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With a view to undertaking more easily and more eagerly those labors which we are to endure for the sake of virtue and nobility, he said it is useful to have reflected on the following: how much some men labor because of base desires, as those who love without restraint; how much others endure for the sake of profit; and again how much some suffer in their pursuit of reputation. And yet all these endure every hardship of their own free will. Is it not then a strange thing that these men should submit to such sufferings for the sake of nothing noble, while we, for the sake of nobility and to escape the vice that ruins our life, and to acquire virtue, which is the provider of all good things, should not readily undertake every labor? Indeed, one could not even say how much better it is, instead of laboring to obtain another man's wife, to labor so as to discipline one's own desires; instead of suffering hardship over money, to train oneself to need little; instead of taking trouble over reputation, to take pains not to be a hunter of reputation; instead of seeking how to harm the man one envies, to consider how to envy no one; and instead of being a slave to certain so-called friends, as flatterers are, to suffer hardship in order to acquire true friends. In general, since labor is necessary for all human beings, both for those who reach after better things and for those who reach after worse, it is most absurd that those who pursue the better things should not be far more eager to labor than those whose labors hold out but small hopes. But acrobats, indeed, undertake such difficult feats and risk their very lives, some turning somersaults over swords, some walking suspended on ropes, some flying through the air like birds, for whom a slip is death. And they do all this for the sake of a paltry fee; shall we then not bear to suffer hardship for the sake of complete happiness? For there is no other end of becoming good than to be happy and to live blessedly for the rest of one's life. And one might reasonably consider also what the behavior of certain animals is like, which is well able to shame us into being lovers of labor. Quails and cocks, at any rate, though they have no understanding of virtue as man does, nor any knowledge of the noble and the just, nor labor for anything of that kind, nevertheless, when they fight against one another and are maimed, they endure it and hold out to the death, so that the one may not be defeated by the other. How much more fitting, then, is it that we should bear up and hold out, whenever we know that we are suffering hardship for the sake of something noble, whether to help friends or to benefit our city, or to fight in defense of wives or children, and, greatest and most important of all, so that we may be good and just and self-controlled — which comes to no one apart from labors. From this it occurs to me to say that the man who is unwilling to labor all but condemns himself as unworthy of any good thing, since all good things we acquire by labor. These things and others like them he said on that occasion, rousing and urging on those present to despise labor.