BOOK I. XXVIII. 10-17
rightly or wrongly; if rightly, the man is blameless; if wrongly, the man himself pays the penalty; for it is impossible that the man who has gone astray, is one person, while the man who suffers is another[1]),—whoever remembers this, I say, will not be enraged at anyone, will not be angry with anyone, will not revile anyone, will not blame, nor hate, nor take offence at anyone. So you conclude that such great and terrible things have their origin in this—the impression of one's senses? In this and nothing else. The Iliad is nothing but a sense-impression and a poet's use of sense-impressions. There came to Alexander an impression to carry off the wife of Menelaus, and an impression came to Helen to follow him. Now if an impression had led Menelaus to feel that it was a gain to be deprived of such a wife, what would have happened? We should have lost not merely the Iliad, but the Odyssey as well.—Then do matters of such great import depend upon one that is so small:—But what do you mean by "matters of such great import"? Wars and factions and deaths of many men and destructions of cities? And what is there great in all this?—What, nothing great in this?15—Why, what is there great in the death of many oxen and many sheep and the burning and destruction of many nests of swallows or storks?—Is there any similarity between this and that?—A great similarity. Men's bodies perished in the one case, and bodies of oxen and sheep in the other. Petty dwellings of men were burned, and so were nests of storks. What is there great or dreadful about that? Or else show me in what
- ↑ i.e., not merely does suffering always follow error, but it is also morally unthinkable that one man's error can cause another "suffering," in the Stoic sense; or, in other words, no man can be injured (as Socrates believed; cf. I. 29, 18) or made to "suffer" except by his own act (cf. § 23). It is this fundamental moral postulate of the Stoics which led them to classify so many of the ills of life which one person does actually cause to another as not real evils (cf. §§ 26-8), but ἀδιάφορα, "things indififerent." cf. I. 9, 13; I. 30, 2, etc.
