Attend, therefore, and you will soon understand that I am advancing nothing that your own conviction will reject. For the benefit that is accomplished by an act has been repaid by our gratitude if we give it friendly welcome; the other, which consists of some object, we have not yet returned, but we shall have the desire to return it. Goodwill we have repaid with goodwill; for the object we still owe an object. And so, although we say that he who receives a benefit gladly has repaid it, we, nevertheless, also bid him return some gift similar to the one he received.
Some of the utterances that we Stoics make avoid the ordinary meaning of the terms, and then by a different line of thought are restored to their ordinary meaning. We deny that the wise man can receive injury, yet the man who strikes him with his fist will be sentenced on the charge of doing him an injury; we deny that a fool possesses anything, and yet a man who steals some object from a fool will be punished for theft; we declare that all men are mad, and yet we do not dose all men with hellebore; and to the very men whom we call mad we entrust the right of suffrage and the jurisdiction of judge. So we declare that he who receives a benefit in a kindly spirit has repaid it by gratitude, yet, nevertheless, we leave him in debt — still bound to repay gratitude even after he has repaid it. The aim of this is, not to forbid beneficence, but to encourage us not to be fearful of benefits, not to faint under them as if we were weighed down by an intolerable burden. “Good things,” you exclaim, “have been given to me, my reputation has been protected, my ignominy has been removed, my life has been preserved, and my liberty that is dearer than life. And how shall I ever be able to repay my gratitude? When will there come the day on which I can show to my benefactor my heart?” This is the very day — the day on which he is showing his own heart! Accept the benefit, embrace it, rejoice, not because you are receiving it, but because you are returning it and yet will still be in debt; you will then avoid the risk of the great mishap that some chance may cause you to be ungrateful. No difficult terms will I set before you for fear that you may be discouraged, that you may faint at the prospect of long labor and servitude. I do not put you off — you may pay with what you have! Never will you be grateful if you are not so at this moment. What, then, shall you do? There is no need for you to take up arms — perhaps some day there will be. There is no need for you to traverse the seas — perhaps some day you will set sail even when storm-winds are threatening. Do you wish to return a benefit? Accept it with pleasure; you have repaid it by gratitude — not so fully that you may feel that you have freed yourself from debt, yet so that you may be less concerned about what you still owe!