Book 1
12
But you are wretched and discontented. If you are alone, you term it a desert; and if with men, you call them cheats and robbers. You find fault too with your parents, and children, and brothers, and neighbors. Whereas you ought, if you live alone, to call that repose and freedom, and to esteem yourself as resembling the gods; and when you are in company, not to call it a crowd, and a tumult, and a trouble, but an assembly, and a festival,—and thus to take all things contentedly. What, then, is the punishment of those who do not so accept them? To be as they are. Is any one discontented with being alone? Let him remain in his desert. Discontented with his parents? Let him be a bad son; and let him mourn, Discontented with his children? Let him be a bad father. Shall we throw him into prison? What prison? Where he already is; for he is in a situation against his will, and wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison,—just as Socrates was not truly in prison, for he was willingly there.
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What, then, must my leg be lame?
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And is it for one paltry leg, wretch, that you accuse the universe? Can you not forego that, in consider tion of the whole? Can you not give up something? Can you not gladly yield it to him who gave it? And will you be angry and discontented with the decrees of Zeus,—which he, with the Fates, who spun in his presence the thread of your birth, ordained and appointed? Do not you know how very small a part you are of the whole?—that is, as to body; for, as to reason, you are neither worse nor less than divine. For reason is not measured by size or height, but by principles. Will you not, therefore, place your good there where you share with the gods?
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But how wretched am I, in such a father and mother!
