BOOK XI
recourse to the several parts and by analysis to go on to despise them, and to apply the same process to life as a whole.
3. How admirable is the soul which is ready and resolved, if it must this moment be released from the body, to be either extinguished or scattered or to persist. This resolve, too, must arise from a specific decision, not out of sheer opposition like the Christians, but after reflection and with dignity, and so as to convince others, without histrionic display.
4. Have I done a neighbourly act? I am thereby benefited. Let this always be ready to your mind, and nowhere desist.
5. What is your art? To be good. But how is this done except by principles of thought, concerned both with Universal Nature and with man's individual constitution?
6. First of all tragedies were put on the stage to remind you of what comes to pass and that it is Nature's law for things to happen like that, and that you are not to make what charmed you on the stage a heavy burden on the world's greater stage. For you see that those events are bound to have that ending and that even those endure them who have cried aloud: 'Alas! Alas! Cithaeron.' There are also valuable sayings in the dramatists; an especially famous one, for instance:
'Were the gods careless of my sons and me,
Yet there is reason here',
and again:
'Man must not vent his passion on mere things',
or:
'Life, like ripe corn, must to the sickle yield',
and the many others of the same sort.
After Tragedy was introduced the Old Comedy, which
