ous because it threatens us with death. But since reason accuses us of cowardice in dreading a thing so sudden, so inevitable, so imperceptible, we seize this other more defensible pretext. All those maladies which threaten no other danger than that of the malady itself we say are without danger. Toothache, or gout, however painful they may be, still, as they do not kill, who counts them as sicknesses? Now let us assume that in death we consider chiefly the pain. (a) In like manner, poverty has nothing to fear but this — that it will throw us into the arms of pain through the thirst, the hunger, the cold, the heat, the vigils, which it makes us suffer.
Thus we have to do with pain alone. I grant that it is the worst mischance of our being, and I grant this readily, for there is no man on earth who regards it with such disfavour or who shuns it so much as I, because hitherto, thanks to God, I have not had much familiarity with it; but it is in our power, if not to annihilate it, at least to diminish it by patience; and even when the body is perturbed by it, to maintain none the less the soul and the reason in good condition. And if it were not so, what would have brought courage and valour and strength and greatness of soul and resolution into good repute? How should they play their part if there were no pain to defy? Avida est periculi virtus.[1] If we have not to lie on the hard ground, to endure in complete armour the noon-day heat, to eat horse-flesh or that of an ass, to be hacked in pieces, to extract a bullet from among our bones, to be sewn up and cauterised and probed, whence shall we acquire the advantage that we desire to have over the common crowd? What the sages say, that of actions equally meritorious the one is most desirable to perform in which there is most difficulty, is a long way from avoiding evil and pain. (c) Non enim hilaritate, nec lascivia, nec risu aut joco, comite levitatis, sed sæpe etiam tristes firmitate et constantia sunt beati.[2] (a) And for this reason it was impossible to persuade our fathers that conquests made by the strong
