Minor Dialogues, Together With the Dialogue on Clemency
that no one save the wise man is good.
“If,” says our adversary, “Socrates was unjustly condemned, he
received an injury.” At this point it is needful for us to bear in
mind that it is possible for some one to do an injury to me, and
yet for me not to receive it, as if any one were to steal something
from my country-house and leave it in my town-house, that man would
commit a theft, yet I should lose nothing. A man may become
mischievous, and yet do no actual mischief: if a man lies with his
own wife as if she were a stranger, he will commit adultery, but
his wife will not; if a man gives me poison and the poison lose its
strength when mixed with food, that man, by administering the poison,
has made himself a criminal, even though he has done no hurt. A man
is no less a brigand because his sword becomes entangled in his
victim’s clothes and misses its mark. All crimes, as far as concerns
their criminality, are completed before the actual deed is accomplished.
Some crimes are of such a nature and bound by such conditions that
the first part can take place without the second. {32} though the
second cannot take place without the first. I will endeavour to
explain these words: I can move my feet and yet not run; but I
cannot run without moving my feet. I can be in the water without
swimming; but if I swim, I cannot help being in the water. The
matter of which we are treating is of this character: if I have
received an injury, it is necessary that some one must have done
it to me; but if an injury has been done me, it is not necessary
that I should have received one; for many circumstances may intervene
to avert the injury, as, for example, some chance may strike the
hand that is aiming at us, and the dart, after it has been thrown,
may swerve aside. So injuries of all kinds may by certain circumstances
be thrown back and intercepted in mid-course, so that they may be
done and yet not received.
VIII. Moreover, justice can suffer nothing unjust, because contraries
cannot co-exist; but an injury can only be done unjustly, therefore
an injury cannot be done to the wise man. Nor need you wonder at
no one being able to do him an injury; for no one can do him any
good service either. The wise man lacks nothing which he can accept
by way of a present, and the bad man can bestow nothing that is
worthy of the wise man’s acceptance; for he must possess it before
he can bestow it, and he possesses nothing which the wise man would
rejoice to have handed over to him. Consequently, no one can do
either harm or good to the wise man, because divine things neither
want help nor are capable of being hurt; and the wise man is near,
indeed very near to the gods, being like a god in every respect
save that he is mortal. As he presses forward and makes his way
towards the life that is sublime, well-ordered, without fear,
proceeding in a regular and harmonious course, tranquil, beneficent,
made for the good of mankind, useful both to itself and to others,
he will neither long nor weep for anything that is grovelling. He
who, trusting to {33} reason, passes through human affairs with
godlike mind, has no quarter from which he can receive injury. Do
you suppose that I mean merely from no man? He cannot receive an
injury even from fortune, which, whenever she contends with virtue,
always retires beaten. If we accept with an undisturbed and tranquil
mind that greatest terror of all, beyond which the angry laws and
the most cruel masters have nothing to threaten us with, in which
fortune’s dominion is contained—if we know that death is not an
evil, and therefore is not an injury either, we shall much more
easily endure the other things, such as losses, pains, disgraces,
changes of abode, bereavements, and partings, which do not overwhelm
the wise man even if they all befall him at once, much less does
he grieve at them when they assail him separately. And if he bears
the injuries of fortune calmly, how much more will he bear those
of powerful men, whom he knows to be the hands of fortune.
IX. He therefore endures everything in the same spirit with which
he endures the cold of winter and the severities of climate, fevers,
diseases, and other chance accidents, nor does he entertain so high
an opinion of any man as to suppose that he acts of set purpose,
which belongs to the wise man alone. All other men have no plans,
but only plots and deceits and irregular impulses of mind, which
he reckons the same as pure accident; now, what depends upon pure
accident cannot rage around us designedly. He reflects, also, that
the largest sources of injury are to be found in those things by
means of which danger is sought for against us, as, for example,
by a suborned accuser, or a false charge, or by the stirring up
against us of the anger of great men, and the other forms of the
brigandage of civilized life. Another common type of injury is when
a man loses some profit or prize for which he has long been angling;
when an inheritance which he {34} has spent great pains to render
his own is left to some one else, or the favour of some noble house,
through which he makes great gain, is taken from him. The wise man
escapes all this, since he knows not what it is to live for hope
or for fear. Add to this, that no one receives an injury unmoved,
but is disturbed by the feeling of it. Now, the man free from
mistakes has no disturbance; he is master of himself, enjoying a
deep and tranquil repose of mind; for if an injury reaches him it
moves and rouses him. But the wise man is without anger, which is
caused by the appearance of injury, and he could not be free from
anger unless he were also free from injury, which he knows cannot
be done to him; hence it is that he is so upright and cheerful,
hence he is elate with constant joy. So far, however, is he from
shrinking from the encounter either of circumstances or of men,
that he makes use of injury itself to make trial of himself and
test his own virtue. Let us, I beseech you, show favour to this
thesis and listen with impartial ears and minds while the wise man
is being made exempt from injury; for nothing is thereby taken away
from your insolence, your greediest lusts, your blind rashness and
pride; it is without prejudice to your vices that this freedom is
sought for the wise man; we do not strive to prevent your doing an
injury, but to enable him to sink all injuries beneath himself and
protect himself from them by his own greatness of mind. So in the
sacred games many have won the victory by patiently enduring the
blows of their adversaries and so wearying them out. Think that the
wise man belongs to this class, that of men who, by long and faithful
practice, have acquired strength to endure and tire out all the
violence of their enemies.
