But this most elegant and learned of all the philosophers is not taken to task very severely when he asserts his three kinds of good; but he is attacked by every one for that book which he wrote on a happy life, in which book he has many arguments why one who is tortured and racked cannot be happy.

For in that book he is supposed to say that a man who is placed on the wheel (that is a kind of torture in use among the Greeks) cannot attain to a completely happy life.

He nowhere, indeed, says so absolutely; but what he says amounts to the same thing.

Can I, then, find fault with him, after having allowed that pains of the body are evils, that the ruin of a man's fortunes is an evil, if he should say that every good man is not happy, when all those things which he reckons as evils may befall a good man?
The same Theophrastus is found fault with by all the books and schools of the philosophers for commending that sentence in his Callisthenes, Fortune, not wisdom, rules the life of man.
They say never did philosopher assert anything so languid.

They are right, indeed, in that; but I do not apprehend anything could be more consistent, for if there are so many good things that depend on the body, and so many foreign to it that depend on chance and fortune, is it inconsistent to say that fortune, which governs everything, both what is foreign and what belongs to the body, has greater power than counsel.