On the Steadfastness of the Wise Man

I should not be wrong, Serenus, in saying that there is as great a difference between the Stoics and the rest of those who lay claim to wisdom as there is between women and men, since each group contributes equally to the partnership of life, but the one is born to obey, the other to command. Other wise men treat us gently and soothingly, much as the household physician, intimate with his patients, tends ailing bodies not by the best and quickest method but by what is permitted; the Stoics, having entered upon the manly road, are not concerned that it should seem pleasant to those who set out upon it, but that it should snatch us away as soon as possible and lead us out to that lofty summit which has risen so far beyond the reach of every missile that it towers above fortune.

"But the path along which we are summoned is steep and rugged." What of it? Is a height approached by level ground? Yet these places are not so sheer as some suppose. Only the first stretch has crags and cliffs and the look of an impassable way, just as most things, when surveyed from afar, are apt to seem cut off and joined together, since distance deceives the sight; then, as one draws nearer, those same features, which the error of the eyes had heaped into one mass, gradually open out; and to those who saw them as precipices from a distance, the gentle slope comes back.

Recently, when mention happened to be made of Marcus Cato, you grew indignant, as you cannot endure injustice, that Cato's own age had understood him too little, that it had ranked a man who rose above the likes of Pompey and Caesar below the likes of Vatinius; and it seemed to you outrageous that, when he was about to speak against a law, his toga had been torn from him in the Forum, and that, hustled by the hands of a seditious faction all the way from the Rostra to the Arch of Fabius, he had borne foul abuse and spittle and every other insult of a frenzied mob.

Then I answered that you had cause to be moved on behalf of the commonwealth, which Publius Clodius on this side, Vatinius on that, and every worst man, were putting up for sale, and, seized by blind greed, did not understand that even as they sold it they were themselves being sold. But concerning Cato himself I bade you be free of care; for no wise man can suffer either injury or insult, and the immortal gods have given us in Cato a surer model of the wise man than they gave in Ulysses and Hercules to earlier ages. For these our Stoics have pronounced wise men, unconquered by toils, despisers of pleasure, and victors over every terror.

Cato did not grapple with wild beasts, which it is the part of the huntsman and the rustic to pursue, nor did he hunt down monsters with fire and sword, nor did he fall upon times in which it could be believed that the sky rested upon the shoulders of one man. With the old credulity now shaken off, and the age brought to the height of cleverness, he closed with ambition, that many-shaped evil, and with the boundless lust for power which the whole world divided into three could not satisfy; against the vices of a degenerate state, sinking down under its own weight, he stood alone, and held up the falling commonwealth as far as it could be drawn back by a single hand, until he was dragged down and gave himself as companion to the ruin he had long held off, and at one stroke were extinguished two things which it was a crime to part; for neither did Cato live on after liberty, nor liberty after Cato.

Do you suppose that injury could be done to such a man by the people, because it stripped him of his praetorship or his toga? Because it bespattered that sacred head with the filth of their mouths? The wise man is safe, and can be touched by no injury or insult.

I seem to see your mind kindled and boiling over; you are preparing to cry out: "These are the very things that rob your teachings of authority. You make great promises, things that cannot even be wished for, let alone believed; then, after speaking of mighty matters, when you have denied that the wise man is poor, you do not deny that he often lacks a slave and a roof and food; when you deny that the wise man is mad, you do not deny that he raves, and utters words none too sane, and dares whatever the force of his disease compels; when you have denied that the wise man is a slave, you do not, all the same, deny that he will be sold, and will do what he is ordered, and will render his master the services of a slave. So, after lifting your brows on high, you come down to the same level as the rest of us, only changing the names of things."

And so I suspect that something of the same sort lies in this claim too, which at first sight is fine and splendid—that the wise man will suffer neither injury nor insult. Yet it makes a great difference whether you place the wise man beyond indignation or beyond injury. For if you say that he will bear it with an even mind, he has no special privilege; he has come by an ordinary thing, one that is learned by the very persistence of injuries—endurance. But if you say that he will not suffer injury, that is, that no one will attempt to do it to him, then I will drop all my business and turn Stoic.

But for my part I have resolved not to deck out the wise man with the imaginary honor of words, but to set him in a place where no injury may be allowed to reach him. "What then? Will there be no one to provoke him, to make the attempt?" Nothing in the nature of things is so sacred that it does not find some defiler; yet things divine are not for that reason any less on high, if there are those who reach after a greatness set far above them, which they cannot touch. That which is invulnerable is not what is never struck, but what is never harmed; and by this mark I will show you the wise man.

