marshals thus the goods belonging to the body or to external conditions: health, beauty, strength, wealth; and wealth, he says, is not blind, but very clear-sighted when it is enlightened by wisdom.[1] (b) Dionysius the younger showed an excellent graciousness in this matter.[2] He was told that one of his Syracusan subjects had hidden a treasure in the earth; he ordered him to bring it to him, which he did, secretly keeping back a part of it with which he went to another city, where, having lost his appetite for hoarding, he began to live more liberally. Learning of this, Dionysius ordered the rest of his hoard returned to him, saying that since he had learned how to use it, he gladly gave it back.
I remained several years in this stage.[3] I know not what good spirit most beneficially drove me out of it, like the Syracusan, and sent all that habit of saving to the winds, the pleasure of a certain very expensive journey having trampled underfoot that foolish fancy. Whence I have fallen into a third sort of existence (I say what I feel about it), certainly much more agreeable and better regulated — which is, that I make my outgo run evenly with my income: sometimes one is in advance, sometimes the other, but they are never far apart. I live from day to day, and content myself with having the wherewithal to supply my present and ordinary needs; as for the extraordinary ones, all the providing in the world would not suffice for them. (c) And it is madness to expect that Fortune herself ever arms us sufficiently against herself. It is with our own weapons that we must fight her. Haphazard weapons will betray us at the height of need. (b) If I now save, it is only with the expectation of some speedy outlay; and not to buy lands, (c) for which I have no use, (b) but to buy pleasure. (c) Non esse cupidum pecunia est, non esse emacem vectigal est.[4] (b) I have little fear that my means will give out, nor any desire that
- ↑ See the Laws, I, not far from the beginning, where Plato says not exactly this, but something like it.
- ↑ Montaigne is in error here: it was Dionysius the elder. See Plutarch, Apothegms of Kings, etc.
- ↑ That is, in the “second condition.” See page 83.
- ↑ Not to be covetous, is wealth; not to be spendthrift, is revenue. — Cicero, Paradoxa Stoicorum, VI, 3.
