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“Gently,
Stay in the bed, poor wretch, and take your ease,”[318]

restrain him and check him. But those who suffer from a diseased brain are then most active and least at rest, for impulses bring about action, and the passions are vehement impulses. And so they do not let the mind rest, but when the man most requires quiet and silence and retirement, then is he dragged into the open air, and becomes the victim of anger, contentiousness, lust, and grief, and is compelled to do and say many lawless things unsuitable to the occasion.

Sec. IV. As therefore the storm which prevents one’s putting into harbour is more dangerous than the storm which will not let one sail, so those storms of the soul are more formidable which do not allow a man to take in sail, or to calm his reason when it is disturbed, but without a pilot and without ballast, in perplexity and uncertainty through contrary and confusing courses, he rushes headlong and falls into woeful shipwreck, and shatters his life. So that from these points of view it is worse to be diseased in mind than body, for the latter only suffer, but the former do ill as well as suffer ill. But why need I speak of our various passions? The very times bring them to our mind. Do you see yon great and promiscuous crowd jostling against one another and surging round the rostrum and forum? They have not assembled here to sacrifice to their country’s gods, nor to share in one another’s rites; they are not bringing to Ascraean Zeus the firstfruits of Lydian produce,[319] nor are they celebrating in honour of Dionysus the Bacchic orgies on festival nights with common revellings; but a mighty plague stirring up Asia in annual cycles drives them here for litigation and suits at law at stated times: and the mass of business, like the confluence of mighty rivers, has inundated one forum, and festers and teems with ruiners and ruined. What fevers, what agues, do not these things cause? What obstructions, what irruptions of blood into the air-vessels, what distemperature of heat, what overflow of humours, do not result? If you examine every suit at law, as if it were a person, as to where it originated, where it came from, you will find that one was produced by obstinate temper, another by frantic love of strife, a third by some sordid desire.[320]

Footnotes:

[312] Homer, “Iliad,” xvii. 446, 447.

[313] See the Fable [Greek: Alopex kai Pardalis]. No. 42, Ed. Halme.

[314] Reading with Wyttenbach, [Greek: ochriasesi kai erythemasi].

[315] Forte [Greek: agnoian].”– Wyttenbach. The ordinary reading is [Greek: anoian]. “E coelo descendit [Greek: gnothi seauton],” says Juvenal truly, xi. 27.

[316] Compare the image in Shakspere, “Hamlet,” A. iii. Sc. I. 165, 166.

“Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh.”

[317] Euripides, “Bacchae,” 1170-1172. Agave’s treatment of her son Pentheus was a stock philosophical comparison. See for example Horace, ii. “Sat.” iii. 303, 304, and context.

[318] Euripides, “Orestes,” 258.

[319] ” Aurum puta. Pactolus enim aurum fert. Videtur dictio e Pindaro desumta esse.”– Reiske.

[320] “Libellus hic fine carere videtur. Quare autem opusculum hoc Plutarcho indignum atque suppositum visum Xylandro fuerit, non intelligo.”– Reiske.