and to think yourself like to the gods; and when you are with many, you ought not to call it crowd, nor trouble, nor uneasiness, but festival and assembly, and so accept all contentedly.
What then is the punishment of those who do not accept? It is to be what they are. Is any person dissatisfied with being alone? let him be alone. Is a man dissatisfied with his parents? let him be a bad son, and lament. Is he dissatisfied with his children? let him be a bad father. Cast him into prison. What prison? Where he is already, for he is there against his will; and where a man is against his will, there he is in prison. So Socrates was not in prison, for he was there willingly—Must my leg then be lamed? Wretch, do you then on account of one poor leg find fault with the world? Will you not willingly surrender it for the whole? Will you not withdraw from it? Will you not gladly part with it to him who gave it? And will you be vexed and discontented with the things established by Zeus, which he with the Moirae (fates) who were present and spinning the thread of your generation, defined and put in order? Know you not how small a part you are compared with the whole.[1] I mean with respect to the body, for as to intelligence you are not inferior to the gods nor less; for the magnitude of intelligence is not measured by length nor yet by height, but by thoughts.[2]
Will you not then choose to place your good in that in which you are equal to the gods?—Wretch that I am to have such a father and mother.—What then, was it permitted to you to come forth and to select and to say: Let such a man at this moment unite with such a woman that I may be produced? It was not permitted, but it was a
- ↑ "Et quota pars homo sit terrai totius unus." Lucret. vi. 652, and Antoninus, ii. 4.
- ↑ The original is δόγμασι, which the Latin translators render "decretis," and Mrs. Carter "principles." I don't understand either. I have rendered the word by "thoughts," which is vague, but I can do no better. It was the Stoic doctrine that the human intelligence is a particle of the divine. Mrs. Carter names this "one of the Stoic extravagancies, arising from the notion that human souls were literally parts of the Deity." But this is hardly a correct representation of the Stoic doctrine.
