with passion, is not this acceptable to the gods?—How then shall a man endure such persons as this slave? Slave yourself, will you not bear with your own brother, who has Zeus for his progenitor, and is like a son from the same seeds and of the same descent from above? But if you have been put in any such higher place, will you immediately make yourself a tyrant? Will you not remember who you are, and whom you rule? that they are kinsmen, that they are brethren by nature, that they are the offspring of Zeus?[1]—But I have purchased them, and they have not purchased me. Do you see in what direction you are looking, that it is towards the earth, towards the pit, that it is towards these wretched laws of dead men?[2] but towards the laws of the gods you are not looking.
CHAPTER XIV.
that the deity oversees all things.
When a person asked him how a man could be convinced that all his actions are under the inspection of God, he answered, Do you not think that all things are united in one?[3] I do, the person replied. Well, do you not think
- ↑ Mrs. Carter compares Job xxxi. 15: "Did not he that made me in the womb make him (my man-servant)? And did not one fashion us in the womb?"
- ↑ I suppose he means human laws, which have made one man a slave to another; and when he says "dead men," he may mean mortal men, as contrasted with the gods or God, who has made all men brothers.
- ↑ Things appear to be separate, but there is a bond by which they are united. "All this that you see, wherein things divine and human are contained, is One: we are members of one large body" (Seneca, Ep. 95). "The universe is either a confusion, a mutual involution of things and a dispersion; or it is unity and order and providence" (Antoninus, vi. 10): also vii. 9, "all things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly any thing unconnected with any other thing." See also Cicero, De Nat. Deorum, ii. 7; and De Oratore, iii. 5.
