BOOK II. XV. 9-16
crumbling foundation, you cannot rear thereon even a small building, but the bigger and the stronger your superstructure is the more quickly it will fall down. 10Without any reason you are taking out of this life, to our detriment, a human being who is a familiar friend, a citizen of the same state, both the large state[1] and the small; and then, though in the act of murder, and while engaged in the destruction of a human being that has done no wrong, you say that you "must abide by your decisions"! But if the idea ever entered your head to kill me, would you have to abide by your decisions?
Well, it was hard work to persuade that man; but there are some men of to-day whom it is impossible to move. So that I feel that I now know what I formerly did not understand—the meaning of the proverb, "A fool you can neither persuade nor break."[2] God forbid that I should ever have for a friend a wise fool![3] There is nothing harder to handle. "I have decided," he says! Why yes, and so have madmen; but the more firm their decision is about what is false, the more hellebore[4] they need. 15Will you not act like a sick man, and summon a physician? "I am sick, sir; help me. Consider what I ought to do; it is my part to obey you." So also in the present instance. "I know not what I ought to be doing, but I have come to find out." Thus one should speak. No, but this is what one hears, "Talk to me about anything else,
- ↑ That is, the Universe, in Stoic parlance.
- ↑ Is amenable neither to reason nor force; will neither bend nor break.
- ↑ A loquacious and argumentatively stubborn person. In the original this sentence makes a trimeter scazon, and hence is probably a quotation from some satirical poem.
- ↑ Commonly used in antiquity as a remedy for insanity.
