally right (for he could not have said that conscientiously[BG]), but only that what _seemed_ expedient could do so. For he often bears witness to the fact that nothing is really expedient that is not at the same time morally right, and nothing morally right that is not at the same time expedient; and he says that no greater curse has ever assailed human life than the doctrine of those who have separated these two conceptions. And so he introduced an apparent, not a real, conflict between them, not to the end that we should under certain circumstances give the expedient preference over the moral, but that, in case they ever should get in each other's way, we might decide between them without uncertainty. This part, therefore, which was passed over by Panaetius, I will carry to completion without any auxiliaries, but fighting my own battle, as the saying is. For of all that has been worked out on this line since the time of Panaetius, nothing that has come into my hands is at all satisfactory to me. [BE] 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."