Again, the Stoics say that the wise man never wonders at any of the things which appear extraordinary, such as Charon’s mephitic caverns, ebbings of the tide, hot springs, or fiery eruptions.
Nor yet, they go on to say, will the wise man live in solitude; for he is naturally made for society and action. He will, however, submit to training to augment his powers of bodily endurance.
And the wise man, they say, will offer prayers, and ask for good things from the gods: so Posidonius in the first book of his treatise On Duties, and Hecato in his third book On Paradoxes.
Friendship, they declare, exists only between the wise and good, by reason of their likeness to one another. And by friendship they mean a common use of all that has to do with life, wherein we treat our friends as we should ourselves.
They argue that a friend is worth having for his own sake and that it is a good thing to have many friends. But among the bad there is, they hold, no such thing as friendship, and thus no bad man has a friend.
Another of their tenets is that the unwise are all mad, inasmuch as they are not wise but do what they do from that madness which is the equivalent of their folly.
—Diogenes Laërtius, 7.123-124
IMAGE: Benjamin Heinrich Orth, Three Friends (1835)
No comments:
Post a Comment