Is there any doubt that the strength which is not conquered is a surer thing than the strength which is never assailed, seeing that untried powers are of uncertain worth, while that firmness is rightly held most sure which beats back every onset? In the same way you must understand that the wise man is of a better nature if no injury harms him than if none is done to him. And I shall call that man brave whom wars do not subdue, nor the threatening force of the enemy dismay—not the man whose ease is fattened among an idle people.

This, then, is what I say: the wise man is liable to no injury; and so it does not matter how many missiles are hurled against him, since he is penetrable by none. As the hardness of certain stones is impregnable to iron, and adamant cannot be cut or hewn or worn away, but blunts whatever strikes it; as certain things cannot be consumed by fire, but, though the flame plays round them, keep their own rigor and shape; as certain crags, thrust out into the deep, break the sea and show no trace of its fury, though battered for so many ages—just so the mind of the wise man is solid, and has gathered such strength that it is as safe from injury as those things I have named.

"What then? Will there be no one who attempts to do the wise man injury?" He will attempt it, but it will not reach him; for he is drawn off by too great a distance from contact with his inferiors for any harmful force to carry its strength all the way to him. Even when the powerful, raised high by office and strong in the consent of their servants, set out to harm him, all their assaults will fall as far short of wisdom as missiles which, shot on high by bowstring or catapult, though they leap beyond our sight, yet curve back short of the sky. What of it?

Do you suppose that, when that foolish king darkened the day with the multitude of his arrows, a single shaft fell upon the sun, or that Neptune could be reached by lowering chains into the deep? As the things of heaven escape the hands of men, and no harm is done to the godhead by those who tear down temples and melt down statues, so whatever is done against the wise man in wantonness, insolence, or pride is attempted in vain. "But it would have been better that there should be no one willing to do it." You are wishing the human race a hard thing—innocence; and whether such things are done is the concern of those who would do them, not of him who cannot be affected even if they are. Nay, perhaps wisdom shows its strength more by calm amid provocations, just as the surest proof that a general is mighty in arms and men is his untroubled security in the enemy's land.

Let us distinguish, Serenus, if it seems good to you, injury from insult. The former is by its nature the graver, the latter the slighter, and grievous only to the touchy—a thing by which men are not harmed but offended. Yet such is the looseness and emptiness of men's minds that some count nothing more bitter. So you will find a slave who would rather be flogged than cuffed, and who thinks death and stripes more bearable than insulting words.

We have come to such absurdity that we are tormented not only by pain but by the notion of pain, like children, in whom a shadow strikes fear, and the ugliness of masks, and a distorted face; while tears are drawn from them by names that grate too harshly on the ear, by the movements of fingers, and by other things from which, in a kind of headlong, ill-considered panic, they recoil.

Injury has this as its aim—to do someone an evil; but wisdom leaves no room for evil, for the only evil it knows is baseness, which cannot enter where virtue and honor already are. Therefore, if there is no injury without evil, and no evil except what is base, and what is base cannot reach a man already taken up with what is honorable, then injury does not reach the wise man. For if injury is the suffering of some evil, and the wise man suffers no evil, then no injury touches the wise man.

Every injury is a diminishment of the one upon whom it falls, and no one can suffer injury without some loss either of dignity, or of body, or of things placed outside us. But the wise man can lose nothing; he has lodged everything within himself, he entrusts nothing to fortune, he holds his goods secure, content with virtue, which has no need of fortune's gifts and therefore can be neither increased nor diminished. For things brought to their height have no room for growth, and fortune snatches away nothing except what she gave; but virtue she does not give, and therefore does not take away. It is free, inviolable, unmoved, unshaken, and so hardened against mischance that it cannot even be bent, let alone overcome;

against the apparatus of terrors it holds its eyes steady; it changes nothing in its expression, whether harsh things are displayed to it or favorable. And so the wise man will lose nothing the loss of which he could feel; for he is in possession of virtue alone, from which he can never be driven, while all else he holds on sufferance—and who is moved by the loss of what is another's? But if injury can harm none of the things that are the wise man's own, since they are safe while his virtue is safe, then injury cannot be done to the wise man.

Demetrius, surnamed Poliorcetes, had captured Megara. The philosopher Stilbo, being asked by him whether he had lost anything, replied: "Nothing; all that is mine is with me." And yet his patrimony had fallen as plunder, the enemy had carried off his daughters, his native land had passed under foreign sway, and the king himself, ringed about by the arms of his victorious army, was putting the question from a higher seat.

