happy, however sage he be? Such a state, of bliss self-contained, is
for the Gods; men, because of the less noble part subjoined in them,
must needs seek happiness throughout all their being and not merely in
some one part; if the one constituent be troubled, the other,
answering to its associate's distress, must perforce suffer
hindrance in its own activity. There is nothing but to cut away the
body or the body's sensitive life and so secure that self-contained
unity essential to happiness."

    6. Now if happiness did indeed require freedom from pain,
sickness, misfortune, disaster, it would be utterly denied to anyone
confronted by such trials: but if it lies in the fruition of the
Authentic Good, why turn away from this Term and look to means,
imagining that to be happy a man must need a variety of things none of
which enter into happiness? If, in fact, felicity were made up by
heaping together all that is at once desirable and necessary we must
bid for these also. But if the Term must be one and not many; if in
other words our quest is of a Term and not of Terms; that only can
be elected which is ultimate and noblest, that which calls to the
tenderest longings of the soul.

    The quest and will of the Soul are not pointed directly towards
freedom from this sphere: the reason which disciplines away our
concern about this life has no fundamental quarrel with things of this
order; it merely resents their interference; sometimes, even, it
must seek them; essentially all the aspiration is not so much away
from evil as towards the Soul's own highest and noblest: this
attained, all is won and there is rest- and this is the veritably
willed state of life.

    There can be no such thing as "willing" the acquirement of
necessaries, if Will is to be taken in its strict sense, and not
misapplied to the mere recognition of need.

    It is certain that we shrink from the unpleasant, and such
shrinking is assuredly not what we should have willed; to have no
occasion for any such shrinking would be much nearer to our taste; but
the things we seek tell the story as soon as they are ours. For
instance, health and freedom from pain; which of these has any great
charm? As long as we possess them, we set no store upon them.

    Anything which, present, has no charm and adds nothing to
happiness, which when lacking is desired because of the presence of an
annoying opposite, may reasonably be called a necessity but not a
Good.

    Such things can never make part of our final object: our Term must
be such that though these pleasanter conditions be absent and their
contraries present, it shall remain, still, intact.

    7. Then why are these conditions sought and their contraries
repelled by the man established in happiness?

    Here is our answer:

    These more pleasant conditions cannot, it is true, add any
particle towards the Sage's felicity: but they do serve towards the
integrity of his being, while the presence of the contraries tends
against his Being or complicates the Term: it is not that the Sage can
be so easily deprived of the Term achieved but simply that he that
holds the highest good desires to have that alone, not something
else at the same time, something which, though it cannot banish the
Good by its incoming, does yet take place by its side.

    In any case if the man that has attained felicity meets some
turn of fortune that he would not have chosen, there is not the
slightest lessening of his happiness for that. If there were, his
felicity would be veering or falling from day to day; the death of a
child would bring him down, or the loss of some trivial possession.
No: a thousand mischances and disappointments may befall him and leave
him still in the tranquil possession of the Term.

    But, they cry, great disasters, not the petty daily chances!

    What human thing, then, is great, so as not to be despised by
one who has mounted above all we know here, and is bound now no longer
to anything below?

    If the Sage thinks all fortunate events, however momentous, to
be no great matter- kingdom and the rule over cities and peoples,
colonisations and the founding of states, even though all be his own
handiwork- how can he take any great account of the vacillations of
power or the ruin of his fatherland? Certainly if he thought any
such event a great disaster, or any disaster at all, he must be of a
very strange way of thinking. One that sets great store by wood and
stones, or... Zeus... by mortality among mortals cannot yet be the
Sage, whose estimate of death, we hold, must be that it is better than
life in the body.

    But suppose that he himself is offered a victim in sacrifice?

    Can he think it an evil to die beside the altars?

    But if he go unburied?

    Wheresoever it lie, under earth or over earth, his body will
always rot.

    But if he has been hidden away, not with costly ceremony but in an
unnamed grave, not counted worthy of a towering monument?