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Pindar’s Caeneus hath been taken to task by several, being improbably feigned, impenetrable by steel and impassible in his body, and so Descending into hell without a wound, And with sound foot parting in two the ground.
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But the Stoics’ Lapithes, as if they had carved him out of the very adamantine matter of impassibility itself, though he is not invulnerable, nor exempt from either sickness or pain, yet remains fearless, regretless, invincible, and unconstrainable in the midst of wounds, dolors, and torments, and in the very subversions of the walls of his native city, and other such like great calamities. Again, Pindar’s Caeneus is not wounded when struck; but the Stoics’ wise man is not detained when shut up in a prison, suffers no compulsion by being thrown down a precipice, is not tortured when on the rack, takes no hurt by being maimed, and when he catches a fall in wrestling he is still unconquered; when he is encompassed with a rampire, he is not besieged; and when sold by his enemies, he is still not made a prisoner. The wonderful man is like to those ships that have inscribed upon them A PROSPEROUS VOYAGE, or PROTECTING PROVIDENCE, or A PRESERVATIVE AGAINST DANGERS, and yet for all that endure storms, and are miserably shattered and overturned.
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Euripides’s Iolaus of a feeble, superannuated old man, by means of a certain prayer, became on a sudden youthful and strong for battle; but the Stoics’ wise man was yesterday most detestable and the worst of villains, but today is changed on a sudden into a state of virtue, and is become of a wrinkled, pale fellow, and, as Aeschylus speaks, Of an old sickly wretch with stitch in’s back, Distent with rending pains as on a rack, a gallant, god-like, and beauteous person.