But Stilbo wrested his victory from him, and bore witness that, though his city was taken, he himself was not only unconquered but unscathed. For he had with him his true goods, on which no hand can be laid; while the things being carried off, scattered and plundered, he judged to be not his own, but external accidents that follow the beck of fortune. And so he had loved them as things not truly his own; for the possession of all that flows in from outside is slippery and uncertain.

Consider now whether any thief, or false accuser, or overbearing neighbor, or some rich man wielding the tyranny of childless old age, could do an injury to a man from whom war and the enemy, and that master of the famous art of shattering cities, could snatch nothing away.

Amid swords flashing on every side, amid the soldiers' uproar of pillage, amid flames and blood and the slaughter of a stormed city, amid the crash of temples falling upon their own gods, for one man there was peace. There is no reason, then, why you should judge my promise rash; for if you put too little faith in me, I will give you a surety for it. Indeed, you can scarcely believe that so much firmness, or so great a greatness of soul, can fall to a man; but here steps forward into our midst one to say:

"There is no reason for you to doubt whether a man, though mortal-born, can raise himself above mortal things—whether he can look untroubled upon pains, losses, sores, wounds, and the great upheavals of affairs roaring about him, and bear hardship calmly and prosperity with measure, yielding to the one and trusting in the other, remaining one and the same amid these opposites, and counting nothing his own except himself, and himself only in that part in which he is the better.

Lo, here I stand, ready to prove this to you: that, under this destroyer of so many cities, ramparts may be shaken loose by the battering-ram's blow, and the height of towers suddenly sink down through tunnels and hidden mines, and a siege-mound rise to match the loftiest citadels—yet no engines can be devised that will shake a well-founded mind. Just now I crept out from the ruins of my house, and, with fires blazing on every side, fled through blood from the flames;

what fate has befallen my daughters, whether one worse than the public ruin, I do not know; alone and well on in years, and seeing all about me the marks of the enemy, I yet declare that my estate is untouched and unharmed. I keep, I hold, whatever of mine was mine.

There is no reason for you to believe me conquered and yourself the conqueror. Your fortune has conquered my fortune. Where those perishable things, which change their owner, may be, I do not know; but as for what is mine, it is with me, and will be with me.

Yonder rich men have lost their patrimonies; the lustful have lost their loves, and the harlots they have cherished at great cost to their honor; the ambitious have lost the Senate-house, and the Forum, and the places set apart for the public exercise of their vices; the moneylenders have lost the ledgers in which greed, falsely glad, imagines its riches. But I, for my part, have everything whole and unimpaired. Go, then, and question those men who weep, who lament, who fling their naked bodies between drawn swords in defense of their money, who flee the enemy with their bosoms laden."

Hold this, then, for certain, Serenus: that the perfect man, full of virtues human and divine, loses nothing. His goods are girt about with solid and insurmountable defenses. You shall not set beside them the walls of Babylon, which Alexander entered, nor the ramparts of Carthage or Numantia, taken by a single hand, nor the Capitol or the citadel: these bear the trace of the enemy. The defenses that guard the wise man are safe both from flame and from assault; they offer no entrance; lofty, impregnable, they are the equals of the gods.

There is no reason for you to say, as you are wont, that this wise man of ours is nowhere to be found. We do not invent this thing as an empty glory of human wit, nor do we conceive a mighty image of a false reality; rather, such as we portray him, we have shown him, and shall show him—though rarely, perhaps, and at great intervals of the ages, one alone. For great things, surpassing the ordinary and common measure, are not often brought forth. But this very Marcus Cato, from the mention of whom this discussion arose, I fear may be even above our model.

Finally, that which harms must be stronger than that which is harmed; but wickedness is not stronger than virtue; therefore the wise man cannot be harmed. Injury against the good is attempted only by the wicked; among the good there is peace; the wicked are as ruinous to the good as they are to one another. But if a man cannot be harmed except by one weaker than himself, and the wicked man is weaker than the good, then the good need fear no injury except from an unequal—and injury does not befall the wise man. For of this I need no longer remind you: that no one is good except the wise. "If Socrates," someone says, "was condemned unjustly, then he suffered injury."

At this point we must understand that it can happen that someone does me an injury and yet I do not suffer it. For instance, if someone should place in my house a thing that he had stolen from my country estate, he would have committed the theft, but I would have lost nothing.

