BOOK III. XXIV. 116-XXV. 4
eat, but in not having reason sufficient to secure you against fear and against grief. But if once you win for yourself security against grief and fear, will there any longer exist for you a tyrant, or a guardsman, or members of Caesar's household; or will some appointment to office sting you with envy, or those who perform sacrifices on the Capitol in taking the auspices,[1] you who have received so important an office from Zeus? Only make no display of your office, and do not boast about it; but prove it by your conduct; and if no one perceives that you have it, be content to live in health and happiness yourself.
CHAPTER XXV
To those who fail to achieve their purposes
Consider which of the things that you purposed at the start you have achieved, and which you have not; likewise, how it gives you pleasure to recall some of them, and pain to recall others, and, if possible, recover also those things which have slipped out of your grasp. For men who are engaged in the greatest of contests ought not to flinch, but to take also the blows; for the contest before us is not in wrestling or the pancratium, in which, whether a man succeeds or fails, he may be worth a great deal, or only a little,—yes, by Zeus, he may even be extremely happy or extremely miserable,—but it is a contest for good fortune and happiness itself. What follows? Why here, even if we give in for
- ↑ In this passage the words Caesariani and ordinatio have been taken over direct from the Latin. In ὀπτικίοις, a word which seems to occur nowhere else in Greek or in Latin, it may be that the Latin auspicia (sacrifices at the inauguration of some official enterprise) are meant, as Wolf suggested, and so the passage is translated; but the word is very uncertain (Chinnock, Class. Rev. 3 (1889), 70, thinks it stands for officia), and several emendations have been proposed, of which ὀπφικίοις (officia, Koraes) is perhaps the most plausible.
