(…) we do not abandon any discipline for despair of ever being the best in it.
‘Ten are stronger than one’. Yes, for what, though? For taking people captive, for killing or dragging them off, for taking away their property. For main force, yes, ten are better than one. But one person with the right judgements is superior to ten without. Numbers here are irrelevant. Put them in the balance, the person with correct ideas will outweigh all the others.
If you lost the capability to read, or play music, you would think it was a disaster, but you think nothing of losing the capacity to be honest, decent and civilized. Yet those other misfortunes come from some outside cause, while these are your own fault. Moreover, it is neither honorable to have those other abilities nor dishonorable to lose them, whereas it is dishonorable to lose these capacities and a misfortune for each we have only ourselves to blame.
Now, what does the title ‘citizen’ mean? In this role, a person never acts in his own interest or thinks of himself alone, but, like a hand or foot that had the sense and realized its place in the natural order, all its actions and desires aim at nothing except contributing to the common good.
Well, when a guide meets up with someone who is lost, ordinarily his reaction is to direct him on the right path, not mock or malign him, then turn on his heel and walk away. As for you, lead someone to the truth and you will find that he can follow.
Take a lyre player: he’s relaxed when he performs alone, but put him in front of an audience, and it’s a different story, no matter how beautiful his voice or how well he plays the instrument. Why? Because he not only wants to perform well, he wants to be well received - and the latter lies outside his control.
‘Please, God’, we say, ‘relieve me of my anxiety’. Listen, stupid, you have hands, God gave them to you himself. You might as well get on your knees and pray that your nose won’t run. A better idea would be to wipe your nose and forgo the prayer. The point is, isn’t there anything God gave you for your present problem? You have the gifts of courage, fortitude and endurance. With ‘hands’ like these, do you still need somebody to help wipe your nose?
‘Did no one before you’, he says, ‘use the words “good” and “just”? Or if he did, were we ignorant of what each of them meant - were we making empty sounds bereft of sense?’ (…) What we lacked was the ability to apply them correctly. We had not yet organized them with a view to determining the class of the things each of them belongs to.
You might as well put the same challenge to doctors: ‘Didn’t we use the words “sick” and “healthy” (…) ?’ Well, we had a concept of what ‘healthy’ means, yes, but even now we can’t agree on how to adapt it. There is one doctor who says, ‘Withhold his food’, while another says, ‘Make him eat’. One says, ‘Bleed her’, another says, ‘She needs a transfusion.’ And the cause of this chaos is none other than out still-unrealized ability to apply the concept of ‘healthy’ to particular cases.
No one, you realize, fears Caeser himself, it is death, exile, dispossession, jail and disenfranchisement that they are afraid of. Nor is Caeser loved, unless by chance he is personally deserving; we love money, a tribuneship, a military command or consulship. But when we love, hate or fear such things, then the people who administer them are bound to become our masters.