Book 4
10
Why, then, are you anxious? Why break your rest? Why do you not calculate where your good and evil lie, and say, They are both in my own power; nor can any deprive me of the one, nor involve me against my will in the other. Why, then, do not I lay myself down and sleep? What is my own is safe. Let what belongs to others look to itself, who carries it off, how it is distributed by him who hath the disposal of it. Who am I, to will that it should be so and so? For is the option given to me? Has any one made me the dispenser of it? What I have in my own disposal is enough for me. I must make the best I can of this. Other things must be as their master pleases.
10
Does any one who has these things before his eyes lie sleepless, and shift from side to side? What would he have, or what needs he,—Patroclus,This whole paragraph refers to the lament of Achilles over Patroclus. Iliad, xix. 315, etc.—H. or Antilochus, or Menelaus? Why, did he ever think any one of his friends immortal? When was it not obvious that on the morrow, or the next day, he himself or that friend might die? Ay, very true, he says; but I reckoned that he would survive me, and bring up my son. Because you were a fool, and reckoned upon uncertainties. Why, then, do you not blame yourself, instead of sitting in tears, like a girl? But he used to set my dinner before me. Because he was alive, foolish man; but now he cannot. But Automedon will set it before you; and if he should die, you will find somebody else. What if the vessel in which your meat used to be cooked should happen to be broken; must you die with hunger because you have not your old vessel? Do you not send and buy a new one? What greater evil could afflict my breast? Is this your evil, then? And, instead of removing it, do you accuse your mother, that she did not foretell it to you, that you might have spent your whole life in grieving from that time forward?