X. Since we have now discussed the first part of our subject, let
us pass on to the second, in which we will prove by arguments, some
of which are our own, but {35} which for the most part are Stoic
commonplaces, that the wise man cannot be insulted. There is a
lesser form of injury, which we must complain of rather than avenge,
which the laws also have considered not to deserve any special
punishment. This passion is produced by a meanness of mind which
shrinks at any act or deed which treats it with disrespect. “He did
not admit me to his house to-day, although he admitted others; he
either turned haughtily away or openly laughed when I spoke;” or,
“he placed me at dinner, not on the middle couch (the place of
honour), but on the lowest one;” and other matters of the same sort,
which I can call nothing but the whinings of a queasy spirit. These
matters chiefly affect the luxuriously-nurtured and prosperous; for
those who are pressed by worse evils have no time to notice such
things as these. Through excessive idleness, dispositions naturally
weak and womanish and prone to indulge in fancies through want of
real injuries are disturbed at these things, the greater part of
which arise from misunderstanding. He therefore who is affected by
insult shows that he possesses neither sense nor trustfulness; for
he considers it certain that he is scorned, and this vexation affects
him with a certain sense of degradation, as he effaces himself and
takes a lower room; whereas the wise man is scorned by no one, for
he knows his own greatness, gives himself to understand that he
allows no one to have such power over him, and as for all of what
I should not so much call distress as uneasiness of mind, he does
not overcome it, but never so much as feels it. Some other things
strike the wise man, though they may not shake his principles, such
as bodily pain and weakness, the loss of friends and children, and
the ruin of his country in war-time. I do not say that the wise man
does not feel these, for we do not ascribe to him the hardness of
stone or iron; there is no virtue but is conscious of its own
endurance. What then does he? He receives some {36} blows, but when
he has received them he rises superior to them, heals them, and
brings them to an end; these more trivial things he does not even
feel, nor does he make use of his accustomed fortitude in the
endurance of evil against them, but either takes no notice of them
or considers them to deserve to be laughed at.
XI. Besides this, as most insults proceed from those who are haughty
and arrogant and bear their prosperity ill, he has something wherewith
to repel this haughty passion, namely, that noblest of all the
virtues, magnanimity, which passes over everything of that kind as
like unreal apparitions in dreams and visions of the night, which
have nothing in them substantial or true. At the same time he
reflects that all men are too low to venture to look down upon what
is so far above them. The Latin word _contumelia_ is derived from
the word _contempt_, because no one does that injury to another
unless he regards him with contempt; and no one can treat his elders
and betters with contempt, even though he does what contemptuous
persons are wont to do; for children strike their parents’ faces,
infants rumple and tear their mother’s hair, and spit upon her and
expose what should be covered before her, and do not shrink from
using dirty language; yet we do not call any of these things
contemptuous. And why? Because he who does it is not able to show
contempt. For the same reason the scurrilous raillery of our slaves
against their masters amuses us, as their boldness only gains licence
to exercise itself at the expense of the guests if they begin with
the master; and the more contemptible and the more an object of
derision each one of them is, the greater licence he gives his
tongue. Some buy forward slave-boys for this purpose, cultivate
their scurrility and send them to school that they may vent
premeditated libels, which we do not call insults, but smart sayings;
yet what madness, at one time to be amused and at another to be
affronted by the same thing, {37} and to call a phrase an outrage
when spoken by a friend, and an amusing piece of raillery when used
by a slave-boy!
XII. In the same spirit in which we deal with boys, the wise man
deals with all those whose childhood still endures after their youth
is past and their hair is grey. What do men profit by age when their
mind has all the faults of childhood and their defects are intensified
by time? when they differ from children only in the size and
appearance of their bodies, and are just as unsteady and capricious,
eager for pleasure without discrimination, timorous and quiet through
fear rather than through natural disposition? One cannot say that
such men differ from children because the latter are greedy for
knuckle-bones and nuts and coppers, while the former are greedy for
gold and silver and cities; because the latter play amongst themselves