One can become guilty of harm even though he has done no harm. If a man should lie with his own wife as though she were another's, he will be an adulterer, even though she is no adulteress. Someone gave me poison, but mixed with food it lost its force; the man, by giving it, bound himself to the crime, even though he did no harm. He is no less a robber whose weapon is foiled by a garment thrown across the body. All crimes, so far as guilt is concerned, are complete even before the deed is accomplished.

Certain things are of such a condition, and so coupled in mutual relation, that the one can exist without the other, but the other cannot exist without the one. What I mean I will try to make plain. I can move my feet without running, but I cannot run without moving my feet. I can be in the water and not swim; but if I swim, I cannot fail to be in the water.

To this same class belongs the matter we are now treating. If I have suffered injury, it must have been done; but if it has been done, it does not follow that I have suffered it; for many things can intervene to ward off the injury. As some chance can strike down a raised hand and turn aside missiles already loosed, so some thing can repel injuries of any kind whatever, and intercept them midway, so that they have been done and yet not suffered.

Moreover, justice can suffer nothing unjust, for contraries do not come together. But injury cannot be done except unjustly; therefore injury cannot be done to the wise man. And there is no reason for you to wonder; if no one can do him injury, then neither can anyone do him a benefit. The wise man lacks nothing that he could receive in the way of a gift, and the wicked man can bestow nothing worthy of the wise; for he must have before he can give, and he has nothing whose transfer to himself the wise man would rejoice in.

No one, then, can either harm or benefit the wise man, since things divine neither desire help nor can be harmed; and the wise man stands next neighbor to the gods, like a god save for his mortality. Striving and pressing on toward those things on high—ordered, fearless, flowing in an even and harmonious course, secure, kindly, born for the common good, wholesome both to himself and to others—he will covet nothing base, will weep for nothing.

He who, leaning upon reason, passes through human chances with the spirit of a god, has no place where he can suffer injury. Do you think I mean only at the hand of man? No, nor at the hand of fortune, who, as often as she has closed with virtue, has never withdrawn on equal terms. If we accept with an even and calm mind that greatest thing, beyond which angry laws and the cruelest masters have nothing to threaten, in which fortune spends all her power—and if we know that death is no evil, and for that very reason no injury either—then we shall far more easily endure the rest: losses and pains, disgraces, changes of place, bereavements, and partings, which, even if they all hem the wise man in together, do not sink him, much less make him grieve at the assault of any single one. And if he bears the injuries of fortune with measure, how much more those of powerful men, whom he knows to be the hands of fortune!

And so he endures all things as he endures the cold of winter and the inclemency of the sky, as he endures fevers and diseases and the other things that befall by chance; nor does he judge so well of anyone as to think he has done anything by design—which belongs to the wise man alone. In all others there are not designs, but frauds and snares and the disordered impulses of their minds, which he reckons among mere chances; and everything that comes by chance rages about us and against things of little worth.

Consider, too, that the field for injuries lies most widely open in those things through which danger is contrived against us—by suborning an accuser, by a false charge, by inflaming against us the hatred of the more powerful, and by whatever other brigandage there is among men in togas. There is also that frequent injury, when a gain is wrested from someone, or a prize long courted; when an inheritance pursued with great effort is turned aside, and the goodwill of a lucrative household snatched away. From these the wise man escapes, who knows not how to live either in hope or in fear.

Add, further, that no one suffers injury with an unmoved mind, but is disturbed at the perception of it; but free from disturbance is the man delivered from errors, master of himself, of a deep and tranquil calm. For if injury touches him, it both moves and impels him; but the wise man is free from anger, which the appearance of injury rouses, nor would he be free from anger unless he were free from injury as well—an injury which he knows cannot be done to him. Hence he is so upright and glad; hence he is lifted up by unbroken joy. So far is he from drawing back at the affronts of things and of men, that the very injury is of use to him, since through it he takes the proof of himself and tests his virtue.

Let us be favorable, I beg you, to this proposition, and attend with fair minds and ears, while the wise man is exempted from injury! Nor is anything thereby taken from your wantonness, or your most rapacious desires, or your blind recklessness and pride. With your vices left intact, it is this freedom for the wise man that we seek. We are not arguing that you may not do injury, but that he may sink all injuries into the deep, and defend himself by patience and greatness of soul.

So in the sacred contests many have won by wearing out the hands of those who struck them with stubborn endurance. Reckon the wise man, then, to be of that breed, of those who by long and faithful training have gained the strength to bear up under, and to tire out, every hostile force.

