and adopted all his doctrines.
XII. Now Theodorus utterly discarded all previous opinions about the Gods: and we have met with a book of his which is entitled, On Gods, which is not to be despised; and it is from that that they say that Epicurus derived the principal portions of his sentiments. But Theodorus had been a pupil of Anniceris, and of Dionysius the Dialectician, as Antisthenes tells us in his Successions of Philosophers.
XIII. He considered joy and grief as the chief goods: and that the former resulted from knowledge, and the latter from ignorance. And he called prudence and justice goods: the contrary qualities evils, and pleasure and pain something intermediate. He discarded friendship from his system, because it could not exist either in foolish men or in wise men. For that, in the case of the former, friendship was at an end the moment that the advantage to be derived from it was out of sight. And that wise men were sufficient for themselves, and so had no need of friends. He used also to say that it was reasonable for a good man not to expose himself to danger for the sake of his country, for that he ought not to discard his own prudence for the sake of benefiting those who had none. And he said that a wise man’s country was the World. He allowed that a wise man might steal, and commit adultery and sacrilege, at proper seasons: for that none of these actions were disgraceful by nature, if one only put out of sight the common opinion about them, which owes its existence to the consent of fools. And he said that the wise man would indulge his passions openly, without any regard to circumstances: on which principle he used to ask the following questions: “Is a woman who is well instructed in literature of use just in proportion to the amount