EPISTLE LXXXVII.
things are not goods.” 36. “But,” says the objector, “by such reasoning, things which are the gift of Fortune will not even be advantages.” No, advantages and goods stand each in a different situation. An advantage is that which contains more of usefulness than of annoyance. But a good ought to be unmixed and with no element in it of harmfulness. A thing is not good if it contains more benefit than injury, but only if it contains nothing but benefit. 37. Besides, advantages may be predicated of animals, of men who are less than perfect, and of fools. Hence the advantageous may have an element of disadvantage mingled with it, but the word “advantageous” is used of the compound because it is judged by its predominant element. The good, however, can be predicated of the wise man alone; it is bound to be without alloy,
38. Be of good cheer; there is only one knot[1] left for you to untangle, though it is a knot for a Hercules: “Good does not result from evil. But riches result from numerous cases of poverty; therefore, riches are not a good.” This syllogism is not recognized by our school, but the Peripatetics both concoct it and give its solution. Posidonius, however, remarks that this fallacy, which has been bandied about among all the schools of dialectic, is refuted by Antipater[2] as follows: 39. “The word ‘poverty’ is used to denote, not the possession[3] of something, but the non-possession or, as the ancients have put it, deprivation, (for the Greeks use the phrase ‘by deprivation,’ meaning ‘negatively’). ‘Poverty’ states, not what a man has, but what he has not. Consequently there can be no fulness resulting from a multitude of voids; many positive things, and not many deficiencies, make up riches.
- ↑ The “knot of Hercules” is associated with the caduceus (twining serpents) in Macrob. Sat. i. 19. 16; and in Pliny, N. H. xxviii. 63, it has magic properties in the binding up of wounds.
- ↑ Frag. 54 von Arnim.
- ↑ Per possessionem translates the Greek καθ᾽ ἕξιν, as per orbationem (or detractionem) translates κατὰ στέρησιν.
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