Page:Plutarch - Moralia, translator Holland, 1911.djvu/202

180 or pre-eminence: for what should let, notwithstanding all these crosses, but that thy body and mind both may be in right good plight and excellent estate? And against those accidents which seem naturally to grieve and trouble us, to wit, maladies, pains and travails; death of dear friends and toward children, we may oppose another saying of Euripides the poet: For no remonstrance nor reason is so effectual to restrain and stay this passionate and sensual part of our mind, when it is ready to slip and be carried headlong away with our affections, as that which calleth to remembrance the common and natural necessity; by means whereof a man in regard of his body, being mixed and compounded, doth expose and offer this handle (as it were) and vantage whereby fortune is to take hold when she wrestleth against him; for otherwise, in the greatest and most principal things, he abideth fast and sure. King Demetrius having forced and won the city Megara, demanded of Stilpo, the wise philosopher, whether he had lost any goods in the sackage and pillage thereof? Sir (quoth he), I saw not so much as one man carrying anything of mine away; semblably, when fortune hath made what spoil she can, and taken from us all other things, yet somewhat there remaineth still within ourselves,

In which regard we ought altogether so to depress, debase and throw down our human nature, as if it had nothing firm, stable and permanent, nothing above the reach and power of fortune: but contrariwise, knowing that it is the least and worst part of man, and the same frail, brittle, and subject to death, which maketh us to lie open unto fortune and her assaults; whereas in respect of the better part we are masters over her, and have her at command, when there being seated and founded most surely the best and greatest things that we have, to wit, sound and honest opinions, arts and sciences, good discourses tending to virtue, which be all of a substance incorruptible, and whereof we cannot be robbed: we (I say) knowing thus much, ought in the confidence of ourselves to carry a mind invincible and secure against whatsoever shall happen, and be able to say that to the face of fortune which Socrates, addressing his speech indeed covertly to the judges, seemed to speak