Since we have run through the first part, let us pass to the other, in which we shall refute insult by arguments partly its own, but mostly shared with the former. Insult is the lesser injury, one which we can complain of rather than prosecute, which the laws too have judged worthy of no penalty.

This feeling is stirred by the lowliness of a mind that shrinks at a word or deed lacking in respect: "He did not admit me today, when he admitted others"; and "he turned away from my talk haughtily, or laughed at it openly"; and "he seated me not in the middle of the couch but at the foot"; and other things of this stamp, which I can call nothing but the complaints of a queasy mind. It is generally the pampered and the prosperous who fall into them; for the man who has worse things pressing upon him has no leisure to mark such trifles.

Through excess of leisure, dispositions naturally weak and womanish, and given to wantonness for want of any real injury, are moved by these things, the greater part of which consists in the fault of the one who interprets them. And so the man who is affected by insult shows that there is in him nothing of prudence and nothing of self-confidence; for he undoubtedly judges himself despised, and this sting does not come without a certain lowliness of mind, abasing and lowering itself. But the wise man is despised by no one; he knows his own greatness, and assures himself that no one has so much power over him; and all these things—which I would call not the miseries of the mind but its annoyances—he does not conquer, but does not even feel.

There are other things which strike the wise man, even if they do not overthrow him: such as bodily pain and disablement, or the loss of friends and children, and the ruin of a fatherland ablaze with war. I do not deny that the wise man feels these; for we do not claim for him the hardness of stone or iron. There is no virtue that does not feel its own endurance. What, then, is the case? He receives certain blows, but, having received them, he masters them, heals them, and quells them; but these lesser things he does not even feel, nor does he employ against them that wonted virtue of bearing hardship, but either does not notice them or thinks them worthy of laughter.

Moreover, since insults are for the most part the work of the proud and insolent, and of those who bear good fortune ill, the wise man has wherewith to repel that puffed-up feeling—the fairest of all virtues, magnanimity. This passes by whatever is of such a kind as the empty shapes of dreams and visions of the night, which have nothing solid or true in them.

At the same time he reflects that all men are too far beneath him to have the boldness to look down on things so much loftier than themselves. "Insult" (contumelia) is so called from "contempt" (contemptus), because no one brands another with such an injury except one whom he has held in contempt; but no one holds in contempt a greater and better man, even if he does something that the contemptuous are wont to do. For children, too, strike their parents' faces, and the infant tousles and tears its mother's hair and bespatters her with spittle, or lays bare in the sight of her household what should be covered, and does not spare obscene words—and none of these do we call insult. Why? Because the doer is incapable of contempt.

The same reason explains why the impertinence of our slaves, insolent toward their masters, delights us—a boldness which only then makes free with the guests if it has begun with the master; and the more despised and even ridiculous each one is, the looser his tongue. Some men buy boys for their pertness, and sharpen their impudence, and keep them under a tutor, that they may pour out their studied insults; and these we do not call insults, but witticisms. But what madness it is to be now delighted, now offended, by the same things, and to call a thing said by a friend slander, but by a little slave a playful jest!

The disposition that we have toward children, this the wise man has toward all those in whom, even after youth and gray hairs, there remains a childishness. Or have those made any progress whose mental ills are those of children, whose errors have grown the greater, who differ from children only in size and shape of body, but are no less aimless and unsteady, craving pleasures without discrimination, fearful, and quiet not from good sense but from dread?

No one would say there is any difference between them and children on the ground that the children are greedy for knucklebones and nuts and small coin, these for gold and silver and cities; that the children play at being magistrates among themselves, and mimic the bordered toga and the rods and the tribunal, while these men play at the same things in earnest, in the Campus and the Forum and the Senate-house; that the children, on the seashore, raise up mimic houses by heaping up the sand, while these, as though doing some great thing, are taken up with the piling of stones and walls and roofs, and have turned to peril what was devised for the protection of the body. Therefore those who have gone further are on a level with children, but their error is in other and greater matters.

Not without reason, then, does the wise man take the insults of such men as he takes jests; and sometimes he admonishes and chastises them, like children, with hurt and punishment—not because he has suffered injury, but because they have done it, and that they may cease to do it. For so too are cattle tamed by the lash; and we are not angry with them when they refuse the rider, but check them, that pain may overcome their stubbornness. So now you will see the answer also to that objection raised against us: "Why, if the wise man suffers neither injury nor insult, does he punish those who have done them?" For he is not avenging himself, but correcting them.

