BOOK II. I. 6-11
purpose, it is only in regard to matters of this kind that it is right to employ caution; but if the things which lie outside the province of the moral purpose and are not under our control are nothing to us, we ought to employ confidence in regard to them. And so we shall be at one and the same time both cautious and confident, yes, and, by Zeus, confident because of our caution. For because we are cautious about the things which are really evil, the result will be that we shall have confidence in regard to the things which are not of that nature.
However, we act like deer: when the hinds are frightened by the feathers[1] and run away from them, where do they turn, and to what do they fly for refuge as a safe retreat? Why, to the nets; and so they perish because they have confused the objects of fear with the objects of confidence. So it is with us also; where do we show fear? About the things which lie outside the province of the moral purpose. Again, in what do we behave with confidence as if there were no danger? In the things which lie within the province of the moral purpose. 10To be deceived, or to act impetuously, or to do something shameless, or with base passion to desire something, makes no difference to us, if only in the matters which lie outside the province of the will we succeed in our aim. But where death, or exile, or hardship, or ignominy faces us, there we show the spirit of running away, there we show violent agitation. Therefore, as might be expected of those men who err in matters of the greatest concern, we transform our natural confidence into boldness, desperateness, recklessness, shamelessness, while our natural caution and self-respect we transform into
- ↑ The beaters used to frighten deer into the nets by stretching a cord, with brightly coloured feathers on it, across the safe openings in the wood. Compare Vergil, Georgics, III. 372; cf. Aen., XII. 750., "(In Scythia) men drive them (stags) not (into nets, as they do here) with the terrors of the crimson feather."
