consulship which is ready for you? And can you follow these principles, which, when by yourself, or in conversation with your dearest friends, you do not dare to profess and avow openly? But you have those maxims constantly in your mouth which the Peripatetics and Stoics profess. In the courts of justice and in the senate you speak of duty, equity, dignity, good faith, uprightness, honourable actions, conduct worthy of power, worthy of the Roman people; you talk of encountering every imaginable danger in the cause of the republic—of dying for one’s country. When you speak in this manner we are all amazed, like a pack of blockheads, and you are laughing in your sleeve: for, among all those high-sounding and admirable expressions, pleasure has no place, not only that pleasure which you say consists in motion, and which all men, whether living in cities or in the country, all men, in short, who speak Latin, call pleasure, but even that stationary pleasure, which no one but your sect calls pleasure at all. XXIV. Take care lest you find yourselves obliged to use our language, though adhering to your own opinions. But if you were to put on a feigned countenance or gait, with the object of appearing more dignified, you would not then be like yourself; and yet are you to use fictitious language, and to say things which you do not think, or, as you have one dress to wear at home, and another in which you appear in court, are you to disguise your opinions in a similar manner, so as to make a parade with your countenance, while you are keeping the truth hidden within? Consider, I intreat you, whether this is proper. My opinion is that those are genuine sentiments which are honourable, which are praiseworthy, which are creditable; which a man is not ashamed to avow in the senate, before the people, in every company and every assembly, so that he will be ashamed to think what he is ashamed to say.