But what reason is there why you should not believe that this firmness of mind can fall to the wise man, when you may observe the same thing in others, though not from the same cause? For what physician is angry with a madman? Who takes amiss the abuse of a man burning with fever and forbidden cold water?

This is the disposition the wise man has toward all men—that of the physician toward his patients, whose private parts, if they need a remedy, he does not disdain to handle, nor to inspect their leavings and discharges, nor to take the insults of those raving in their delirium. The wise man knows that all these men who go about in togas and purple, like men in health, are sickly creatures with a healthy color; he sees them as no other than the patients of an intemperate house. And so he is not even angered if, in their illness, they have dared something too saucy against their healer; and with the same mind with which he reckons their honors at nothing, he reckons their unhandsome deeds.

Just as he will not be pleased with himself if a beggar pays him court, nor judge it an insult if a man of the lowest rabble, on greeting him, gets no greeting returned, so neither will he look up to himself if many rich men look up to him—for he knows that they differ in nothing from beggars, nay, are more wretched, since the beggar wants little, these much—and again, he will not be touched if the king of the Medes, or Attalus of Asia, passes by his greeting in silence and with an arrogant look. He knows that such a man's estate has no more in it to be envied than the estate of one whose lot, in a great household, it is to keep in check the sick and the mad.

Shall I take it amiss if one of those who do business near the temple of Castor, buying and selling worthless slaves, whose shops are crammed with a crowd of the vilest servants, fails to return my name in greeting? Not so, I think; for what good has the man under whom there is no one but a knave? Therefore, just as he disregards this fellow's courtesy or discourtesy, so too the king's: "You have under you the Parthians and the Medes and the Bactrians, but men whom you hold by fear, men on whose account you have never been free to unbend your bow, men who are your bitterest enemies, men for sale, men on the watch for a new master."

He will therefore be moved by no man's insult. For though all men differ among themselves, yet the wise man holds them all equal by reason of their equal folly; for if once he should lower himself so far as to be moved by injury or insult, he could never be secure. But security is the wise man's own proper good; and he will not allow it, by judging that an insult has been done him, that he should pay honor to the one who did it; for it must be that the man by whom one minds being despised is the man whose regard one would rejoice in.

Such madness possesses some men that they think an insult can be done them by a woman. What does it matter how rich she is, how many litter-bearers she has, how heavily her ears are laden, how spacious her sedan-chair? She is just as unthinking a creature, and, unless knowledge and much learning have come to her, savage, and unrestrained in her appetites. Some men take it amiss to be jostled by a hairdresser, and call it an insult—the doorkeeper's reluctance, the announcer's haughtiness, the chamberlain's disdain. Oh, what laughter is to be raised at all this! with what pleasure should the mind be filled, when, out of the turmoil of other men's errors, it contemplates its own repose! "What then?

Will the wise man not approach a door that a surly porter guards?" He, indeed, if some necessary matter calls, will try even that fellow, whoever he may be, and soothe him, like a fierce dog, by throwing him food, and will not think it beneath him to spend something to cross the threshold—reflecting that on certain bridges, too, a toll is paid for passage. And so to that man too, whoever he be, who plies this trade of greetings, he will make a gift; he knows that things for sale are bought with money. He is of a petty mind who is pleased with himself because he answered the doorkeeper freely, because he broke his rod, because he went to the master and demanded a flogging for him. The man who quarrels makes himself an adversary; and to win, he has had to be an equal.

"But what will the wise man do if he is struck with a fist?" What Cato did when his mouth was struck: he did not blaze up, he did not avenge the injury, he did not even forgive it, but denied that it had been done. With greater greatness of soul he refused to acknowledge it than he would have shown in pardoning it. We shall not dwell long on this; for who does not know that none of the things which are reckoned evils or goods appears to the wise man as it does to all the rest?

He does not regard what men judge base or wretched; he does not go where the crowd goes, but, as the stars hold their course contrary to the heavens, so he advances against the opinion of all.

Cease, then, to say: "Will the wise man not suffer injury, then, if he is flogged, if his eye is gouged out? Will he not suffer insult, if he is driven through the Forum with the foul cries of lewd men? If at a king's banquet he is bidden to recline below the table and to feed with slaves told off to do dishonorable services? If he is forced to bear any other of those things that can be devised to be galling to an honorable sense of shame?

