Page:Plutarch - Moralia, translator Holland, 1911.djvu/43

Rh which doth obey and yield, and another which being obeyed, is yielded unto, and not obeyed, is resisted.

Furthermore, as touching the Stoics, who hold that all sins and faults be equal, neither will this place nor the time now serve to argue against them, whether in other points they swerve from the truth: howbeit, thus much by the way I dare be bold to say, that in most things they will be found to repugn reason, even against apparent and manifest evidence. For according to their opinion, every passion or perturbation is a fault, and whosoever grieve, fear or lust, do sin: but in those passions great difference there is seen, according to more or less: for who would ever be so gross as to say that Dolon's fear was equal to the fear of Ajax? who, as Homer writeth:

or compare the sorrow of King Alexander, who would needs have killed himself for the death of Clytus, to that of Plato for the death of Socrates? For dolours and griefs encrease exceedingly when they grow upon occasion of that which happeneth besides all reason; like as any accident, which falleth out beyond our expectation, is more grievous, and breedeth greater anguish than that whereof a reason may be rendered, and which a man might suspect to follow. As, for example, if he who ever expected to see his son advanced to honour and living in great reputation among men, should hear say that he were in prison, and put to all manner of torture, as Parmeno was advertised of his son Philotas. And who will ever say that the anger of Nicocreon against Anaxarchus was to be compared with that of Magas against Philemon, which arose upon the same occasion, for that they both were spitefully reviled by them in reproachful terms, for Nicocreon caused Anaxarchus to be braid in a mortar with iron pestles: whereas Magas commanded the executioner to lay a sharp naked sword upon the neck of Philemon, and so to let him go without doing him any more harm.

And therefore it is that Plato named anger the sinews of the soul, giving us thereby to understand that they might be stretched by bitterness, and let slack by mildness. But the Stoics, for to avoid and put back these objections and such-like, deny that these stretchings and vehement fits of passions be according to judgment, for that it may fail and err many ways: