BOOK IV. IV. 19-24
man! 20But just as you laugh at the man who is afraid he will not have an office, so also laugh at yourself. For it makes no difference whether a person is thirsty with fever, or is afraid of water like a man with the rabies. Or how can you any longer say with Socrates, "If so it please God, so be it"?[1] Do you suppose that, if Socrates had yearned to spend his leisure in the Lyceum or the Academy,[2] and to converse daily with the young men, he would have gone forth cheerfully on all the military expeditions in which he served? Would he not have wailed and groaned, "Wretched man that I am I here I am now in misery and misfortune, when I might be sunning myself in the Lyceum"? What, was this your function in life, to sun yourself? Was it not rather to be serene, to be unhampered, to be unhindered? And how would he have been Socrates any longer, if he had wailed like this? How would he have gone on to write paeans in prison?[3]
In a word, then, remember this—that if you are going to honour anything at all outside the sphere of the moral purpose, you have destroyed your moral purpose. And outside the sphere of your moral purpose lie not merely office, but also freedom from office; not merely business, but also leisure. "Am I now, therefore, to pass my life in this turmoil?" What do you mean by "turmoil"? Among many people? And what is there hard about that? Imagine that you are in Olympia, regard the turmoil as a festival. There, too, one man shouts this and another that; one man does this and another
- ↑ Plato, Crito, 43 D (slightly modified). Compare I. 4, 24, where the quotation is exact.
- ↑ Referring to the famous gymnasia in these places.
- ↑ Plato, Phaedo, 60 D, says that he translated some fables of Aesop into verse and composed a hymn (προοίμιον) to Apollo. This latter composition is called a paean by Diogenes Laertius, 2, 42, who professes to give the first line of it.
