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Furthermore, we see that Nature also admonishes us; for just as she has provided different foods for different beasts and has not made them all carnivorous or seed-pickers or root-diggers, so has she given to men a great variety of means for gaining a livelihood, To shepherd and ploughman and fowler and to him w hom the sea Provides with sustenance.Pindar, Isthmian Odes, i. 48; Cf. Moralia, 406 c. We should, therefore, choose the calling appropriate to ourselves, cultivate it diligently, let the rest alone, and not prove that Works and Days, 25; the whole passage, to the end of the chapter, is quoted in the Munich scholia on this verse of Hesiod (Usener, Rheinisches Museum, xxii. 592). Hesiod spoke inexactly when he said, Potter is angry with potter, joiner with joiner. For not only are men jealous of fellow-craftsmen and those who share the same life as themselves, but also the wealthy envy the learned, the famous the rich, advocates the sophists, and, by Heaven free men and patricians regard with wondering admiration and envy successful comedians in the theatre and dancers and servants in the courts of kings; and by so doing they afford themselves no small vexation and disturbance.
