duty and individual advantage has always inhibited altruism from being accepted as an invariable guide to conduct without the artificial support of penal law. In Homer and Hesiod we find almost every rule for living uprightly adequately expressed. A man should honour his parents, love and be generous to his friends, be a good neighbour, and succour strangers and suppliants. He should be truthful, honest, continent, and industrious; and should consider sloth to be a disgrace.[1] In the next age Hellenic refinement could add little more than fuller expression to these simple precepts. But from Pythagoras to Socrates, from Aristotle to Cicero, from Seneca to Marcus Aurelius, a constant emission of ethical doctrine was maintained. Amid the wealth of disquisition, innumerable striking aphorisms might be selected, but only a few such can be recorded here: We should scan the actions of each day before resigning ourselves to sleep;[2] We have contracted with the government under which we live to submit ourselves to its laws, even should they condemn us to death unjustly;[3] We should pity the man who inflicts an injury more than him who suffers it, for the one is harmed only in his body, theIliad, ix, 312.
[Greek: Ergon d' ouden oneidos, aergiê de t' oneidos.]
Op. et Dies, 311.
[Greek: Mê kaka kerdainein, kaka kerdea is' atêsin.]
Ibid., 352. </poem> ]
- ↑ A few of their utterances may be quoted: <poem> [Greek: Echthros gar moi keinos homôs Aidao pylêsin, Hos ch' heteron men keuthê eni phresin allo de eipê.
- ↑ From the Golden Verses of Pythagoras; Epictetus, iii, 10.
- ↑ Hence Socrates would not save his life by flight from Athens after his condemnation, although his friends had made everything secure for his escape; see the Crito.