However far these things may grow, whether in number or in magnitude, they will be of the same nature. If small things do not touch him, neither will the greater; if few do not touch him, neither will the many. But from your own weakness you draw your guess about a mighty soul, and, when you have reckoned how much you think you can bear, you set the limit of the wise man's endurance only a little beyond. But his own virtue has placed him in another region of the world, having nothing in common with you.

Seek out, then, hardships, and whatever things are grievous to bear and to be shunned in the hearing and the sight. He will not be overwhelmed by their assembled mass, and as he withstands them singly, so will he withstand them all together. He who says that one thing is bearable to the wise man and another unbearable, and confines greatness of soul within fixed bounds, does ill; fortune conquers us, unless she is wholly conquered.

Do not think this hardness belongs to the Stoics alone: Epicurus, whom you take as the patron of your idleness, and whom you suppose to teach soft and slothful doctrines that lead to pleasures, says: "Rarely does fortune cross the wise man's path." How near he came to uttering a man's word! Will you speak more bravely still, and remove her path altogether!

This house of the wise man is narrow, without adornment, without din, without pomp; it is guarded by no doorkeepers sorting the crowd with a venal disdain; but across this empty threshold, free of porters, fortune does not pass. She knows there is no place for her there, where nothing is her own.

But if Epicurus too, who indulged the body most of all, rises up against injuries, how can this seem to us incredible, or beyond the measure of human nature? He says that injuries are bearable to the wise man; we, that they are no injuries at all. Nor is there any reason for you to say that this is contrary to nature.

We do not deny that it is a disagreeable thing to be beaten and shoved and to lose a limb; but we deny that all these are injuries. We do not take from them the sensation of pain, but the name of injury, which cannot be admitted while virtue is unharmed. Which of the two speaks more truly we shall see; in their contempt for injury, at any rate, the two agree. Do you ask what difference there is between the two? The same as between two bravest gladiators, of whom the one presses upon his wound and holds his ground, while the other, looking back at the shouting people, signals that it is nothing, and will not suffer the fight to be stopped.

There is no reason for you to think the matter on which we differ a great one; that which is at issue, the one thing that concerns you, both examples urge—to despise injuries and the things I would call the shadows and suspicions of injuries, namely insults; and to look down on these there is no need for a wise man, but only for a man of sense, one who can say to himself: "Do these things befall me deservedly or undeservedly? If deservedly, it is no insult, but a judgment; if undeservedly, then it is the doer of the unjust deed who has cause to blush."

And what is this thing that is called insult? Someone has jested at the baldness of my head, and at the weakness of my eyes, and at the thinness of my legs, and at my stature. What insult is it to hear what is plain to see? Before one person something is said, and we laugh; before many, we are indignant; and we leave others no freedom to say the very things we are accustomed to say against ourselves. We are pleased by jests in moderation; at immoderate ones we are angry.

Chrysippus tells of a man who took it amiss that someone had called him a "sea-wether." In the Senate we have seen Fidus Cornelius, son-in-law of Ovidius Naso, weeping when Corbulo had called him a "plucked ostrich"; against other taunts that wounded his character and his way of life his brow stood firm, but at this so absurd one the tears burst forth. So great is the weakness of men's minds when reason has withdrawn.

What of the fact that we are offended if someone mimics our way of speaking, if someone mimics our gait, if someone reproduces some defect of body or tongue? As though these things became better known by another's imitating them than by our own doing of them! Some are unwilling to hear of old age and gray hairs and the other things at which men arrive by their own prayers; the reproach of poverty has scorched some men—a thing which a man casts in his own teeth whenever he hides it. And so the material for raillery is taken from the insolent, and from those who are witty at the expense of others, if you yourself anticipate it and seize upon it first; no one has afforded a laugh who has taken it at his own expense.

Vatinius, a man born both to be laughed at and to be hated, was, it is recorded in memory, a clown, and charming and sharp of tongue. He himself made many jokes about his own feet and his shrunken throat; and so he escaped the wit of his enemies, of whom he had more than he had diseases, and Cicero's above all. If he could do this by the hardness of a face which, through unremitting abuse, had unlearned how to blush, why should not the man do so who has reached some measure of progress through liberal studies and the cultivation of wisdom?

Add, too, that it is a kind of vengeance to rob the doer of an insult of the pleasure of having done it; for such men are wont to say: "Wretched me! I think he did not understand." So entirely does the fruit of insult lie in the perception and indignation of the one who suffers it. Besides, sooner or later he will meet his match; there will be found someone to avenge you as well.

