What pain, then, attends Epicurus, when he says that very thing, that pain is the greatest evil! And yet nothing can be a greater disgrace to a philosopher than to talk thus.

Therefore, you allowed enough when you admitted that infamy appeared to you to be a greater evil than pain.
And if you abide by this admission, you will see how far pain should be resisted; and that our inquiry should be not so much whether pain be an evil, as how the mind may be fortified for resisting it.

The Stoics infer from some petty quibbling arguments that it is no evil, as if the dispute were about a word, and not about the thing itself.

Why do you impose upon me, Zeno?
For when you deny what appears very dreadful to me to be an evil, I am deceived, and am at a loss to know why that which appears to me to be a most miserable thing should be no evil.

The answer is, that nothing is an evil but what is base and vicious.