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But I cannot, he says, for I never expected or looked for this experience. But you ought to have looked for it, and to have previously pronounced judgement on human affairs for their uncertainty and fatuity, and then you would not now have been taken off your guard as by enemies suddenly come upon you. Admirably does Theseus in Euripides In an unknown play; cf. Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag. Euripides, No. 964 D; Cf. the translation by Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, iii. 14 (29). appear to have prepared himself for such crises, for he says: But I have learned this from a certain sage, And on these cares and troubles set my mind, And on myself laid exile from my land And early deaths and other forms of ills, That if I suffer aught my fancy saw, It should not, coming newly, hurt the more. But the more ignoble and untutored sometimes cannot even recall themselves to the consideration of anything seemly and profitable, but go out of their way to find extremes of wretchedness, even to punishing their innocent body and to forcing the unafflicted, as Achaeus Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag. p. 757, Achaeus, No. 45. says, to join in their grief.
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Wherefore very excellently Plato Adapted from the Republic, p. 604 B. appears to advise us in such misfortunes to maintain a calm demeanour, since neither the evil nor the good in them is at all plain, and since no advance is made by the man who takes things much to heart. For grief stands in the way of sane counsel about an event and prevents one from arranging his affairs with relation to what has befallen, as a player does at a throw of the dice, in whatever way reason may convince him would be best. We ought not, therefore, when we have fallen to act like children and hold on to the injured place and scream, but we should accustom our soul speedily to concern itself with curing the injury and raising up the fallen, and we should put away lamentation by remedial art.