Gaius Caesar, among the other vices in which he abounded, was carried by a wondrous lust for insult to brand everyone with some mark—though he himself was the most generous material for ridicule: so foul was the pallor that bore witness to his madness, so grim the savagery of his eyes lurking beneath an old woman's brow, so hideous his head, bald and sprinkled with begged-for hairs; add to this the neck beset with bristles, and the thinness of his legs, and the hugeness of his feet. It would be an endless task, were I to set down one by one the insults with which he assailed his parents and forebears, and the insults he heaped upon men of every rank; I will recount those that brought him to his destruction.

He had Valerius Asiaticus among his closest friends, a fierce man, and one hardly likely to bear another's insults with an even mind; to him, at a banquet—that is, in a public assembly—in the clearest of voices, he flung the taunt of what his wife was like in his embraces. Good gods! that a man should hear this, and a prince know it, and that license should have gone so far that—I will not say to a man of consular rank, I will not say to a friend, but to a husband—an emperor should recount his own adultery and his disgust!

Chaerea, on the other hand, a military tribune, had a manner of speech that did not match his hand—languid in sound, and, if you did not know his deeds, suspect of effeminacy. To him, when he asked the watchword, Gaius would give now "Venus," now "Priapus," reproaching the soldier, in one way or another, with effeminacy—he himself, all glittering, in dainty sandals and gold. And so he forced the man to use the sword, that he might not have to ask the watchword so often! Chaerea was the first among the conspirators to raise his hand, the first to sever the neck through the middle with a single stroke; then from every side were heaped the blows of swords avenging public and private wrongs, but the first man was he who least seemed it.

But this same Gaius counted everything an insult, as is the way with those who are impatient of bearing them and most eager to inflict them; he was angry with Herennius Macer because he had greeted him as "Gaius," nor did a chief centurion go unpunished for having called him "Caligula"; for, born in the camp and a foster-child of the legions, he had been wont to be so called, by no name ever more familiar to the soldiers, but by now he, with his tragic buskins on, judged "Caligula" a reproach and a disgrace.

Therefore this very thing will be a consolation: that, even if our own easygoing nature has forgone revenge, there will be someone to exact the penalty from the insolent, the proud, and the injurious man—vices which are never used up upon a single man and a single insult. Let us look to the examples of those whose patience we praise: as of Socrates, who took in good part the gibes that were published and seen on the stage against him, and laughed at them no less than when he was drenched with foul water by his wife Xanthippe. Antisthenes was reproached with having a barbarian mother, a Thracian; he answered that the mother of the gods, too, was from Mount Ida.

We must not come to brawling and grappling. We must carry our feet far off, and whatever of these things is done by the thoughtless—and it cannot be done except by the thoughtless—is to be disregarded, and the honors and the injuries of the crowd are to be held as all one. We must neither grieve at the latter nor rejoice at the former;

otherwise, through fear of insults or through weariness of them, we shall leave many necessary things undone, and shall fail to meet our public and private duties—sometimes even our wholesome ones—while a womanish anxiety frets us at the prospect of hearing something against our will. Sometimes, too, in anger at the powerful, we shall betray this feeling through an intemperate freedom of speech. But freedom is not to suffer nothing—we are mistaken; freedom is to set the mind above injuries, and to make oneself the one source from which one's own joys come, and to draw external things apart from oneself, lest one's life be passed unquiet, in dread of everyone's laughter, everyone's tongue. For who is there that cannot offer an insult, if anyone can?

But the wise man and the aspirant to wisdom will use different remedies. For those still imperfect, who still steer their course by public judgment, this must be set before them: that they ought to live amid injuries and insults; all things will fall the lighter on those who expect them. The more honorable a man is in birth, repute, and estate, the more bravely let him bear himself, mindful that in the front line the tall stand in the high ranks. Let him bear insults, and abusive words, and ignominies, and the other affronts as he bears the shouting of the enemy, and missiles from afar, and stones rattling without a wound about his helmet; but injuries let him sustain as wounds, some fixed in his armor, some in his breast, without being thrown down, without even being moved from his ground. Even if a hostile force presses and bears hard upon you, yet it is base to yield; hold the post assigned you by Nature. Do you ask what this post is? That of a man.

The wise man has another aid, the opposite of this: for you are still carrying on the struggle, while for him the victory is already won. Do not fight against your own good, but cherish this hope in your minds until you have reached the truth, and gladly take in the better doctrine, and aid it with your belief and your prayer. That there should be something unconquered, that there should be someone against whom fortune has no power—this is to the advantage of the commonwealth of the human race.