perfect good are four in number: justice, manly courage, temperance, and knowledge; for in these goods all beautiful actions have their accomplishment. And analogously, there are also four species of the disgraceful: injustice, and cowardice, and intemperance, and folly. And the honourable is predicated in one sense, as making those who are possessed of it worthy of all praise; and in a second sense, it is used of what is well adapted by nature for its proper work; and in another sense, when it expresses that which adorns a man, as when we say that the wise man alone is good and honourable.
The Stoics also say, that the beautiful is the only good, as Hecaton says, in the third book of his treatise on Goods, and Chrysippus asserts the same principle in his essays on the Beautiful. And they say that this is virtue, and that which partakes of virtue; and this assertion is equal to the other, that everything good is beautiful, and that the good is an equivalent term to the beautiful, inasmuch as the one thing is exactly equal to the other. For since it is good, it is beautiful; and it is beautiful, therefore, it is good.
LX. But it seems that all goods are equal, and that every good is to be desired in the highest degree, and that it admits of no relaxation, and of no extension. Moreover, they divide all existing things into good, bad, and indifferent. The good are the virtues, prudence, justice, manly courage, temperance, and the rest of the like qualities. The bad are the contraries, folly, injustice, and the like. Those are indifferent which are neither beneficial nor injurious, such as life, health, pleasure, beauty, strength, riches, a good reputation, nobility of birth; and their contraries, death, disease, labour, disgrace, weakness, poverty, a bad reputation, baseness of birth, and the like; as Hecaton lays it down in the seventh book of his treatise on the Chief Good; and he is