BOOK II. VI. 20-27
20"I run the risk of my life in Caesar's presence." But do I not run a risk by living in Nicopolis, where there are so many earthquakes? And what risk do you yourself take when you cross the Adriatic? Do you not risk your life? "But I also risk my opinion at court." Your own opinion? How so? Why, who can compel you to opine anything against your will? But do you mean some other man's opinion? And what kind of risk is it of yours that others should entertain false opinions? "But I run the risk of banishment." What is banishment? To be somewhere else than in Rome? "Yes." What then? "Suppose I am sent to Gyara."[1] If it is to your good, you will go; if not, you have a place to which you may go instead of Gyara—where he too will go, whether he will or no, who is sending you to Gyara. Then why do you go up to Rome as though it were some great thing? It amounts to less than your preparation for it; so that a young man of parts may say, "It was not worth so much to have listened to so many lectures, and to have written so many exercises, and to have sat so long at the side of a little old man, who was not worth very much himself." Only remember that distinction which is drawn between what is yours and what is not yours. Never lay claim to anything that is not your own. 25A platform and a prison is each a place, the one high, and the other low; but your moral purpose can be kept the same, if you wish to keep it the same, in either place. And then we shall be emulating Socrates, when we are able to write paeans in prison. But considering what has been our state hitherto, I wonder if we should have endured it, had some one else said to us in prison,
- ↑ Gyara or Gyaros was a little island east of Attica, used as a place of banishment in the early empire. Compare I. 25, 19 f., etc.
