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For this reason it will also help greatly toward tranquillity of mind to observe that famous men have suffered nothing at all from evils the same as yours. Does childlessness, for example, vex you? Consider the kingsOthers prefer to translate Emperors, and regard the passage as proof that this essay was written during the reign of Vespasian, who was the first emperor to be succeeded by a son. I consider such an early date for this work altogether unlikely. of Rome, of whom not one was able to bequeath the kingdom to a son. Are you distressed by your present poverty? Well, what Boeotian rather than Epameinondas, what Roman rather than Fabricius, would you have preferred to be? But my wife has been seduced. Have you, then, not read the inscription at Delphi, The lord of land and sea, King Agis, put me herePreger, Inscr. Graec. Metricae, p. 76, no. 87.; and have you not heard that Alcibiades Cf. Life of Alcibiades, xxiii. 7 (203 d). seduced Agis’s wife, Timaea, and that, whispering to her handmaids, she called her child Alcibiades? But this did not prevent Agis from being the most celebrated and the greatest of Greeks. Just as the licentiousness of his daughter did not prevent Stilpo Cf. Diogenes Laertius, ii. 114. from leading the most cheerful life of all the philosophers of his time; on the contrary, when Metrocles reproached him, he asked, Is this my fault or hers? And when Metrocles replied, Her fault, but your misfortune, he said, What do you mean? Are not faults also slips? Certainly, said Metrocles. And are not slips also mischances of those who have slipped? Metrocles agreed. And are not mischances also misfortunes of those whose mischances they are? By this gentle and philosophic argument he showed the Cynics abuse to be but idle yapping.
