BOOK IV. IV. 46-V. 3
recklessness, or negligence; if you are not moved by the things that once moved you, or at least not to the same degree, then you can keep festival day after day; to-day because you behaved well in this action, to-morrow because you behaved well in another. How much greater cause for thanksgiving is this than a consulship or a governorship! these things come to you from your own self and from the gods. Remember who the Giver is, and to whom He gives, and for what end. If you are brought up in reasonings such as these, can you any longer raise the questions where you are going to be happy, and where you will please God? Are not men everywhere equally distant from God? Do they not everywhere have the same view of what comes to pass?
CHAPTER V
Against the contentious and brutal
The good and excellent man neither contends with anyone, nor, as far as he has the power, does he allow others to contend. We have an example before us of this also, as well as of everything else, in the life of Socrates, who did not merely himself avoid contention upon every occasion, but tried to prevent others as well from contending. See in Xenophon's Symposium how many contentions he has resolved, and again how patient he was with Thrasymachus, Polus, and Callicles,[1] and habitually so with his wife, and also with his son when the latter tried to confute him with sophistical argu-
- ↑ The first in Plato's Republic, Book I; the other two in his Gorgias.
