Prosperity comes to ordinary people and to men of mean abilities, but it
is the prerogative of a great man to overcome the calamities and terrors
that frighten mortals. In truth, to be always happy and to pass one’s
life without mental anxiety, is to be ignorant of half of man’s destiny.
Thou art a great man; yet how am I to know it unless fate gives thee an
opportunity to show thy worth?
2. Thou didst enter the Olympian games as a contestant; if there was
none beside thyself, thou hast the crown, thou hast not the victory. I
congratulate thee, not as a brave man, but as one who has gained the
consulship or the praetorship: thou hast won political honors. I can say
the same thing to a good man, unless some more than ordinary emergency
has given him an opportunity to show his strength of soul.
3. Unhappy do I adjudge thee, if thou hast never been unhappy; thou hast
passed thy life without an adversary. No one knows what thou mightest
have done; thou dost not even know it thyself. We need to be tried that
we may find out what we are; what a man can do can be ascertained only
by trial. For this reason men have sometimes voluntarily encountered
obstacles that seemed to evade them and sought an opportunity for
demonstrating to others the virtue that was passing into oblivion.
4. I assert that great men sometimes rejoice in tribulation like valiant
soldiers in battles. I heard Triumphus, a gladiator under Caius Caesar
(Caligula) complain because he had so little to do. “How my best days
are speeding away,” said he! Courage is eager for danger and looks to
the end in view, not at what it is likely to encounter, for the reason
that what it encounters is part of the glory. Warriors are proud of
their wounds; joyfully they point to the blood it was their good fortune
to shed. Those who return from the combat unscathed may have been just
as brave—it is the wounded man that is the observed of all eyes.
God shows his good will to those whom he would have attain the highest
excellence every time he gives them an opportunity to display courage
and endurance; this is possible only in some contingency beset with
difficulties. You form your opinion of a pilot in a storm; of a soldier,
in battle. By what test am I to know how thou wilt bear up against
poverty, if thou aboundest in wealth? By what test am I to know how thou
wilt bear up under ignominy and disgrace and popular hatred, if thou
growest old amid public applause? if a strong and unswerving popular
partiality supports thee in all thou doest?
6. How am I to know with what equanimity thou wilt bear the loss of
children, if thou seest about thee all those thou hast begotten? I have
listened to thee when thou wert offering consolation to others; then
should I have seen thee when thou wert thyself in need of consolation;
when thou wert trying to restrain thyself from sorrowing. Do not, I
beseech thee, shrink from these things which the immortal gods send upon
thee as stimuli to thy courage. A disaster is an occasion of virtue.
Those persons one can rightly call wretched who grow effeminate in
superabounding prosperity; whom a dead calm bears along, as it were, in
a motionless sea.
7. No matter what befalls them, they are unprepared for it. Hardships
bear heaviest on those who have never known them; heavy lies the yoke on
the neck that has not felt it. The mere thought of a wound makes the raw
recruit turn pale; the veteran looks without blanching upon his own
blood because he knows that he has often gained a victory at the price
of it. Then it is that God trains and hardens those whom he has chosen,
whom he loves and wishes well to; but those whom he seems to treat with
indulgence, whom he spares, he keeps tender for the evils to come. For
you are mistaken if you conclude that any one is exempt; he who has long
basked in the sunshine of fortune will have his turn.
Every one that thinks he is discharged has been placed among the
reserves. (You ask) why does God afflict every good man with ill health
or sorrow or other misfortune? Because in camp-life the most perilous
duties are also laid on the bravest; the commander sends picked men to
fall upon the enemy from a nocturnal ambuscade, or to explore a route,
or to carry by assault an outpost. No one of those who go forth says,
“The general has a poor opinion of me,” but, “He has judged wisely and
well,” And so let all say who are ordered to undergo what to the coward
and the slothful seem to be painful experiences: God has accounted us
worthy to be used as examples by which to show how much human nature can
endure. Flee from pleasure, from that unmanly felicity in which the
active powers of the mind grow torpid, unless something intervenes to
recall man’s lot, by a sort of perpetual intoxication.
9. Him whom glass windows protect against every breath of air; whose
feet are kept warm by fomentations periodically renewed; whose
dining-rooms are made always comfortable by heat within the walls and
under the floor—such a person, not even a gentle breeze passes over
without danger. Though everything that transcends the bounds of
moderation is hurtful, the most perilous intemperance is that of good
fortune. It excites the brain, awakens idle fancies in the mind, puts
dense darkness between the false and the true.
10. Which is better, to bear up under continuous misfortune that incites
us to do our best, or to be crushed under unbounded and inexhaustible
riches? Death comes gently when the stomach is empty; it is from
repletion that men die like beasts. Accordingly the gods follow the same
method with good men that teachers follow with good pupils—they require
the hardest labor from those of whom they cherish the highest hopes.
Dost thou believe that it is out of hatred for their children that the
Lacedaemonians try, by public scourgings, what stuff they are made of?
Their own fathers exhort them to bear bravely their flagellations, and
ask them, when bleeding and half dead, to proffer unflinchingly their
wounds for fresh wounds.
11. Why is it strange if God sends severe trials upon noble spirits? a
test of one’s courage is never an easy matter. Is it destiny that
scourges and lacerates us? let us endure it; ’tis not wanton cruelty, it
is a contest; the oftener we enter it, the stronger we shall become. The
solidest part of the body, frequent use has made so. We must be
subjected to the buffetings of fortune in order that in this way we may
become callous to it. Little by little, fortune makes us a match for
itself; contempt of dangers results from often braving them. In this way
sailors inure their bodies to the sea; the hands of the husbandman are
calloused; the arms of the soldier are strong from hurling javelins; the
limbs of runners are agile. That part of everybody is the strongest that
has exercised the most.
12. The soul acquires the strength to brave misfortune by patient
endurance; what it can effect in us thou mayst know, if thou dost but
consider what hardship does for those peoples that go about without
clothing and are strong by their very indigence. Consider all the
nations over whom the sway of Rome does not extend, I mean the Germans
and every nomad tribe along the Danube. Perpetual winter, a severe
climate, bear hard upon them, a sterile soil grudgingly supports them, a
hut or branches of trees protect them against the rain, they roam over
marshes hardened by frost, for food they capture wild beasts.
13. Dost thou think them wretched? No one is wretched when he performs
what habit has made second nature to him; for by degrees we find
pleasure in doing what we began to do from necessity. These peoples have
no houses and no resting place except as weariness finds them from day
to day; their food is cheap and obtained only as wanted; their naked
bodies are exposed to the terrible extremes of a horrid climate; what
thou regardest as a frightful calamity is the whole life of many
peoples.
14. Why dost thou wonder that good men are called upon to undergo
violent shocks to the end that they may stand the more firmly? A tree
does not take deep root, or grow strong, unless it is frequently shaken
by the wind; for as a result of violent agitation its fiber is toughened
and its roots more firmly set. Those are fragile that grow up in
sheltered valleys. It is therefore a boon to good men, as it makes them
fearless amid danger, to become familiar with hardships and to bear with
equanimity those things that are not ills, except when they are borne
with an ill grace.