I seem to you now to have been false to the claim that I made at the beginning. For you say that I am far from doing anything worthwhile — nay, that, in honest truth, I am wasting all my trouble. But wait, and you will soon say this with more truth after I have led you into such obscurities that, even when you have found your way out, you will have accomplished nothing more than escape from difficulties into which you need never have plunged. For what is the good of laboriously untying knots which you yourself have made in order that you might untie them? But, just as it provides amusement and sport when certain objects are knotted up in such a way that an unskilled person has difficulty in unloosing them, while they yield without any trouble to the one who tied the knots because he knows the loops and the snarls, and nevertheless the problem affords some pleasure, for it tests sharpness of wits and provokes mental effort, so these matters, which seem cunning and tricky, banish indifference and sloth from our minds, which, at one time, should find a level field in which to wander, and, at another, should encounter a dark and uneven stretch, through which we must merely creep, and place every footstep with care.
Some argue that no man is ungrateful, and support the statement as follows: “A benefit is that which does good; but, according to you Stoics, no one is able to do good to a bad man; therefore a bad man does not receive a benefit, [therefore he] is [not]9 ungrateful.
“Furthermore, you say, a benefit is an honorable and commendable act; but no honorable and commendable act has place in a bad man, therefore neither has a benefit; and, if he cannot receive one, neither ought he to return one, and, therefore, he does not become ungrateful.
“Furthermore, according to you, a good man always acts rightly; but, if he always acts rightly, he cannot be ungrateful. No one is able to give a benefit to a bad man. A good man returns a benefit, a bad man does not receive one; and, if this is so, neither is any good man, nor any bad man, ungrateful. So in the whole realm of Nature, there is no such thing as an ungrateful man, and the term is an empty one.”
According to us Stoics there is only one sort of good, the honorable. A bad man cannot possibly attain this; for he will cease to be bad if virtue has entered into him; but, so long as he is bad, no one is able to give him a benefit, because evils and goods are opposites, and cannot unite. Therefore, no one can do good to him, for whatever good reaches him is vitiated by his wrong use of it. Just as the stomach, when it is impaired by disease, gathers bile, and, changing all the food that it receives, turns every sort of sustenance into a source of pain, so, in the case of the perverse mind, whatever you entrust to it becomes to it a burden and a source of disaster and wretchedness. And so those who are most prosperous and wealthy are beset with most trouble, and the more property they have to cause them unrest, the less they find themselves. Nothing, therefore, which would be to their good can possibly come to bad men — nay, nothing which would not do them harm. For whatever good falls to their lot they change into their own evil nature, and seemingly attractive gifts that would be beneficial if they were given to a better man become baneful to them. Nor, therefore, are they able to give a benefit, since no one is able to give what he does not have; such a man lacks the desire to benefit.