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Whether Vice Is Sufficient To Cause Unhappiness
by
Sec. IV. Who then are made unhappy by these things? Those who have no manliness or reason, the enervated and untrained, who retain the opinions they had as children. Fortune therefore does not produce perfect infelicity, unless Vice co-operate. For as a thread saws through a bone that has been soaked in ashes and vinegar, and as people bend and fashion ivory only when it has been made soft and supple by beer, and cannot under any other circumstances, so Fortune, lighting upon what is in itself faulty and soft through Vice, hollows it out and wounds it. And as the Parthian juice, though hurtful to no one else nor injurious to those who touch it or carry it about, yet if it be communicated to a wounded man straightway kills him through his previous susceptibility to receive its essence, so he who will be upset in soul by Fortune must have some secret internal ulcer or sore to make external things so piteous and lamentable.
Sec. V. Does then Vice need Fortune to bring about infelicity? By no means. She lashes not up the rough and stormy sea, she girds not lonely mountain passes with robbers lying in wait by the way, she makes not clouds of hail to burst on the fruitful plains, she suborns not Meletus or Anytus or Callixenus as accusers, she takes not away wealth, excludes not people from the praetorship to make them wretched; but she scares the rich, the well-to-do, and great heirs; by land and sea she insinuates herself and sticks to people, infusing lust, inflaming with anger, afflicting them with superstitious fears, tearing them in pieces with envy.
Footnotes:
[1] The beginning of this short Treatise is lost. Nor is the first paragraph at all clear. We have to guess somewhat at the meaning.
[2] In a fragment of the “Phaethon.” Compare also “On Education,” Sec. 19.
[3] “Iliad,” xxiii. 297, 298.
[4] “Iliad,” ii. 700, 701.
[5] ‘Tis ever so. Compare Horace, “Sat.” i. i. 1-14.
[6] Adopting Reiske’s reading.
[7] Proverbial for extreme good fortune. Cf. Horace, “Odes,” iii. ix. 4, “Persarum vigui rege beatior.”
[8] See Herodotus, iv. 72.