Opening Stoic Paradoxes — Cicero in Plato Scroll…
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Cicero · C. R. Edmonds
Translated by C. R. Edmonds. Six short rhetorical essays defending the celebrated “paradoxes” of the Stoics — that virtue is the only good, that the wise man alone is free, and their kin. I have often observed, O Brutus, that your uncle Cato, when he delivered his opinion in the senate, was accustomed to handle important points of philosophy, inconsistent with popular and forensic usage; but that yet, in speaking, he managed them so that even these seemed to the people worthy of approbation; which was so much the greater excellency in him, than either in you or in me, because we are more conversant in that philosophy which has produced a copiousness of expression, and in which those things are propounded which do not widely differ from the popular opinion. But Cato, in my opinion a complete Stoic, both holds those notions which certainly do not approve themselves to the common people; …
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