But, though this is so, still even a bad man is able to receive certain things that resemble benefits, and he will be ungrateful if he does not return them. There are goods of the mind, goods of the body, and goods of fortune. The fool and the bad man are debarred from the goods of the mind; but he is admitted to the others — these he can receive and ought to return, and, if he does not return them, he is ungrateful. And ours is not the only school that holds this doctrine. The Peripatetics also, who widely extend the bounds of human happiness, say that trifling benefits come even to the bad, and that he who does not return such is ungrateful. We, therefore, do not agree that things that will not make the mind better are benefits; nevertheless we do not deny that those things are advantageous and desirable. These things a bad man is able both to give to a good man and to receive from him, such as money and clothing and public office and life; and, if he does not return them, he will fall into the class of the ungrateful.
“But,” you retort, “how can you call a man ungrateful if he fails to return something which you will not admit to be a benefit?” Certain things, on account of their similarity, are designated by the same term even at the expense of some inaccuracy. Thus we speak of a silver and a golden “pyxis10”; thus, too, we call a man “illiterate,” though he may be not utterly untutored but only not acquainted with the higher branches of learning; thus, too, one who has seen a man wretchedly clad and in rags says that the man he saw was “naked.” The things that we mean are not really benefits, but have the appearance of benefits. “Then,” you retort, “just as these things are quasi-benefits, so also the man is, not an ingrate, but a quasi-ingrate.” No, not so, because both the giver and the recipient of these things call them benefits. So, he who fails to return the semblance of a true benefit is just as much an ingrate as he is a poisoner who, when he thought that he was concocting poison, concocted a sleeping-draught!