VIII. They say that Tiribazus, when arrested by the Persians, drew his scimitar, being a powerful man, and fought for his life; then, when they loudly protested that the arrest was by the king’s orders, at once dropped his point, and held out his hands to be tied. Is not this just what happens in the case before us? Other men make a fight against mischances and thrust all aside, that they may devise ways of escape and evade what is unwelcome to themselves. But the superstitious man listens to nobody, and addresses himself thus: ‘Poor wretch, |F| thy sufferings come from Providence, and by the order of the God.’ So he flings away all hope, gives himself up, flies, obstructs those who try to help him. Many tolerable troubles are made deadly by various superstitions. Midas[[279]] of old, as we are to believe, dispirited and distressed by certain dreams, was so miserable that he sought a voluntary death by drinking bulls’ blood. Aristodemus, king of the Messenians, during the war with the Lacedaemonians, when dogs were howling like wolves, and rye grass sprouting around his ancestral hearth, in utter despair at the extinction of all his hopes, cut his own throat. Perhaps it would have been better for Nicias[[280]], the Athenian |169| general, to find the same release from superstition as Midas or Aristodemus, and not, in his terror of the shadow when the moon was eclipsed, to sit still under blockade, and afterwards, when forty thousand had been slaughtered or taken alive, to be taken prisoner and die ingloriously. For there is nothing so terrible when the earth blocks the way, or when its shadow meets the moon in due cycle of revolutions; what is terrible is that a man should plunge[[281]] into the darkness of superstition, |B| and that its dark shadow should confound a man’s reason and make it blind in matters where reason is most needed.
Glaucus, see! the waves already from the depth of ocean stirred,
And a cloud is piling upwards, right above the Gyrean point,
Certain presage of foul weather.[[282]]
When the helmsman sees this, he prays that he may escape out of the peril, and calls on the Gods that save; but, while he prays, his hand is on the tiller, and he lowers the yard-arm,
Furls his mainsail, and from billows black as Erebus he flees.[[283]]
Hesiod[[284]] tells the farmer to pray to Zeus below the earth and holy Artemis before he ploughs or sows, but to hold on to |C| the plough-handle as he prays. Homer[[285]] tells us that Ajax, before meeting Hector in single combat, commanded the Greeks to pray for him to the Gods; then, while they were praying, he was arming. Agamemnon, when he had given orders to the fighters:
Let each his spear set, and prepare his shield,
then begs of Zeus:
Grant that this hand make Priam’s halls a heap.[[286]]