These things needed to be said in order to crush the arrogance of men who are themselves dependent upon Fortune, and to claim for slaves the right of bestowing benefits to the end that it may be claimed also for our sons. For the question is raised whether children can sometimes bestow on their parents greater benefits than they have received from them.
It is granted me that there have been many examples of sons who were greater and more powerful than their parents, and just as freely, too, that they were better men. If this is true, it is quite possible that they bestowed on them better gifts, since they were endowed both with greater good fortune and with better intentions. “However that may be,” you reply, “what a son gives to a father is, in any case, less, because he owes to his father this very power of giving. So a father is never surpassed in the matter of a benefit, for the very benefit in which he is surpassed is really his own.”
But, in the first place, there are some things that derive their origin from others, and yet are greater than their origins; nor is it true that a thing cannot be greater than that from which it begins on the ground that it could not have advanced to its great size unless it had had a beginning. All things exceed by a great degree their origins. Seeds are the causes of all growing things, and yet are the tiniest parts of what they produce. Look at the Rhine, look at the Euphrates, in fact, at all the famous rivers. What are they if you judge of them from what they are at their source? Whatever makes them feared, whatever makes them renowned, has been acquired in their progress. Look at the trunks of trees — the tallest if you are considering their height, the broadest if you are considering their thickness and the reach of their branches; compared with all this, how small a compass the slender thread of the root embraces! Yet take away the root, and there will be no springing up of forests, and the mighty mountains will lack their vesture. The lofty temples of the city rise upon their foundations; yet all that was thrown down to support their whole structure lies out of sight. The same is true in the case of all other things; always their subsequent greatness will conceal their first beginnings. It would not have been possible for me to attain anything unless there had been the preceding benefit from my parents; but it does not follow that whatever I have attained is inferior to that without which I could not have attained it. Unless my nurse had suckled me when I was an infant, I should not have been able to do any of the things that I now perform by brain and hand nor should I have risen to the present distinction and fame that my civil and military labors have earned for me; yet, for all that, surely you will not set more value on the service of my nurse than on my very weighty achievements? But what difference is there, since it is just as true that I should not have been able to advance to my later accomplishments without the benefit from my nurse as without that from my father? But if I am indebted for all that I can now do to the source of my being, reflect that the source of my being is not my father, nor my grandfather, either; for there will always be something farther removed, from which the source of a succeeding source is derived. Yet no one will say that I am more indebted to ancestors that are unknown and have passed from memory than to my father; I am, however, more indebted, if the very fact that my father has begotten me is a debt that he owes to his ancestors.