But I have learned this from a certain sage, And on these cares and troubles set my mind, And on myself laid exile from my land And early deaths and other forms of ills, [p. 165] That if I suffer aught my fancy saw, It should not, coming newly, hurt the more.But the more ignoble and untutored sometimes cannot even recall themselves to the consideration of anything seemly and profitable, but go out of their way to find extremes of wretchedness, even to punishing their innocent body and to forcing the unafflicted, as Achaeus 2 says, to join in their grief.
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
‘But I cannot,’ he says, ‘for I never expected or looked
for this experience.’ But you ought to have looked for it, and to
have previously pronounced judgement on human affairs for their uncertainty
and fatuity, and then you would not now have been taken off your guard as by
enemies suddenly come upon you. Admirably does Theseus in Euripides 1 appear to have prepared
himself for such crises, for he says :
Plutarch. Moralia. with an English Translation by. Frank Cole Babbitt. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1928. 2.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com