NOT to return gratitude for benefits is a disgrace, and the whole world counts it as such, Aebutius Liberalis. Therefore even the ungrateful complain of ingratitude, while the vice that all find so distasteful nevertheless continues its hold upon all, and we go so far to the opposite extreme that sometimes, not merely after having received benefits, but because we have received them, we consider the givers our worst enemies. I cannot deny that, while some fall into the vice from a natural perversity, more show it because remembrance disappears with the passing of time for benefits that at first lived fresh in their memory wither as the days go by. On the subject of such persons you and I, I am well aware, have already had a discussion, in which you said that they were, not ungrateful, but forgetful; just as if that which caused a man to be ungrateful could be any excuse for his being so, or as if the fact that a man had this misfortune kept him from being ungrateful, whereas it is only the ungrateful man who has this misfortune.
There are many sorts of ungrateful men, just as there are many sorts of thieves and of murderers — they all show the same sin, but their types the greatest diversity. The man is ungrateful who denies that he has received a benefit, which he has in fact received; he is ungrateful who pretends that he has not received one; he, too, is ungrateful who fails to return one; but the most ungrateful of all is the man who has forgotten a benefit. For the others, even if they do not pay, continue in debt, and reveal at least some trace of the services that they have locked in the depths of their evil hearts. These, it may be, for one reason or another, may some day turn to the expression of gratitude, whether urged to it by shame, or by the sudden impulse toward honorable action that is wont to spring up for a moment even in the hearts of bad men, or perhaps by the call of a favorable opportunity. But there is no possibility of a man’s ever becoming grateful, if he has lost all memory of his benefit. And which of the two would you call the worse — the man whose heart is dead to gratitude for a benefit, or the one whose heart is dead even to the memory of a benefit? Eyes that shrink from the light are weak, those that cannot see are blind; and not to love one’s parents is to be unfilial, not to recognize them is to be mad!