IV.
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.