This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
When Zeno was told that the only ship he had
remaining was cast away at sea with all her lading, he
replied: Well done Fortune, that hast reduced me to the
habit and life of a philosopher. And, indeed, a man that
is not puffed up with conceit nor madly in love with a
crowd will not, I suppose, have any reason to accuse
Fortune for constraining him to live in an island, but will
rather commend her for removing so much anxiety and
agitation of his mind, for putting a stop to his rambles in
foreign countries, to his dangers at sea, and the noise and
tumult of the exchange, and for giving him a fixed, vacant,
undisturbed life, such a life as he may truly call his own,
describing as it were a circle about him, in which is contained the use of all things necessary. For what island is
there that has not a horse, a walk, and a bath in it; that
has not fishes and hares for such as delight in hunting and
angling and such like sports? But the chiefest of all is,
that the quiet which others thirst so much after thou commonly mayst have here without seeking. For those that
are gamesters at dice, shutting up themselves at home,
there are sycophants and busy spies that hunt them out,
and prosecute them from their houses of pleasure and
[p. 26]
gardens in the suburbs, and hale them by violence before
the judges or the court. But none sails to an island to
give a man any disturbance, no petitioner, no borrower, no
urger to suretyship, no one that comes to beg his voice
when he stands candidate for an office; only the best
friends and familiars, out of good-will and desire to see
him, may come over thither; and the rest of his life is
safe and inviolable to him, if he has the will and the skill
to live at case. But he that cries up the happiness of
those that run about in other countries, or spend the most
of their life in inns and passage-boats, is no wiser than he
is that thinks the planets in a better estate than the fixed
stars. And yet every planet rolling about in its proper
sphere, as in an island, keeps its order. For the sun never
transgresses its limited measures, as Heraclitus says; if it
did do so, the Furies, which are the attendants of Justice,
would find it out and punish it.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. Little, Brown, and Company. Cambridge. Press Of John Wilson and son. 1874. 3.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.