Xlvii. (2)

Whoever you are that would live apart from slaves, deliver yourself from slavery. And you will be free if you deliver yourself from appetite. For neither was Aristides called just, nor Epaminondas divine, nor Lycurgus a preserver, because they were rich and slave-holders; but because, being poor, they delivered Greece from slavery.

If you would have your house securely inhabited, imitate the Spartan Lycurgus. And as he did not enclose his city with walls, but fortified the inhabitants with virtue, and preserved the city always free; so do you, likewise, not surround yourself with a great court-yard, nor raise high towers, but strengthen those who live with you by benevolence, and fidelity, and friendship. And thus nothing hurtful will enter, even if the whole band of wickedness be set in array against it.

Do not hang your house round with tablets and pictures; but adorn it with virtue. For those are merely foreign and a fading deception of the eyes; but this, a congenial and indelible and perpetual ornament to the house.

Instead of herds of oxen, endeavor to assemble flocks of friends about your house.

As a wolf resembles a dog, so much does a flatterer, an adulterer, a parasite, resemble a friend. Take heed therefore, that instead of guardian dogs, you do not inadvertently admit ravening wolves.

To seek admiration by adorning one’s house with stucco belongs to a tasteless man; but to adorn our characters by the charm of an amiable nature shows at once a lover of beauty and a lover of man.

If you chiefly admire little things, you will never be held worthy of great ones; but if you are above little things, you will be held greatly worthy.

Nothing is meaner than the love of pleasure, the love of gain, and insolence. Nothing is nobler than magnanimity, meekness, and philanthropy.

[We represent] those intractable philosophers who do not think pleasure to be in itself the natural state of man; but merely an incident of those things in which his natural state consists, — justice, moderation, and freedom. Why, then, should the soul rejoice and be glad in the minor blessings of the body, as Epicurus says, and not be pleased with its own good, which is the very greatest? And yet Nature has given me likewise a sense of shame; and I am covered with blushes when I think I have uttered any indecent expression. This emotion will not suffer me to recognize pleasure as a good and the end of life.